alt Hacker NewsIn ~2017 I ditched FreeNAS when my FreeNAS Mini died from the Atom C2000 hardware failure. iXSystems was great about getting me a replacement board, but I decided when I rebuilt the system to just use FreeBSD and get used to command-line only administration. That directly lead to me learning pf, jails, bhyve, etc. Yeah, I don't have any fancy web UI, but I've had a rock solid system for almost 10 years with Samba + NFS running without issue.
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I've been using things like Samba and NFS since the 1990s. They're not hard to figure out with useful resolution.
When I finally became determined to give ZFS a serious go around 2016, I looked at all of my options -- including throwing some hardware together for FreeNAS, and running FreeNAS in a VM.
I decided to just use an existing Linux box that was already doing storage stuff and add ZFS to it.
It's been fine ever since. Keeping ZFS going isn't deep voodoo at all; of all the things this box does, ZFS has probably been the most hands-off aspect of it.
Yeah, I just run bare Debian myself. It's really not hard to setup LVM and Samba. And all of the major frontier models are well-versed in those things, so I used their help to get all of the various bits setup to make access from MacOS fast.