New user migrating from freeNAS

User Stories
1

Hi all,

I’ve been using freeNAS for years, was hard to get used to it after maaaany more years of Linux and didn’t ever get to feel so comfy there as in Linux. Long story short, ZFS is cool, but makes my 16GB RAM, 2 5x4TB raid5 + 1 5x2TB raid5 HP G8 microServer crawl like a roach, with only the plex server running and a few jails. (Yeah, 15 disks totalling 50TB of raw plate)

Now I’m migrating all of my ZFS pools into btrfs ones from ubuntu and after 4 days moving data up&down&left&right I hope to start installing in 8 hours when the last rsync finishes. I like to tinkle with my systems, so this will be no exception, and these are the things that I will try to do over time, so expect new Topics in the corresponding sections as I go on:

1- Install on dual USB raid 1 devices, raw btrfs partitioned (going out of tutorials so soon???.. yeah). Plan is to install on one and extend to the second one via CLI.
2- Not installed yet, so I don’t know where will swap go, but I plan to move it to a couple SSD’s (3/4 of a TB) I’ll drop in the last free spot inside mi G8 to hold that, along with the high activity dockers (my old jails) so my little hard disk army can sleep more than now. Only backups, private videos, movies, music… will go to the spinners.
3- Rock-ons, I don’t get yet the point of the additional layer above dockers, wouldn’t it be easier (for everyone) just to user native dockers from the gui??? I will give it a go anyway to make my rock-ons for the dockers I’ve liked the most, will share if I get something worthy… But let me insist on this, please let us use plain dockers from the gui, you save effort not having to maintain an intermediate layer and we get the full experience, everybody happy.
4- Services/dockers/rock-ons I expect to run, migrating my current jails (and some new ones): zoneminder, minecraft server, emoncms, weewx, plex pass of course, syslog server/analyser, nginx to ssl-proxy all that stuff (no plain ports outside), crashplan…
5- Oh Oh!! I forgot to mention, maybe it’s already available, but the one killer feature for freeNAS running from a USB was that you could select a data pool to hold your logs and anything that gets updated frequently, avoiding tear of your devices and system slowdowns due to accessing slow devices as wel as not filling it up with ‘junk’… So I will look further into it as I don’t find much in the docs nor the forums…

Enough for now, sorry for the long story, just wanted to say hello and look… Congratulations for your amazing system and I’m really eager to start playing with it the sooner. I hope I can contribute something to this great community.

Regards, Angel from sunny Spain

Edited to add point 5

2

Hi Angel @AngeleToR, welcome to Rockstor Community!!

My first and only comment on your post:

You’ll enjoy your Rockstor, forget about x tons RAM requirements and speeches like “You have an airplane but please, don’t let it take off” (or :“you can use deduplication, but please don’t use it!”), believe me.

Rockstor: you have an hot-air balloon, let it fly up and down, taking advantage of airstreams too :wink:

Hope to read more about your migration!

Flyer/Mirko

1 Like
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Thanks Mirko @Flyer,

I’m just starting to set things up and my first, VERY grateful surprise is the power of the installer when you get out of the ‘Auto’ section. Installed on USB but took swap out to the SSD so easily that’s hard to believe. I just missed some more docs regarding non standard installs, but that’s something that can be contributed by users so you developers can focus on developing this beast.
The GUI is faster than fast. After freeNAS sluggish UI everything FEELS fast, but man, this really IS fast. I hit a small glitch I’ll report in a while, as soon as I dig a little into it, but nothing serious, it may even be a misconfiguration when I created one of the pools that fails to auto-import.

I’m flying high right now man, kinda like my new balloon :laughing::balloon:

1 Like
4

Kind a frustrating for me to read that the interface is fast.

both SATA ports are used by the storagedrives. System (Intel Atom 230) runs from USB 2.0 flash. And is really sluggish!!.

Would love to add a SSD or so, but no extra ports in my mini server :-((

Nevermind, thing works and serves as it is supposed to do.

5

If you have a free PCI-express slot you could consider the kit that is sold in the Rockstor shop:

https://shop.rockstor.com/collections/diy-accessories/products/pcie-msata-boot-drive

I have a similar (same adapter, but different drive) setup, and it made my Rockstor fly, compared to running it on an USB stick.

6

No , one PCI slot, put an Intel NIC in there. Noticeable improvement over the realtec onboard.

But thanx for the suggestion.
In time ill probably will but an HP microserver.

7

Hi Sander,

Yes, my microServer really flies with Rockstor. Any rig able to run freeNAS and ZFS will do it. I’m also running the OS from and USB3 device, so I don’t ‘waste’ a SSD, but I’m looking into installing the OS into the SSD and carving out a pool from it for the rock-ons… Still learning though…
Go for the cheapest microserver and swap its CPU with an Intel Xeon 1265L-v2 and let it fly. I’ve also added a handmade ‘tray’ for a 5th internal 3,5" HD plugged into the DVD sata port, and a couple of SSD attached to an internal 4 ports PCIe card to fill every gap in it, so pretty happy with my little toy…

Only drawback, two memory slots for 16GB max RAM (there are new 16GB stick that MAY be compatible, but will wait to see others try it first…)

Regards, Angel