@suman asked to start something like this to get an idea where other NAS vendors are doing better than rockstor, from a users perspective.
In my opinion this makes sense, everybody has a reason being here, this is good to know, but what are the reasons why you sometime search for alternatives or think about getting back to your previous NAS system?
This happend for my a few days ago being annoyed about the lack of “plugins”, rock-ons or docker images available on the system. BTsync is still outdated, rock-ons sometimes are not working as expected or I want to use a docker image but do not find an easy way install it on rockstor.
I used unRaid before. What do I miss on rockstor compared to my previous systems:
SMART monitoring, or easy HDD monitoring. for me it still seems like I do not know if a disk is starting to fail which makes me a little nervous
Proper disk spin downs and getting this reported
Docker/Plugin integration, Unraid has a huge amount of plugins and allows to run docker images easily
Easy integration of external harddisks, to copy data from and to it (ex. NTFS disks)
Automatic sharing of USB drives plugged it
Jump on the train and report what you are missing from your old NAS solution.
I can just support that. 1&2 are the most important points. It’s a basic feature that should just work ootb. Everything else is Bonus.
I don’t use any of the docker containers/rock-ons but I like the idea behind it. Synology has a load of different (unofficial!) addons. I don’t say everything should get official support but there has to be an easy way for users to create rock-ons on their own.
I second points 1-4, just don’t know what point 5 use case is, sorry.
I would like NIC Link Bonding/Aggregation, etc.
I wouldn’t mind VM(KVM or virtualbox,etc)0 and VM web administration. On my personal tinkering list to “hack” the last one into Rockstor since it is CentOS based, which is a good base for KVM, Virt-manager/oVirt, etc. Then you can run Windows( if you must ), or other full OSs and non supported docker apps, or one that seem broken and full OS helps resolve.
I am running Proxmox with a VM Rockstor NAS, but if I could do it the otherway around then I could store VMs on NFS shares( or any other Proxmox backups, ISOs etc) as they must be started first and shutdown last on a power cycle. Impossible with my current setup.
two use cases which I came up because I have too many external 2.5" drives lying around which I don’t want to dismantel or throw way
I do create backup from machines (like laptops etc) to this external drives, which is hard if there is no share I can mount on that PC
I have drives which are normally connected on my server so this data can be used by any device at home I am working on. If I am on the road I take the disk with me, because otherwise working with the data is not really possible.
Compared to FreeNAS and OpenMediaVault they miss the option to put drives in stand-by mode or to set scheduled times for the system to turn off.
Furthermore there is something Synology (and probably QNAP as well as others) offer(s). Backing up or syncing your data to cloud storages. For anyone who has more than 10 TB of data there’s an interesting ‘unlimited option’ of amazon cloud drive. rclone supports acd as well as many others (google, microsoft, dropbox, hubic, …) and is actively developed. http://rclone.org/
This should be added at least as a rock-on
Herbert - I second all of your items, and I’ll add one more - mirrored USB boot.
FreeNAS has this, and it’s as simple as selecting two boot devices during install.
I have an older ReadyNAS six-bay chassis with an Intel Atom D510 in it.
Right now, I’m using one of the slots for an SSD for boot/OS/apps.
I’d love to switch to USB, but the only ports on the chassis are USB 2.0, and my experiments with Rockstor on USB 2.0 have been painful compared to a regular install.
Distributing the boot/swap/os across all of the disks in the chassis would be an awesome alternate fix.
@OpenSourceUser Thanks for the article pointer and rclone reference. Just linking in that we have an outstanding issue on the Schedule power down/up on the system and a related forum thread which contains info on how at least the drives can be configured to power down as well. Not that friendly just yet but bit by bit. There is also an issue open specifically on drive power down interface which @maxhq has already put some work into the behind the scenes mechanisms of; this issue in turn links back to the forum thread “SMART Status and Disk Spin Down”
+1 on the above. Extra mention of the ability to mirror/clone to the cloud providers.
(disclosure: still waiting to build a Rockstor NAS, currently using Syno)
Cloud Syncing Two ways:
I want a way to mirror my NAS to the cloud for backup. Whether that be cloud server running Rockstor (EC2+S3 or something like that) or something else.* I thought about trying to use something like SyncThing for this, but I haven’t had much luck in that past with ST or BTSync when trying to sync “whole drive” with 100,000’s of files.
*Alternative to that would be would be someway to simply backup to the cloud (B2, S3/Glacier, Nearline, whatever).
Backing up cloud service data locally - Synology has a cool client for syncing one’s gDrive/Dropbox/etc accounts to their diskstation. I haven’t seen anything else like it in other NAS solutions, but it give me a lot of peace of mind.
Random other need:
I’ve often wished I could remotely connect to my NAS’s GUI over WAN and then launch a browser out of the NAS. My home NAS has always done a lot more than just file serving and is more of a general purpose home server. Some use cases: Sometimes it’s to remotely access my router or another machine which is only accessible over the local network; other times it’s because I need search for an download something to my NAS via HTTP.
Adding my Suggestions to the list instead of creating another topic.
1)Being able to Edit Shares names especially shares that was replicated to another machine as they end up with a very long name ex. one of my replicated shares are named 00000000-843130d6-3c04-4a7a-bbc5-404501709e84_Health_Safety. When renaming the share rockstor must auto update exported shares with the new share name and keep it’s existing configuration?
2)Being able to assign more than one group to a specific user
3)Additional security for example MAC or IP Authentication that works alongside user/pass auth so that the user must be whitelisted and put in his/her username and password to see a specific share.Host allow and Host deny can be configured in the samb.cnf file but then canceles out the User/pass authentication and seems to authenticate on the IP only and doesn’t ask for the username and password…Maybe I’m just configuring the samb file wrong haha.
4)Additional update options ie. being able to download updates to and install from a flash drive?
5)Recurring donate option on paypal? or possibly a patreon page.
My Home NAS isn´t running 24/7 so its very important that my Server can Autoshutdown when there is no Network traffic,
traffic on HDDs or no NFS Connection for xmpl.
I can solve this by cronjob but it would be gr8 to have this options integrated into the GUI of Rockstor.
High
-HW raid card support, specially ARECA ( http://ceph.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/A2_16Concurrent4KWrite.png )
Arecacards in JBOD mode still allows filsystem to access cache, and 12xx series or older 16xx series cards with BBU is pretty cheap, as to allow GB sized hdd cache. Areca drives is part of elrepo 7, but I’m having trouble inststalling. OMV has a great solution for this. Turn on/off hw raid.
In the near future:
-BTRFS settings : Striping and other options are now part of BTRFS progs, and it would be great to be able to have access to these in web gui.
-General speed of GUI (I find webgui slow on chrome, but this could be just my system).
-DOCKER speed
Not so important, since solution exists:
Proper backupsupport for online storage. Duplicati rockon works excellent (it is in my 3rd party github account), but is very slow on my system, and Im too unfamiliar with the settings (lack of usermanuals).
EDIT: Add posibillity for docker management system similar to this: http://forums.openmediavault.org/index.php/Thread/11296-OpenMediaVault-Docker-GUI-Plugin-Usage/
It gives Rockstor a more flexible solution for docker. Not to be mistaken, I believe Rockstor should have Rock-ons as basis for most people, but with the option of manage extras outside standard rock-ons. It is easier than writing rockons.
), or other full OSs and non supported docker apps, or one that seem broken and full OS helps resolve.
