Looking for solid advice on freenas'ing my freebsd

Hello all,

I'm new here and from what I gather freenas "this" or "that" gets asked a lot so sorry in advance for yet another question, but this I think relates more to the OS. Also I read the rules and this "PC-BSD, FreeNAS, NAS4Free, and all other FreeBSD Derivatives" and hope I'm posting in the right place and that it's clear that this is NOT a Freenas troubleshoot but it IS in a way related to it.

I game so I'm mainly a Windows user, but I've been using (/tinkering with) Linux for a few years now. I'm comfortable around the console, the OS structure but I pretty much follow tutorials and in the end stuff works out great! I have a headless Debian server that doubles as a torrentbox (rtorrent + rutorrent) and NFS server for Kodi access around the house. It has served me well but I wanted an upgrade and I ended up deciding on a build for Freenas (left the specs bellow for context). With it I was planing on keeping the torrentbox side and the NFS, increase the storage capacity, improve the odds of keeping my data safe with a easy/quick GUI and get a homelab to try new stuff. Maybe beehyve, plex, etc.

I test-drived Freenas around 11.0 and it wasn't perfect, but what is? It makes for easy management, has plugins and blablabla. It took me a while (one year or so) to buy all the components I wanted but when I start using it "for real", Freenas switches from 11.1 to .2 and the new GUI happens. Iocage happens. And it's a shit show! I hate the new GUI, I actually prefer iocage jails but it's not implemented right and I had a lot of issues using the GUI for managing them. In the end I was using iocage from the console and it was working great but then it kinda hit's me: Why am I using console when the whole point of Freenas was to NOT use it and make management easy and faster to adopt?!

So, here I am with some questions, because all of that:

1.
This machine's priority is storage and data management; I know I can't run away from the console but can you advise me on a list of ports (I think I'm using this right) to that end? Freenas has a lot of nice features in the management end, like SMART watch, email alerts and in some way I would like to "freenas my freebsd experience" as opposed to what I ended up doing "freebsd'ing my Freenas" because i needed more that what it was giving me. A list or a link with your thoughts would help a lot;​
2.
I've been lurking in the forum and it has nice tutorials on getting started and i've seen some pf, nginx stuff also, but I was looking for more updated references, is there another website with up to date tutorials on freebsd?​

I don't really mind switching from Linux and learning it the hard way, it works for me because i don't RTFM (only when i fucked it up!). It was actually very refreshing not having a million distros to test and understand the workings of. From what I read, Gentoo and Debian are the most similar distros to freebsd so I think I'll be alright.

If you can give-me a good start, would greatly appreciate it...

Thanks in advance


-------------------------------------

PCPartPicker part list

CPU: Intel - Xeon E3-1245 V6 3.7GHz Quad-Core Processor
Motherboard: Supermicro - X11SSL-CF Micro ATX LGA1151 Motherboard
Memory: Crucial - 16GB (1 x 16GB) DDR4-2400 Memory
Storage: Western Digital - Red 4TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive
Case: Fractal Design - Node 804 MicroATX Mid Tower Case
Power Supply: SeaSonic - PRIME Titanium 600W 80+ Titanium Certified Fully-Modular Fanless ATX Power Supply
Other: SanDisk 16GB Ultra Fit USB 3.1 Flash Drive - SDCZ430-016G-G46
 
it works for me because i don't RTFM
Well, here's your major problem.
FreeBSD (as all proper UNIXes) has very good, thorough manpages and documentation; especially compared to what is the norm for most software in the Linux-world.

The FreeBSD Handbook[1] is an exceptionally well written piece of documentation aimed for everyone who wants to get a quick introduction to all the basics of a topic. So: read it! You may skip specific chapters on things you don't need (e.g. kernel debugging, desktop environments, printers...), but you should read about the OS basics and system management/administration.

Most services, especially those you mentioned you'd need, are very easy to set up and usually come with a very sane and ready-to-go default configuration file which is well commented and documented. Again: also read the manpages; they usually answer all basic questions in <1 minute.
For getting a rough overview of how some services are set up or can work together, tutorials can be a nice hint for beginners. But _NEVER_ follow them blindly and just copy&paste commands and configs. In order to be able to adapt a service to your needs or troubleshoot it if it doesn't work as inteded, you have to understand how it works an what those commands/options do that you are changing in the config.
As said: usually the default configuration for FreeBSD packages are very sane and work for most of the basic/standard use cases and have very thorough comments. Also read the messages after package installation (can be re-read with pkg info -D <packagename>), they also contain vital information e.g. on how to enable or configure a service.


[1] https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/
 
Thank you for your post!

The FreeBSD Handbook[1] is an exceptionally well written piece of documentation aimed for everyone who wants to get a quick introduction to all the basics of a topic. So: read it! You may skip specific chapters on things you don't need (e.g. kernel debugging, desktop environments, printers...), but you should read about the OS basics and system management/administration.

Actually I did, while installing the first run of the OS. I agree, overall it's pretty good.

I think THE 2 major issues that are keeping me from going all in at this point are

  1. The fear of fucking it up with the zpools because it's all very new to me and the (illusion of) safety with the Freenas GUI was/is very comforting; Losing all my data because I misspelled something, not having a clear visual safety net for options I don't know exist, etc..
  2. The time needed to invest on this to get it up and running "as good as Freenas" on the disk management front.
I think I need to think this over.
 
1. The fear of fucking it up with the zpools because it's all very new to me and the (illusion of) safety with the Freenas GUI was/is very comforting; Losing all my data because I misspelled something, not having a clear visual safety net for options I don't know exist, etc.
Usually you don't need the zpool command on a day-to-day basis. As for zfs (and zpool), you can try to get into the habit of always adding the -nv flags on first try - then you will only see what would be done to your datasets. Remove the -n switch to actually apply the operation.
OTOH, there are very few commands that you can really use to shoot your foot off and they are appropriately named after their destructive action: destroy and remove.

2. The time needed to invest on this to get it up and running "as good as Freenas" on the disk management front.
FreeBSD creates a default pool layout at setup (which I highly suspect is also used by FreeNAS). How you lay out your pool/datasets on your storage pool is always up to you, even on FreeNAS...
Creating regular snapshots is a matter of installing e.g. zfSnap and writing a handful of lines to your crontab.

If you want to do everything by klicking around in some colorful GUI, just use FreeNAS - but you've asked in the FreeBSD forum and most people here don't use GUIs as they are usually bloated, slow and very limited in what you can actually configure (usually only the few usecases the GUI-developers have thought about or allow you to do).
 
The fear of fucking it up with the zpools because it's all very new to me and the (illusion of) safety with the Freenas GUI was/is very comforting; Losing all my data because I misspelled something, not having a clear visual safety net for options I don't know exist, etc..
This is called experience ;)

Heck, even with almost 20 years experience I sometimes screw up. Nothing to be afraid of, it's going to happen whether you like it or not. The important thing is to learn from your mistakes.

Oh, and backups. Make backups, lots of them.
 
Oh, and backups. Make backups, lots of them.
Preferably not on the FreeNAS you're playing with. ;-)

In general there's no good answer for you here. Frankly speaking even Linux can serve as a storage, depending on your needs it may be all you need. I'm maybe repeating myself but do play with it in VM first. Simulate certain scenarios, backup solutions, etc.. It's way more comfortable to screw things up in VM with snapshot at hand to revert it all back.
Once you are comfortable with it enough you can move your primary storage to FreeBSD/FreeNAS.
 
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