mcbeen.com

I have been playing with openindiana along with a few other platforms over the past few weeks, and thought I would share what I have discovered so far.

Openindiana combined with napit turned out to be a very rudimentary system that was not what I was looking for. I played with it for a few days, but it just didn’t feel right to me. It was stable, but pretty much required me to manage the system over ssh. I eventually gave up and moved on to the derivatives.

The first thine I tried was freenas. I had heard some good things about it, and the feature set looked solid. The overlap between what it offered and what I was looking for was pretty good. On initial installation, I went ahead and downloaded the latest release, 8.2. It installed fine, and booted up without issue. I configured my 3-drive pool and started testing speed and usability. And thats where things started to get weird. I kept getting strange situations where the gui would fall out of sync with the server, and I would have to reboot and clear my caches to get it working again. Looking online, this was confirmed in the forums, and appeared to be a common issue. The cavalier attitude of the developers towards the problem bothered me, but I kept going. After being satisfied that I wanted to move ahead with freenas, I exported my zfs pool on my machine, and moved the drives to freenas. Thats when the system fell to its knees. I spent two days working to try and figure out what was causing my issues, but I finally just gave up. I was never able to get the machine to boot with my 4 drives online. I even resorted to wiping the boot drive and starting again. During boot, at random places the machine would panic with memory access faults. I found that concept astounding in this day and age. Shaking my head I moved on.

From there I moved on to Nexenta. It is also another openindiana derivative like Freenas. The licensing is much more strict and limiting. It definitely had the taste of vmware, and I was a bit hesitant.
I went ahead and ran the install without issue. On reboot, the system loaded to a registration screen. Ugh. I had to “activate” my personal, home, free, hobby nas. Not impressed. I know everyone has to make money, but this is open source software. Activation is crap. At least it doesn’t appear to phone home constantly.
I logged into the website, and entered my machine fingerprint, and got back the return code. Upon entering it into the server console, the load completed, and the basic server was online. The damn codes are horridly long as well. and since this is console, there is no cut and paste. Atrocious.
The Nexenta by default boots to a random static IP, which is curious. All other systems I have used boot with DHCP or ask you what IP address to use. It was easily corrected with the console tools though, and we were off and running.
In typical enterprise fashion, the system includes two wizards… because it just wouldn’t be enterprise ready without wizards! They walk you through naming your appliance and setting up the fundamentals.
After the wizards completed, I went ahead and attempted to import my ZFS volume without issue. In order to setup shares and mount point on my pool, I had to upgrade it since the MacZFS software was so many versions behind. I decided to move ahead and do it, not being fully sure this was were I was going to end up.
It ended up being a good decision. In spite of the typical, cliche, enterprise trappings, this seems to be a very solid platform. A NAS has to be reliable. Not just the drive system and data protection, but the underlying operation system as well. Its no good if the platform is panicking while you are trying to write to it.

Over the weekend I put the system through its paces, and so far I am very pleased to with results, and frustrated by others. Nexenta seriously falls down when it comes to hardware monitoring and maintenance. It appears some to most of this is eliminated in the enterprise version, but I find that to be a poor excuse. Services and basic as SMART are not included or integrated, leaving you to depend on ZFS for error correction, prediction, and recovery. On the other hand, they do include many of their high end services such as data tiering and analytics. Its an exceptional tool.

I’ll be hitting it hard going forward to see how it all shakes out.