Damn man. Technology kinda fucking sucks now. Everything I use is imploding in on itself. Yay!
this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2026
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Uggh, I just got to the point where I'm as familiar with TrueNAS as my old Synology, but I want to move towards more freedom. TrueNAS beats Synology, but where is this going?
Been running my own storage boxes off of rocky w/ zfs, samba and nfs for years simply for the ease of integration of samba + freeipa.
Especially being able to use ipasam.so to allow password authentication for shares on machines that aren't easy/reasonable to use kerberos keytabs from (think android clients, and off domain boxes)
Plus last time I tried truenas you couldn't use a keyfile to encrypt drives unless it was stored on the root dataset which for some reason couldn't be encrypted. Meaning each array had to have its own password instead.
I won't lie I had to write several wiki articles to document this lol.
Oh so they are going to use the Puppet excuse to move away from open source?
we must move to have our code internal only for now. Totally just for security reasons nothing to do with us also changing licensing to make it harder for those building things for us
no don't bring up the security incident we're referring to that shows us as the issue not having code visible! (ie they cheaped out on people/set up and vendor had keys visible)
Why are they always coming up with some kind of bullshit excuse? :D
So glad I went with OpenMediaVault so many years ago
Always blaming security bullshit. I anxiously await a community fork.
Next step is requiring a subscription.
Volker Theile (lead dev of FreeNAS 2006-2009) maintaines OpenMediaVault, based on debian, version 8 was released recently. Not a drop in replacement, and it has its own quirks, but no evil company in the background
Looks like no zfs support?
It's not in there by default, you have to install the omv extras plugin, from there you can install zfs: https://wiki.omv-extras.org/doku.php?id=omv8%3Aomv8_plugins%3Azfs
I have it on my installation, you've got to replace the kernel with the proxmox one, it's fairly easily done by installing a plugin
Since omv 7 it works with the default kernel, you can install the proxmox one though if you want that.
Weird, some time ago it booted with the default kernel by mistake and it couldn't see my zfs pool
From the docs:
The Standard Debian Kernel (selectable) can be used for ZFS. However, since ZFS kernel modules are not installed in the Debian kernel by default, they must be built by the ZFS plugin when it is installed. While this process works, building the modules is a long process that requires continuous access to online repos. Accordingly, the potential for a build error exists. For this reason, while the Standard Kernel is very usable for ZFS, it is not ideal.
I question why this gets recommended so much when we discuss truenas.
Without a doubt zfs is one of if not THE reason to go truenas. It does so much more for you than other filesystems.
I guess OMV at least has btrfs but not the same thing.
ZFS is in the omv extras repo: https://wiki.omv-extras.org/doku.php?id=omv8%3Aomv8_plugins%3Azfs
As it's just plain debian under the hood you can use any basic debian stuff, e.g. I use zfs-auto-snapshot from apt, and the zfs plugin can list and manage the snapshots perfectly.
I love it so much that I donaged twice to the project. There are also some easter-eggs hidden in the software, like quotes from Dune.
I'm running an early version of that on a 16 year old ARM board NAS, the NAS has 256MB of RAM and OpenMediaVault runs great on it.
XigmaNAS is still being developed and is a fork of the original FreeNAS code before iX acquired the name.
There are alternatives
I found a post on the forum:
https://forums.truenas.com/t/scale-build-git-repo-going-closed-source/64313
This is only their old build system which they weren't using themselves, the rest of the OS will remain open source. However they also said some worrying stuff about including "proprietary pieces of the OS".
According to their own documentation: https://github.com/truenas/scale-build
The TrueNAS build system previously hosted here has been moved to an internal infrastructure.
This doesn't sound like they are no longer using the build tool, they are simply not open-sourcing it anymore.
@Ek-Hou-Van-Braai @SteveTech So are they hosting the source code outside of github on their own platform or is it not going to be available at all?
Afaik they are hosting their code on their own closed source internal system.
So it will no longer be Open-Source
@Ek-Hou-Van-Braai That sucks. So where does that leave us opensource advocates? What opensource Nas options do we have now?
OpenMediaVault. CasaOS. There may be others.
No drop-in replacements for everything TrueNAS did, but at least something.
In a years time will the public be able to build trueNAS for themselves without developing their own build tools?
If not then the TrueNAS is no longer Open Source as people can't practically build it for themselves
(or verify that during the build some code wasn't injected)
Truenas went to shit when they killed BSD support, the OS it was founded on
TIL. Now it's based on Debian.
I ordered a TrueNAS system from iXsystems a few years ago, and the reasoning they gave me is that Linux has better driver support, especially for home users.
Whether that was actually the reason, I have no clue. But that’s what they said.
The reason they gave me is people can run apps with docker on Linux, and docker isn't compatible with FreeBSD jails...
And yet they went with K3s at first, a crappy implementation at that, and refused to even consider adding Docker for like a year, then suddenly it became super important to replace their k3s stack with docker in the next release, barely giving people 2-3 months to get all their apps updated.
K3S sorta makes sense in an enterprise environment but for the small one box use case it's overkill and a pain to work with for little extra gain.
Not only that but there wasn't even a notification on the dashboard for me after updating the OS that k3s were being replaced, I found out after updating when my apps wouldn't work. When did I update? About 2 weeks after the migration deadline. Had to rebuild my Plex, Jellyfin and Immich apps.
Don't get me wrong, I don't like notifications from the OS developer in my system, but that would've been a great heads up and a worthy exception. "Hey migrate your apps now or your shit will break" would've worked.
They are very hostile to users and I moved to a pure FreeBSD self managed storage and deployment solution
TrueNAS doesn't add anything to ZFS or what the OS can do. There's a couple graphs and reporting features but the rest just adds more work
Security through obscurity isn't security.
There goes my excuse for not giving up and just paying for Unraid.
And Unraid is OSS?
So my option are (potentially both) closed source storage software bjt one needs to be paid?
Well...I know what I'll not choose.
Unraid pay system switch made me never want to use them
you can always just bypass their security.
Huh
Unraid uses a pretty whacky "license" checking system. There's cracks for it out there that hook into the core license system and use it to generate a valid one for the current version.
One key note is that you HAVE to update the crack before updating Unraid itself.
Odd choice of timing… I wonder if they are sitting on a cache of hard drives.
Are they lying about secure boot being a reason or can I go back to thinking SB is part of Microsoft's EEE attack on software freedom?
@tabular @Ek-Hou-Van-Braai They are lying. Debian supports Secure Boot and remains open.
Although "related platform integrity" stuff might be something they're being forced to include by a government agency or paid to include by another company.
It can be a bit of both.
I don't think secureboot is an attack on freedom exactly (and it's certainly not an instance of EEE), but I definitely think it shouldn't be Microsoft holding the keys.
Literally today Chris Titus released a video where he emphasized that no one should be using secure boot because the default backend is Microsoft and no one changes their secure boot config.
If that's true there's an argument that the name "secure boot" is hardly detachable from the defaults and thus that name is kid of burnt and shouldn't be recommended out of an abundance of caution for new users.
Do you know the name of this video? I keep trying to search for a secure boot video by Chris Titus released today/yesterday but I'm not finding anything.
It was in his reaction video to LTT trying it Linux again
So... nobody changes the default settings, therefore everyone should change the default settings... to the wrong option?
edit: Why is it that homo sapiens is always willing to go an extra mile just to hurt itself?
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