In ~2017 I ditched FreeNAS when my FreeNAS Mini died from the Atom C2000 hardware failure. iXSystems was great about getting me a replacement board, but I decided when I rebuilt the system to just use FreeBSD and get used to command-line only administration. That directly lead to me learning pf, jails, bhyve, etc. Yeah, I don't have any fancy web UI, but I've had a rock solid system for almost 10 years with Samba + NFS running without issue.

▲

asteroidburger an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah, I just run bare Debian myself. It's really not hard to setup LVM and Samba. And all of the major frontier models are well-versed in those things, so I used their help to get all of the various bits setup to make access from MacOS fast.

▲

ssl-3 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I've been using things like Samba and NFS since the 1990s. They're not hard to figure out with useful resolution.

When I finally became determined to give ZFS a serious go around 2016, I looked at all of my options -- including throwing some hardware together for FreeNAS, and running FreeNAS in a VM.

I decided to just use an existing Linux box that was already doing storage stuff and add ZFS to it.

It's been fine ever since. Keeping ZFS going isn't deep voodoo at all; of all the things this box does, ZFS has probably been the most hands-off aspect of it.

	▲	sherr 13 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		This is what I do, to try out ZFS in a "safe" and easy way. An HP Microserver (my home server) with a USB3 disk attached formatted as ZFS. The server still runs Debian stable and uses DKMS ZFS. The recent pain points have only been the time taken to rebuild the kernel module for kernel updates and there have been a lot of them over the past few months (due to all the CVE's found and fixed). The ZFS side has been plain sailing so far but if I hit any ZFS issues I may have trouble (but, as I say, it's a test anyway).