I started the thread because of the 9.2.1 update nightmare and my update experience with this branch.
august 2013.
Looking forward to replace our redhat storage boxes and the hp iscsi appliances on the long run (to save licence costs on block based replication), we took a look at Truenas.
Truenas sales made clear, that it is not an system like nexenta, even if it is the same hardware, you have to purchase the complete appliance from them.
Ok, sounds fair, since the have to support it. For less important nodes this did not seem to be an option, so use the time with their free product.
So playing around with freenas was great. It looked much more cleaner then napp-it and was easier then vanilla FreeBSD (damn, a cool webinterface which is easy to understand!)
Nexenta was (or still is) in the transition from opensolaris to some BSD distribution.
Open-e decided to release there first ZFS beta (JovianDSS). No more or less HW independent commercial system was around, which will not change completely in the foreseeable following months.
To gain experience, we did a couple of test setups, run our internal tests and decided to deploy a backup node (of a backup system). FreeNAS 9.1 was really charming.
Time went by, everything was ok. So we deployed other freenas nodes for special cases too. I recommended the system to others with no critical usage – everyone was happy.
With 9.2.1 samba had been updated, smb3 was introduced, a few fixes and update releases followed.
Every new version had its own special surprises. AD auth had its issue in one update release, suddenly iscsi stopped, 9.2.1.5 fixed random reboots which did not accure until 9.2.1.3 and so on. It really was a long chain of problems.
Even a update release had been republished.
I do not want to list the issues here, this does not make sense ( and I do not want get through our mantis tickets of that time and the references to the freenas redmine entries: )
So you had to stay on a special release to get sure iscsi, cifs and AD work, the annoying AD Umlaut bug was fixed in the second next update release, but there are bug entries that iscsi has its issues. .-...I guess you get the picture.
The issues with the 9.2.1 branch had it good points too, I took the opportunity to learn more about freeBSD and ZFS.
It seemed to me, ever update release fixed something and something new was broken.
Every „hotfix“ was just untested (in relation to the complete system) and do not be brave to test a new update release until you really have plenty time left to test and go back.
Myself got used to track the redmine entries after every FreeNAS update to get sure, nothing on that non important nodes has an real issue.
Beginning with 9.3 the update train has been introduced. Now it got more complicated to get the oversight and it feels like there is no way back or installing a fresh node with a freenas release and the needed updates. to be sure you are at the release version, you want to be.
it is a little bit like the story tail with mozilla, when the started t tell everybody, that they wanted to stop publishing release numbers.
@jkh, I really do not want to complain.
I really appreciate what ixsystem made out of the original freenas project!