 So, it's July 5th, 2018 and I wanted to take a look at something me and Chris Moore talked about in an interview about the upcoming version of Free NAS. Now, this is pretty cool. This is going to be the 11-2 beta. Now, the actual release is due on 7-9, but you can go to the nightlies and get on a sneak preview. I'm going to wait to do any in-depth testing until the actual beta comes out, but I wanted to at least do a quick video and do a look at it. Essentially, this is beta one, but it's not the official beta one. It's a nightly release. And a couple of the things I want to talk about that they added here is replace Warden with IOCage, add cloud sync encryption support. This is actually the real exciting one. Meltdown Mitigation, I'm less worried about because I trust the software running in here, but it's good. Trust me, it's good to have that. I'm not trying to say don't bother. It's a waste of time, but they are working on the mitigations on that. So, let's take a look at the dashboard. So, by default now, and you could switch to the new UI with previous versions, like the 11.1 series of Freedance, but it was pretty rough. And I never really used it because I didn't, I think I did a preview of it in a video, but it's not, I didn't think it was all that great. It had a lot of issues. They have really been working hard at this, and it looks a whole lot better. They polished it up quite a bit. I like the first screen when you log in, you get your version. It says master. It says the build date is July 3rd, 2018. This is the Freedance 11.2 nightlies, like I said. So, this is not the version that's going to come out on 7.9. As close to it as can be, I imagine they may have a couple of commits that they have between now and Monday, but for the most part, this is pretty much how the system is supposed to be looking. Now, among the things I thought was interesting that Chris had mentioned was some people like to see it on a phone or a tablet. And it does work on a phone or a tablet, so you can manage your system from this. And I think the thing is, I'm used to always just using a computer to manage it. But it's definitely, it takes a little bit longer to load, I think, when it does this, but like it could be that I'm running this in a VM and that's just part of how that works. But the layout, without thoroughly getting into it, does seem to work on the phone option here. So, kind of interesting. Log out, restart, shut down. That just worries me doing that from a phone. So, we're going to go back. It is responsive. It is a nice UI. It does have that option. We're not going to do the demo like that. It's just, I thought it was interesting that they offered it. Now, this is a departure from the usual Freeness layout that all of us are so used to, where some menus are on the side and some are across the top. But I got to admit, when you're trying to teach a new user that, I've been using it a long time, so it's easy. But for a new user, they're like, why are some menus on the top and some here? And I do like the consolidation of all the menus and the expanded dropdown so you can find things. Everything in here looks pretty clean, looks pretty nice. They have a nicer layout for just generally everything. I kind of like, especially when you're prompted at the dashboard, so you can see things like, you know, how the drives are doing. You can see the health of the drives and things like that, pull tank healthy, nice green. I imagine it turns red. I don't have an unhealthy tank here to demo it, but it's pretty clean. Now, I noticed, and it's probably because it's a nightly, that these aren't showing up. I don't have any information in here, but I'm not too worried about it. I actually use net data for all of my deeper diagnostics. It's integrated right into Freeness. I've done separate videos on it. You can load it on other servers. Services page. I like this too. The simple start, stop buttons, red and green, just kind of a cleaner look. Like they've done a nice job on all this. Also because you can get a lot of services in here. Nice to see that you can just filter it and it works really fast. It also has a couple different layout options, slim or the kind of more, what you may be used to, a tabular layout like this. So pretty cool. Sharing all that, mostly, you know, clean layout. That same common add the plus. I guess this is similar to the way Google added a lot of things. I see this in the Google dashboards like that material design. Where you can browse the path, little dropdowns, choose snapshot tasks if you have any assigned. I don't have any assigned to this, but all the features seem to be there where you can add the features to the objects and you can just check boxes. A little bit different than the, you know, side by side boxes where you gotta push them all over. So I do like all of this. Now the one exciting thing about this is gonna be the cloud support, cloud credentials. Now I've talked about this before. So the system has an ability to support cloud syncing with storage providers like AWS, Microsoft Azure or Backblaze and Google Cloud. Now Backblaze has really inexpensive storage and it's a great place to store quite a bit of things and a lot of people going, I wanna be able to sync all my data somewhere, but I don't know if I trust that provider. Fair enough, they have a solution for that. So I was gonna work out a video and I just never got around to doing it of how you pre-encrypt everything, then you sync it to the cloud. The problem is that's kind of a pain in a butt to do. It'd be much better if it was one step. Don't worry, free NAS people have this figured out. So I created just a test account that's not real, I'm gonna go over here to tasks and we'll go to cloud sync tests. We're gonna go ahead and add one here. Test, is it a poll or push? We're gonna push data over to the cloud. We're gonna choose Backblaze. I think it's gonna fail on validation here. So we'll wait for it to fail on, no problem. It does do a test to make sure that it's valid. You put the path in. If you wanna sync the data, copy the data, it's got options there. This is the part that's exciting that's coming up. So we have set encrypt files before transferred to the store. That's pretty cool. So we're using our clone crypt. And they have all the documentation here on it of how it works, so I'm gonna do some reading in this. So I'm gonna do a video on this once the beta is out and do some testing back and forth because I have a Backblaze account and test how good this works and how the encryption works and things like that. It also does encryption password and encryption salt. So I like that. It's definitely handy because now I feel as though it's got good strong encryption behind it. And this is a feature that I've been wanting for a long time. Be able to sync it and tell people, hey, you can sync it with a cloud, but you don't trust the cloud so you can do this. Now another nice advantage is if you're worried about this because someone brought this up before about problems they've had with different cloud providers. I take everything with a grain of salt about people's stories about problems. Sometimes they are the problem. Sometimes a cloud provider might be a problem. So seeing a single story and saying, oh, I lost files with Backblaze because there might be more to this story. Anyways, you can do this to multiple cloud providers. So if you don't have confidence in one, you can then choose another and at the same time and then cloud sync to both places. So that way you have the three, two, one backup or you have it a couple copies of it and two different cloud providers both encrypted and then you have a copy yourself. So it would take quite a global catastrophe for all of your data to go away. That being said, this is one of the features that I'm pretty excited about. Now the other stuff I'm gonna do some testing. I'm gonna test it on real hardware so I can actually see the results as opposed to testing in a VM. I have a old server that I have laying around that I'm gonna load the beta on to do some playing with all these things and I'll do a couple of videos on it of course and show you how this is coming along. But I really like the way this looks. Now a couple side notes, if you wanna load this up and test it, I've already done this to this particular VM but one of the prompts it has is would you like to upgrade to the latest version of features for a ZFS? It rolls up the ZFS to add extra features. The other side about that is you can't roll backwards to it. So if you do this to your main machine you're gonna be on this beta because there's not a downgrade to my knowledge to roll it back. It's kind of a move the data, bring it all back. The other thing I wanna point out is IO cage is in here. Now IO cage is replacement for the previous warden jails. It's the updated new version that's in the new versions of FreeNAS. I'm not an expert on it and I'll do some digging into it. I know I have problems running this in a VM. Like I said, FreeNAS is not really ever designed to run a VM. It's designed to run on raw hardware and I have some raw hardware I'm gonna be testing this with so I can do some testing with IO cage and with some of the other features that are supported on this. But overall, I really like it. It definitely is cool. I didn't wanna do too in depth on it until I get around to the actual beta which comes out Monday. Then I'll do some more videos but definitely take a look at it. And as always, if you find any bugs and things like that that's why our betas are open to the public like this is they want you to do some testing and that's what I wanna be doing on a machine and doing some syncing with our other machine to kind of run it through his paces and see what works, what doesn't work and fill out bug reports. And hopefully all will be perfectly smooth and we'll move to this version in production which I'm excited for. So it does need a refresh on the layout for the web interface. And this is a really nice job on the refresh here. I think they're doing a great job. It looks really nice. Other than this, this is the nightly like I said other than this not working everything else seems to work perfectly fine. I can't really do any testing until I put it on hardware with the VMs and Jails but I'm hoping that the VMs have been updated some time. I never found them to be great. That's why I haven't done a lot of videos on it but they have really been working diligently at enhancing the VMs. I think it might be some cool solutions for like the things we do with Unify. I would love to be able to run the Unify in a VM on a free NAS so we can have one box that has a massive amount of ZFS storage for like a camera system. That project's coming when I feel though this is all very stable I'll show how I get all that set up. I know you can run it in a jail. That comes with the pretty deep instructions as well but I'm hoping with IOCage, that gets even better as well. So I'll be coming videos on that in the short term. This definitely take a look at this. If you've got some extra hardware to load it on or a VM to play around with this and start filling out bug reports, check it out. This is the free NAS 11.1 beta slash nightly. First look at it, thanks. Oh, and if you want to go to the nightlies and if you're running like the stable version you just go to system update, choose nightlies, check in a little so there's an update you can install it. But don't do this on your production machine. Probably not the best idea. I mean, I like testing betas but I'm gonna test it on another machine not my production one. Thanks for watching. If you liked this video, go ahead and click the thumbs up. Leave us some feedback below to let us know any details what you like and didn't like as well because we love hearing the feedback or if you just wanna say thanks, leave a comment. 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