 FreeNAS 11.3 Release Candidate 1. I have this loaded on my system and this is specifically the server I mostly use for managing all of my videos and a few miscellaneous things. I actually do all my editing directly on this. It's connected at 10 gig and I wanted to give it a try with the Release Candidate version. And generally once they get to the Release Candidate, there's a reasonable amount of stability and I don't mind contributing back to the community and saying, hey, I found this that or the other that wasn't working properly. Now, the first thing you'll notice about the 11.3 series is the updated dashboard. They have really polished this up a lot. I like this part because this is always like a question people have about, well, how much memory is being used for cache versus that, because people will say, oh, I see a lot of memory usage. Well, yeah, you might, but that's the idea of the way ZFS works. It does not require 28.6 gigs in cache, but because I have 32 gigs and I'm not using that 32 gigs for anything else, why not turn it into a read cache? It's the way ZFS works. So it's not that necessarily it's memory hungry, it just doesn't like wasting when you have 32 gigs of memory sitting here. Now, this particular machine, just for those who always wanna know, it is an Intel Xeon E5 2620, 24 threads available, 12 cores with 32 gigs, like I said here. And the pool, let's look at the pool size here. We'll jump down to that. Oh, actually jumped out in a second because you notice it does have four network cards in it, but those network cards aren't in use except for the two 10 gig cards are in use, CXGB, CXGB zero and CXGB one, it's one of the dual cards and it is both connected at 10 gig in two separate networks, there's no VLANs in this. So just an FY on that. Storage wise, look at the pools here and you can see the dataset, how much is used, how much, healthy 2.23 and about 10 terabytes or yeah, just under 10 terabytes free right now and some of the things I've done for testing inside of here. And so it also has the unified video and some other things I've been testing on and dumping data back and forth. So like I said, actually using it, it also serves as a share for some of the lab servers that I set up. Now, problems I've had with it, not too much so far. The only real one was when I set up the replication tasks, they were set up under 11.2, they didn't carry over but they have a really simple way to fix that problem. So if we go over here and we look at replication tasks, a backup is not a rate of drives, a backup is when you copy all your data to somewhere else. I bring that up because I've had people where it's catastrophic failures of rate arrays to avoid that cause all of my videos are on here. This does synchronize to my other server and out of the box it did seem to be working. It gives you a finished but let me show you the actual result of that when I scroll down here. The replication run would fail even though it would say finished here in green. So it finished and failed and it gave some logs and it's running in legacy mode. So let me just show you what that means. I'm gonna dive a little deeper into this in a second video. Well, once the 11.3 is finalized, they updated and enhanced a lot. The replication task to make it a little bit simpler and we'll get into that like I said in a later video but it does have the ability to import and it's supposed to work with the legacy mode. It failed, minor problem. I just reran it with this. You can actually just follow the settings. It supports direct push, transport SSH. By the way, this is why I have to make another video on this is because now they have SSH, Netcat, local and legacy because now you can actually do replications across different pools that you have in the system. So they've added a lot of features and I'm gonna wait till it's in full release or I should say interface stable, which means okay, we've added as much as we're gonna add to this for the moment so I can do a video on there. But it isn't nice that they enhanced all that but you just kind of rerun the wizard. It doesn't even have to go through the whole setup of the other system and it seems to be working but I'm gonna do some more fine tuning and testing but overall they seem to have simplified the way it works in some ways but added more options so the legacy didn't quite carry over. Jails, no problems there. Matter of fact, this is where I'm gonna say there's a highlight in the new system as the way they did the jails and the plugins. So let's roll over here and look at their release documentation which I was saying here, this is their docs they're starting for the 11.3 RC1 user guide and talking about all the enhancements, new features, new peers, credentials for API, new transport for Netcat for improved transfer. Like so this is all some of this replication which is awesome. Configure snapshot retention on the route site, configure replication, makes it easy to replicate scenarios including a local replication which before there was a trick you could do by pointing replication at yourself and then replicate to other pools. Now you don't have to do that, it's a regular feature. The network management interface will dive deeper into that but you've seen how the dashboard nicer, updated alert, much better reporting. Now the plugins has been streamlined a lot and actually we're gonna jump next. I talked about before the iSCSI wizard when they first came out with the beta one on there. So now it's kind of like, yeah some fill in the blanks to get things set up. And before we go further though, I wanna dive into the deprecated and removed features. This has been a thing that some people are upset about. Domain controller has been removed from services and net data has been removed from services as well. Now this is not a flaw in net data overall. My understanding is from going through and reading some GitHub comments, this is a flaw in net data and the way it handles things in BSD has a memory leak. So they've removed net data from the BSD system because you may have heard me talk about net data before or the fact that net data is now in XCPNG and people asking, well is there a memory leak? Well no, it's some type of BSD problem they were having. So I don't know if that's coming back or not. Obviously you don't generally reboot or leave these things on any type of cycle. You have them running potentially for a very long time. So a memory leak would well be very detrimental to the system because it would slowly eat away at it. So I understand their need to remove it. The domain controller, I never had set this up because I never bothered trying to use third party domain controllers for Windows. I talked about this on one of my, oh I think I'm my last vlog Thursday. I generally, if I'm gonna do a domain controller I'm gonna lean towards setting it up for Windows domain controllers. I know it's 100% compatible but you had the ability to do that with here on FreeNAS and now they have removed that. Now you can still join this. This is different and this is what I wanna be clear about. You can still join FreeNAS too and Active Directory domain run by Windows. It just doesn't have the option of being the head end of a domain. So that has been an important little thing on there. And the built-in Docker temple has been removed from virtual machines. Instructions, understanding Docker manually over here. I don't know anyone running Docker inside of this and I know I have tested several times and I'm sorry I love you FreeNAS but I just don't feel your whole virtual machine stack. The Beehive system is very mature. I've always found it to be a little bit buggy. So there's that. So I don't even delve deep into it because well I just found it kind of a pain to do that so I don't really use or hypervisor much. So I'm not gonna miss that configuration but maybe someone is, I'm sure it was in there for a little while but not enough for people to really keep it in there and there's a manual method. Now back over here, plugins. I like the way they did this. So here is browse and collection of IAC systems supported plugins versus community plugins and not only have they changed the way this looks they've added some new ones. So in the community plugins section we got OpenVPN server, Madsonics, SickChill and this one for people that know and are fans of my channel, UnifyController in here. Have not tested future video. I will do some installing and testing and see how it works but I did notice it is the latest version 5.1235 and they have the long-term support version 5.640 underscore two in here as well. So I may do some playing with that. I was really hoping and maybe someone watching us will do this or is it work instruction had a manually set this up but I would love to see. I know it's not in support anymore but hey, if someone could port over the Unify video server software to this that wouldn't be bad because hey, why not? I got a few cameras and I could always move that working in here but I'll say it a WeChat and a few other things and like I said kind of cool and the fact that IAC system is like, hey, these are the ones they support. The one thing I will say I'm not the biggest fan of this. I guess we could select columns differently but I don't like the slide back and forth but hey, whatever. It just feels like it would be clunky to use if there's a lot of things on there and it feels unnatural to slide left to right but maybe that's just me. I don't know that I would file a complaint on that yet. I'm not that picky of a person. I did already have Sync thing in here and I went ahead and updated the plugin to see if it would migrate. It seemed to work fine and Sync thing did open up. I don't have any shares in it at the moment but it did go through the setup process and get that rolling. So there's gonna be some future videos I do on FreeNAS and Sync thing because there's a little bit of changes they made when you set that up but at least they added it in there. I would also like to see and I know this was requested before with Next Cloud which is still in here and it's supported by IAC systems. They set up, so the out of the box setup had HTTBS options but you know, hopefully we'll get there. Now run down a list real quick here. FreeBSD operating system, some updates there. Angular's been updated some of the backend and where the UI works has been updated. UI changes, et cetera. So a lot of little stuff. Now one thing interesting though is that they went and added the ACME system in here for reporting. So it does have that as an added feature, the automatic certificate management environment and it does support the ACME DNS screen and Route 53. DNS challenge versus open web challenge is another way you can do. Let's encrypt certificates that work over ACME but not all the backend providers yet are supporting it. We're still hoping and I have friends literally working on that project with other companies to get more support out there for DNS challenge and the difference between a DNS challenge and doing ACME versus a web challenge is you don't have to have any ports open for DNS. You can just do the DNS query back and forth to claim ownership and it can pass the certificate that you can then use and then configure it yourself without having to actually expose the system. So as that gets more mature and more developed, I may jump in to do a video on that. Let's go over here to reporting. They made this look a lot nicer. So that's definitely, although we remove net data and we all love the way net data looks, I know a lot of people, myself included, do like that. They did update the reporting look a little bit nicer inside of here so we can look at the different devices, memory, network information and it's looking better. I don't think this has much been when I looked at the beta maybe a month ago before, but hey, cool, they're still progressing on that. Well, let's jump over here to networking over to interfaces. They made this look a little bit better too. So when you're adding network interfaces, they did streamline it so you can see these physical, physical up, up, down. And if we add something, we can actually say a bridge, a link aggregation or a VLAN and then start configuring it and then choose how you want it to attach to the parent interface and you kind of get the idea. I do like how they streamlined it as before it was a little bit confusing to explain to someone I only knew it because I've been using FreeNAS for a long time, but yeah, their networking interface was kind of in more than one place. Now that they've streamlined it with a series of pull downs when you're complying network config, I think this is gonna help new users quite a bit when they're setting things up. Now something else of note is just how they've changed some of the things in the UI that I actually think is pretty cool. So before we tried to squeeze it all in one column and that always caused the problem, now we have these little drop downs and then we can do this. So you could just drop down each one and then go into each subsection like this. So that to me is a little bit nicer. Actually, where's the close on this? I guess we could type exit. Okay, cool. That brings us back to here. I didn't see a little X at the top, but being able to have these little expand down, this one still has looks like the traditional one, but I'm assuming they're gonna do more of them with that little expand out. So like when we're looking at storage, we look at pools, they still have this, but in some places instead of having to clutter up the menus like this, you can do these little drop downs. Now, another thing that's also gonna need a whole new video is, let me see if any of these are set up for this. I probably don't, maybe the Unify Video VM. What we have here is a new way they're dealing with permissions and ACLs. So at ACL, there you go. I talked about this in last beta. This is one of those things that's gonna be, it looks a little more complicated, what they're giving you is a much finer, more granular control of the way you do access control lists and permissions. So that's definitely something welcome and looking forward to as they get all that set up. I wouldn't mind having a better, I guess you could say interface here for the way this works, because when you're here on this, this is just big. In showing me a picture of a network, I think it looks cool, but it means I had to scroll all the way down to see that these are up and connected. But then again, maybe not everyone's like me and has that many network interfaces on their free NAS. And I might be nitpicking because, well, I don't actually log into my free NAS very often. And once it's up and running, I'm mostly, I'm a user of it. This video is streaming and recording to it will be edited against it. And from a day-to-day basis, I pretty much just set it and forget it and don't log in and just have it send me alerts and notices. On a subject of alerts and notices, that is somewhere else that there's a lot more going on with their alert services and alert settings. So you get more control over this of how that's going to work. So that's gonna be more fine tuning because there's a lot in here. Right now I haven't mostly just sent me email notifications if there's anything going on. But it does have at the top here when you log in, I do kind of like this. So you can look at, like I was pushing updates for the plugins. So you're kind of getting a history of things, jail update that I did. Here's that replication run running versus that. Let's show you what else happens when we run a replication task. So if we run it, let me go over here, which has this little expand up menu, I hit run now, continue. And it already happened that, well, did it happen or did it queue? There we go, already finished. Yeah, finished really fast because there's no new data to replicate. So when it did the replication, it's there or you get an alert and you get this replication run and you can view the log of the replication run, download the log. I like the way they put that little menu at the top to kind of get an history of what the system's got going on. That's definitely nice. And it has a filter at the top so you can find things up there. So if I taped in jail or replication, I can go through a history of it. So the little UI changes like that are nice, especially when a lot of times I've got a troubleshoot or things like that. But overall, I really like it. I'm gonna keep plugging away with the new update. I haven't run into any major issues with it. So brother functionality seems to be there. I still gotta do some more thorough NFS and ICE because he testing over time to see if it works. But this only runs my lab servers, nothing production. So I'm not as, I'm not worried about if it crashes. I mean, I'll do a bug report, but it's not going to be detrimental to my business is what I should say. Other than if it does make a mess of the files, it would be detrimental to my production of YouTube videos. But that's why we replicate it to a completely stable version of FreeNAS. So I have a complete backup of everything because well, practice what you preach. I say back everything up. We should really back everything up. Make sure you back that and ass up. And by the way, for those of you wanting that shirt, yes, it's online. There's links below. For those of you wondering where the shirts come from, you can find them on Teespring that UCS wearing. We have a handful of them on there. And also if there's other ones you think we should add to the list or to the store, if you have some idea, drop a link over to forums and continue discussion there. We're always open to suggestions because we're not church designers. We're techie people who just think that's funny. All right, thanks. And thank you for making it to the end of the video. If you liked this video, please give it a thumbs up. If you'd like to see more content from the channel, hit the subscribe button and hit the bell icon if you'd like YouTube to notify you when new videos come out. If you'd like to hire us, head over to laurancesystems.com, fill out our contact page and let us know what we can help you with and what projects you'd like us to work together on. If you wanna carry on the discussion, head over to forums.laurancesystems.com where we can carry on the discussion about this video, other videos, or other tech topics in general, even suggestions for new videos that are accepted right there on our forums, which are free. Also, if you'd like to help the channel in other ways, head over to our affiliate page. We have a lot of great tech offers for you. And once again, thanks for watching and see you next time.