Once upon a time, Warren Young wyml@etr-usa.com said:
I see that story in the exact opposite way: iXsystems found and fixed the problem, expending heroic levels of effort to do so.
By contrast, I’ve had several $300-500 NASes become unmountable for one reason or another, and the vendor was no use *at all* in getting it remounted.
So, I was offering my opinion (backed by some personal anecdotes) of iXsystems. The system we had with all this trouble was much more than $300 (more like $30,000); IMHO it isn't "heroic levels of effort" to do something they told us it could do before we wrote the check.
Did you opt for advance replacement, and if not, why not?
Yes, we had purchased a support contract that included advance replacement. They had no replacement part and took several weeks to find one.
I’ve also had trouble with FreeBSD’s lagg feature. Fortunately, my use case allowed me to switch to a round-robin DNS based load balancing scheme instead. I don’t think you can do that with NFS, by its nature.
Yes, NFS talks to a single IP at a time. My problem isn't with FreeBSD, it with the TrueNAS software; it considers any configured network link dropping as a reason to fail over (even if the link is in a LAG). That is not configurable behavior.
Yes, I noticed their site was running awfully slowly. Embarrassing, but I don’t see what it has to do with the quality of their FreeNAS boxes.
Mainly just more anecdotal evidence about the company and their general reliability.
I know there are fans of iXsystems and FreeNAS; I am not one of them (nor is anyone in my office). We also sold a TrueNAS system to a customer, they had trouble (different problems from us), and we just about lost the customer.