[CentOS] OT: Replacing Venerable NAS

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, Warren Young <wyml at 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.

-- 
Chris Adams <linux at cmadams.net>