(Someone) Please post a link when Robbie’s video goes live
I expect no mention of the word deduplication in your UI then!
Jokes aside, there is social value in what you are doing. You may not get my money, but you get my support.
@HexOS_Jon
An articulate delivery of information without emojis. I’m not really sure how you did that but if you could create a write up, or how to, to share with the members here, I would appreciate it).
You could have my money if you did that for BSD.
Looks like the video is up https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTPVd4YCDZ8
I have plenty of people who think the “big computer hard drive” stuff I do at home is neat but they would never in a million years even know how to get to this forum let alone ask a technical question. They wouldn’t know a penguin from a daemon.
I think a lot of people in this camp get hung up on hardware though. They want to know if the right QNAP or Synology box will tie their shoes for them. Will HexOS help people in finding the right hardware platform? I guess the answer is TrueNAS Mini as mentioned earlier hm? In that case I hope to see the Mini line be price competitive with those type of vendors for this space.
Where is the thread on the old forums with the guy who says “If you’re a REAL sysadmin you just run ZFS on your own OS. Why do you need bloatware TrueNAS?”
This is basically the next inception level above that right? We can be meta whiners now. That’s awesome.
Confirming this.
I recall hearing that HexOS is the first “Powered by TrueNAS” venture.
Presumably there will be other offerings, I wonder what that might be…
Watched the video and while I understand there will be remote capabilities, my takeaway was more towards how to manage TrueNAS using a simpler GUI. My thought… Why doesn’t TrueNAS develop a “GUI for Idiots” or be a little more politically correct “GUI for Beginners” and have that as a selectable option. When TrueNAS is first installed, the GUI for Beginners is the primary GUI, and you are given the ability to switch between the two.
Okay, HexOS does a few more things besides being an easy GUI, but they are making all the decisions for you. I guess some people will like that. When that new user has a problem and comes here to ask questions, I don’t want to teach someone how to use HexOS to troubleshoot a problem. After all, these new users are not going to be familiar with the TrueNAS GUI. How do I tell a person how to run a SMART test and post the results. While it is a simple process, it is a lot of small steps to describe how to do it. I guess we have some of that today but it will get worse I fear.
I guess my main concern is that if HexOS turns out to be plagued with problems, that will rub off on the reputation of TrueNAS. Will it really matter in the IT world? Probably not as they should see it is not TrueNAS at fault, but those folks subscribing to HexOS are apt to have that sour taste in their mouth. But let’s hope that doesn’t happen, no one wants someone to have a bad experience with TrueNAS. Nope, I still don’t work for them, but I am more than happy to let them send me a bitcoin
…we should send them to the HexOS support channels. They promised in the OP that their users wouldn’t be bothering us here. Do I believe it? Heck no. But that’s what they’ve said.
If iX have chosen to “partner” with Linus, they clearly don’t care about their reputation.
I dont think it will be worse than ppl losing a 25TB stripe pool with USB drives and the rest on a 20port multiplier.
I would define it more as a calculated risk, given that he has been… unpredictable. To me, asvertising plugins as a functionality of CORE while being broken is something more concerning that iX partnering with a company sponsored/owned by one of the biggest YT tech channels.
I agree, but our track record is bad. People come here all the time asking software questions (about apps), how to use them, etc. and we seem to always indulge them. For me, those should go to other forums as well. Plex, Nextcloud, PhotoPrism, etc. have their own support forums. Getting it to run is fine, but, beyond that, it shouldn’t really be here IMHO.
As long as people are able to resolve their issues, does it matter where they receive help?
there’s also a non-trivial amount of issues with apps that are TrueNAS specific.
most other consumer NAS OSs mostly just sidestep permissions (unraid for example, everything is owned by nobody:users, except if a docker container decides to chown a bunch of crap) so the App’s forums might be filled with users that don’t have an answer.
plus there are plenty of issues with the ix official charts like missing options and misconfigured startup probes.
however of course it doesn’t help matters when someone just posts “app x is stuck on deploying, help!”
I feel that the target audience is quite narrow for this.
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You rule out those who are savvy enough to build their own custom NAS boxes and know a thing or two about the underlying technology and software.
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You rule out those who may have less technical knowledge than the above cohort, but the TrueNAS GUI itself is user-friendly enough for them to get by.
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You rule out those that could absolutely benefit from the streamlined simplicity that the HexOS GUI offers (yes, even as a “cloud-based remote dashboard”), because they still need a degree of hardware and software knowledge to build their own NAS server in the first place, let alone address hardware maintenance and upgrades.
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You rule out those who cannot be bothered with managing their own hardware locally, since they will just defer to cloud-based storage solutions (of which there are plenty to choose from.)
So that leaves users that:
- Are willing to pay a premium for a pre-built NAS server, loaded with storage drives.
- Find the TrueNAS GUI somehow “too advanced and confusing”.
- Are willing to pay a monthly fee for an “extra user-friendly” remote dashboard.
Let’s imagine a user that does not fit the above profile.
He logs into his HexOS account. He gets an alert that one of his drives is failing in his “storage pool”. (Let’s say it’s a RAIDZ2 vdev).
How does the HexOS GUI help him beyond what the TrueNAS GUI already offers? Is the HexOS GUI going to tell him which port the failing drive is connected to? Is the HexOS GUI going to show him a video tutorial of exactly what to do?
If he already understands concepts about “RAIDZ” and “vdev” and “ZFS”, then why wouldn’t he just use the TrueNAS GUI in the first place? And if he is that disconnected from these concepts, then how will HexOS “hold his hand” so that he can physically maintain and manage his local physical server?
I understand the motive behind this offering, but I believe that the target audience is just “too specific and narrow”, by the nature of offering an “extra friendly” remote dashboard to manage a local (and often custom-built) hardware storage server.
The answer is yes, it does matter, burnout. Only a few answering the majority of posts right now.
I of course am not speaking of Truenas Specific stuff.
If I don’t know something, I don’t post about it.
If I don’t want to replay (for N reasons), I simply don’t: I’m not getting payed, it’s my free time.
Additionally, if people don’t get easy answers they will search themselves… and some of them will post the solution, becoming helping membrrs of the community themselves.
Having intimate knowledge of app number 7 out of 378 is not something common. SCALE being relatively new and constantly changing does not help much.
I think you forgot the “has technical friend who will help spec and build NAS with HexOS pre-installed” category.
If iX have chosen to “partner” with Linus, they clearly don’t care about their reputation.
Why do you keep repeating this nonsense? Yes, many Linus Tech videos are clearly designed to be entertaining–even silly, but he and several of the on screen talent clearly have real technical knowledge. And they are backed up by actual engineers behind the scenes. There’s no way that he could have built the multi-million dollar business that he has without them.
Also, are you completely ignorant of the recent huge investment that his company has made in very expensive testing equipment, software and hardware engineers, and facilities so as to set up a state of the art test lab? And that he’s doing it because he understands that the lack of rigor in reviews by well meaning YouTubers can lead to misleading results being published? Including on his own channel, which he has called out?
I keep repeating “this nonsense” because it’s true. They’re designed with him either not having the foggiest idea what he’s doing, or acting like it even though he knows perfectly well what he’s doing–I’m not sure which is worse[1]. His on-screen persona is, at best, an ignoramus[2]. If some people find that entertaining, I guess that’s their problem, but it isn’t nearly as big a problem as the people who believe his on-screen nonsense represents solid tech advice. It isn’t “nonsense” to express the opinion that iX’ choice to partner with someone who chooses to behave that way harms their reputation.
Is there a reason I should care about the “recent huge investment”? He has a long history of behaving on-camera in ways that I can’t accurately describe without getting my post deleted again. When that “huge investment” results in a similarly-long history of his acting on-camera like a rational adult dispensing solid information, then perhaps my skepticism will have been shown to be unjustified. But his saying “I promise I’ll do better” won’t do it. Come to think of it, it doesn’t do it for iX either.
I’m not convinced it’s all an act, though. “I switched to TrueNAS, configured it less intelligently than a particularly challenged box turtle, and now lost all my data” wasn’t an act AFAIK. ↩︎
This is far from the only reason to avoid him, but I’ll leave to others to consider and/or address his business practices, journalistic ethics, treatment of staff, etc. ↩︎
Why in the world would anyone go to, or publish, technical data/instructions to YouTube?! “damn!? What was that config line? …I think it was at about 7:32.”