Hi Guys,
Per the subject, why does WebShare require TrueNAS Connect?
Since there is a free tier (to my knowledge), I can’t just say “money”. Likely because it relies on TrueNAS Connect to do the SSLs… Also because the option to upgrade is likely already there in connect so no need to build two billables & then higher tier of connect sub has added marketable benefits. Think of how much more value you get for a single subscription.
If you’re wondering why you can’t do the SLLs yourself; you can, but I mean, then you’re somewhat close to the point where you could find something to implement yourself. The trade-off being that you’d be maintaining, implementing, and responsible for it at the cost of your own time.
Edit: I’m certain that there is additional complexity that I’m glossing over, but I’m also fairly sure I’m in the ballpark.
Because iX wants to lock you into a subscription. If SSL certs were the issue, they could have made the built-in cert functionality robust.
I was trying to give benefit of doubt 
The true answer is the future roadmap, and not just a simple SSL certificate 
The WebShare functionality you are seeing today is only the first part of our planned roadmap for this capability in TrueNAS. A lot of what is to come will leverage more of the TrueNAS Connect Infrastructure directly to provide key functionality. The first big pieces of this will show up in TrueNAS 28.
Knowing what the roadmap was, we didn’t want to launch the feature in TrueNAS 27 without Connect requirements, and then have folks complain we that “did a rug pull” when the next major update started requiring Connect to work fully. Going this route means if you enable it today, on the next major updates it’ll keep working and new capabilities just show up. We purposefully made it available on the free tier of Connect as well, so no payment required to get started with it.
Happy to answer questions on this where I can. We’ve not made public the 28 roadmap yet, but that’ll be showing up as we get into the new year.
Personally, I’m disappointed that any functionality is gated behind Connect, as I’ve never been able to make it work reliably. Admittedly, I never filed any bugs about it, but that was mostly because I didn’t see any value in fighting with it in the first place.
Also annoyed that locked objects for S3 is a premium-only feature, as that is more or less why I want S3 object storage anyway, to enable faster/cleaner backups.
But the thing that bothers me the most is the restriction of tiering to Enterprise… compared to homelabbers, even small companies are swimming in money to be able to add more flash to their systems to avoid needing tiering… not so much for the homelabber. Obviously, you aren’t taking anything away from me, but definitely something I was looking forward to and am going to miss.
I’d like to hear about what the plans are, but I don’t want any dependencies or tie anything to a cloud environment, outside of updates or one time licensing. Most people in this space should be comfortable with using their own certificates or authentication models.
Personally, I don’t have the need for Connect and find it hard to understand the dependency you’re creating here especially when it’s local.
I would like to understand if this is a new direction for TrueNAS?