FreeNAS is becoming more and more unusable for me. Part of the reason for using it was access to the jails and plugins – notably CrashPlan and OwnCloud. Due to the moving target nature of the system, I have had to repeatedly login and restart processes, manage memory, kill zombies, and deal with other issues in the jail setup. Further, the performance of AFP in FreeNAS (for me) has not been something to write home about, even with the newer bits (3.1.x branch, last I looked). The last straw is that the ZPOOL version is 5000 with a number of feature flags that nobody else has implemented yet. This means that the pools on my system are unreadable without the very newest releases of FreeNAS or FreeBSD.

I’m backing up now, headed for the better understood lands of ZFS on Linux. It looks stable enough to keep me afloat, and I know how to keep CrashPlan from spawning 65000 zombies in the background.