Any chance of an SYNOLOGY type of FREENAS?

[DownloadDeviant]

Huh? WTF am I talking about?

Let me explain. 

I get the impression the people behind OPN are going to create what I have always dreamed PF could be. Ergo, I would love to see a similar project for FREENAS.

What has prevented me and others from using or offering FREENAS as a solution is the exact thing that makes it so great - it is only good at storage. Period. It does it very well and add-in ZFS and ECC RAM and you are blown away. Yet, this is exaclty what is bad about it. It does not do much else unless you want to go rolling in the deep of strange packages, CLI, duct tape and reading from the book of Dr. Frankenstein.

If someone could take that basic structure and make it function like Synology or QNAP - it would be shake the earth IMO. A Synology or QNAP device can be lean mean storage but can also offer more with their extensive library of add-ons. This gives SOHO and MICRO biz clients the most bang for the buck. Sadly, their low to midrange products do not offer ECC RAM or ZFS. Yet, I can build a $500 FREENAS box with ECC ram! UGHHH!

Any way, just food for thought guys. Maybe you have some friends either jealous of your OPN project or just bored and looking for something to dig into.

[chol]

The link you might find helpful is to iXsystems, they offer great Server and storage systems:

ixSystems FreeNAS mini

You might as well want to discuss your insights to the NAS domain with the members of the FreeNAS forum

[DownloadDeviant]

I did put my thoughts to them in the forums/feedback/ suggestions areas. I have been doing it for over 2 years. It is a great product but they seem to be very stubborn to change. lol

[chol]

You may also be interesed in the HP proliant Gen 8 server line, I am using.

I got a 2 x 2.2 GHz server with 4 NAS hot swap HDD bays and dual Giga NICs for a bargain of 200 Euro.

It runs FreeNAS/OpenBSD/OPNsense/FreeBSD without any problems, quiet and on relatively reasonable Watts (idle 23W).

HP ProLiant MicroServer G1610T/G2020T/E3-1220L v2 Sammelthread (de)

What would be appealing, was the theoretical use of their python based GUI for the pf as a back and front end GUI solution, but I am speaking theoretically here because I am not a coder, and the OPNsense developers made it clear, that a complete rewrite of a GUI for pfSense or OPNsense would at least require 2 years!