HexOS Statement of Intent

I’ve been a TrueNAS junkie for years, having stumbled upon the 11.0 release of FreeNAS (its original denomination) in 2017 when reviewing non-Microsoft storage system options. That was also the first time I’d heard of ZFS, the filesystem that powers TrueNAS. It looked like it was ideal for my use case:

• Open source
• Supported multiple network storage protocols - NFS, SMB and iSCSI being the important ones for me at the time.
• Granular control over permissions with optional…
• Active directory integration
• Highly Performant
• Intrinsically resilient (*when configured to basic best practice principles)
• Not Microsoft

I’d been using Linux as my desktop OS for about six months at this point, and had loads of Linux-based server experience under my belt. I hadn’t touched BSD before but was aware of the shared history between the projects and felt that I wouldn’t have any issues working under the hood where necessary.

Wow, was I wrong.

Permissions

Permissions are perhaps second only to DNS when it comes to cliches for things not working, and this is totally justified. Anyone who’s spent more than a few weeks in the IT industry will not just recognise, but be able to recite word-for-word the error messages encountered when a permission is not correctly site.

Windows cannot access \server\storage You do not have permission to access \server\storage. Contact your network administrator to request access.

Muttering “I am the fucking administrator” under your breath whilst berating Microsoft for building bad software. Still, I can’t say I’ve ever clicked any of the self-help links but they’re probably terrible because… Microsoft!

However, until you’ve endured the hardship, misery and despair of FreeNAS storage and share permissions, you don’t know what pain is.

tustled and toiled with permissions in some form or another. However, until you’ve endured the misery, despair and hopelessness of a TruNAS Core network share with incorrectly configured permissions, you don’t know pain.,