Feedback

To make it short, the development will not be stopped. I am really pleased about the great feedback. I did not know that there are so many people waiting for OMV.

Finally after reading all posts i will comment various issues:

Why is no code released till now?

This is because i wanted to release a perfect piece of software, and currently it does not not fulfilled my claims. But the most important reason is that if the code is in the wild it is hard to do any fundamental code change if necessary. This happens once or twice during the current development, so i was happy to do not have to take care about backward compatibility.

Screenshots can be faked

That’s right. Because of that i will upload a video soon. The problem is that YouTube does not like OGV screencasts recorded on Ubuntu Lucid, so i have to convert the screencast first to be able to upload it to YT.

Donation

After OMV has been released i will add a donation button to the homepage.

Outstanding issues

  • iSCSI Target WebGUI refactoring + include iSCSI authentication
  • Refactor session authentication
  • Refactor volume management (configuration)
  • Mounting ISO files via WebGUI
  • Statistics
  • Apple file protocol (AFP). The latest Lenny backport is 2.0.5, so TimeMachine support should be possible.
  • UPS support
  • Iface bonding
  • WebDAV
  • Userportal to allow the user to admin its personal settings

What is not included

  • Dynamic DNS client: Nearly every router or DSL modem supports this per default. Also there is no Debian port of ‘inadyn-mt’ available which supports a wide range of DDNS services. Because i do not want to get feature request like ‘Please include service x or y’ when using a client with a small subset of supported services, ergo i do not include it in OMV. Maybe someone else is doing a plugin later.
  • UPnP service: The same here, no Debian port of ‘Fuppes’ till now (which seems to be the only solution for XBox and PS3 support). I did not follow the MediaTomb development, but i remember there is no PS3 support or was it XBox? Nevertheless there is no out-of-the-box UPnP server available and i do not want to start creating my own UPnP Debian packages. Also i do not have any UPnP hardware for testing. Maybe someone else is is more encourage to do that.

Some thoughts about…

The last days i came across some blogs and boards with discussions about my descission reimplementing FreeNAS (now as the new project OpenMediaVault) on Debian Lenny. Some of these discussions harms me personally which causes me to rethink my work on OMV in generally. Currently i’m thinking about stopping development because it seems to me that there are some people out there that can not respect the work of others (people that are using their spare time to develop free software that does not cost anything, mostly known as open source) and think they could do it better. So to all of you guys, sit down and try your best. Here is a list of what i personally invest to OpenMediaVault till now and you should plan to your project. For FreeNAS you can multiplicate this by 3:

You need about 20-25h a week (sometimes more), 11 months of spare time

If you calculate this by using a moderate 25Euro per h fee (i hear about that some other companies took about 70$, i do not want to give any names here) this is about 27.500 Euro.

Some people said OMV will be only another Linux NAS distro, hmm, did not knew that there are so many distros out there. Most of them i found are commercial, not usable for novice users or absolute crap (sorry). A small side not to all ZFS fanatics, give Nexenta Core based solutions a try and <irony>get happy with their fantastic WebGUI</irony>.

And now my personal thoughts about FreeNAS 7.x. Without the work of Daisuke Aoyama, Michael Zoon or Dan Merschi (sorry to the others i missed here)  this project would be dead. But what about the new 8.0? We did not see any screenshots nor have any knowledge about the current state, only promises. What happens to a project if it is lead by commercial interests (now and in future)?

Where are all the people that think they could do it better. Within the 3 years (don’t know it exactly) of working on FreeNAS there were many request to help on developing FreeNAS, but after giving them feedback what they could help, guess what happens, i did never heart of them anymore. The same situation after my descission to switch to Linux. Many have criticized my decision, but none of those offered his help. So, how do it come that they are able to criticize this? If they do have the knowledge to help on topics that are missed in a FreeBSD based FreeNAS why not helping the project? If they do not have the knowledge about issues they’re talking about they should simply keep the mouth. Finally all of those blatherer sucks me.

Week review

After the last article dates back quite a while here is a short overview what’s happened the last time.

I tried to customize the Debian graphical installer but after some time i had to capitulate because i was not able to find a way doing it in Live-Helper. Maybe it will work doing some dirty tricks, but i did not want to loose too much time here. So currently there is only a text gui based installer, better than nothing :-).

The firewall rules editor has been refactored to allow reordering of the iptables rules via drag&drop or push buttons.

Installer is ready

After hours of trying to preseed the Debian installer i got the results i wanted. The text based installation is ready now, but for the graphical one i had to start Gimp and swing the brush 🙂 The installation process is reduced to the minimum to allow everybody to install OMV. The only interaction to be done is to set the hostname, a static IP address if DHCP does not work and finally  select the harddisk used to install OMV. Voila, after some minutes OMV should be on the harddisk and ready to use.

While playing with the new firewall WebUI i found out that it is crap because the user is not able to rearrange the rule order. Because of that i had to rewrite the UI the next days to get this working.

Firewall and configuration backup/restore features finished

Step by step the todo list gets smaller. Today the firewall WebUI and backend has been finished. Please note that firewall feature is only designed as client firewall. Everything else should be done by a real router/firewall appliance.

Also the configuration backup/restore feature has been implemented. Now it is possible to create a configuration backup and restore it later.