FreeNAS Corral pulled from “RELEASE” to “TECH PREVIEW” status

Posted By Jon on Apr 13, 2017 | 0 comments

Wasn’t really expecting this!

I checked my normal daily feeds and saw a post titled “Important announcement regarding FreeNAS Corral” on the FreeNAS forums.  Once I opened it, I realized it was Kris Moore (direct of engineering for FreeNAS) posting.  Uh oh.

I half expected that this post was going to say that Corral is going the paid route or someone bought it.  Instead, with a heavy hand, Kris Moore typed out that because of user issues and lack of full feature integration, FreeNAS Corral is being pulled from an official stable build status to a “technology preview” status.

The main take away is that the FreeNAS Corral UI was built on a less-than-standard framework called MontageJS and the Montage Studio development team disbanded.  On top of that, many features (some of which I would label as requirements, not features) are not supported or at least not implemented yet in FreeNAS Corral which is why I couldn’t continue to run it.  There is not configuration for post-init scripts for configuring network interfaces after boot (think bridging, etc.) and there was serious amounts of settings missing from iSCSI setup.

I personally did deploy FreeNAS Corral but as soon as I booted up and realized there was no post-init config script support along with iSCSI access control, I had to boot back into 9.10 U2.

That said, hats off to the FreeNAS team for deciding that pulling Corral off the shelf for the time beingFreeNAS 9.10 has been unbelievably solid for myself and others everywhere.  Instead of forcing Corral out the door with known issues and discontinued UI support, the team is going to release a new Angular-based UI in 9.10.3 with many of the added features from Corral.

Once 9.10.3 lands I will be sure to install it and check it out.  Good job on the FreeNAS team for keeping the community and the reception of the product at the top of their list of concerns!