I’ve been a FreeNAS user since the 8.x days, having decided to ditch a self-hosted file server based off Fedora with a pretty basic MDADM + ext3fs storage setup. Running on commodity hardware, the prior setup was fine, but little other than an extensible NAS that was somewhat of a hassle to manage and keep updated. FreeNAS and it’s plugins jails promised to do most of what I was doing beforehand, in an appliance format that is much easier to maintain.

I’ve been deploying Ubiquiti’s Unifi gear for a while and I absolutely love it. While the development cycle of firmware and software is somewhat uneven, the products are great, inexpensive, run off a self-hosted management portal and don’t have any licensing costs attached to them.

Bien peu de gens y verrons un problème à ce que Rona soit défait en cour. La défenderesse est une compagnie, un monstre sans visage ayant comme seule motivation le profit; dans un cas traitant d’évasion fiscale, son opposition est suspecte au mieux. Pourtant, l’enjeux me semble plus large: devrais-t-on imposer à grand coûts le travail d’être un délateur fiscal? Au-delà de l’information habituellement contenue dans le rapport d’impôt, quelle information le fisc peut-il nous exiger de remettre? Si un de mes proches est sujet d’un audit, quelle sorte de “renseignements ou documents” serais-je contraint de fournir? Combien d’heures non-rémunérés m’obligeront-ils à travailler pour faire le recensement de ces renseignements? Voulons-nous vraiment d’une société de snitch?

By virtue of being a very multi-functional appliance in most settings, a FreeNAS machine has the potential to be a very sensible part of your rack. Even if you don’t use jails or VMs to host anything, it’s still a fileserver at the bare minimum, which means it hosts your data. I don’t think I need to emphasize that protecting your data is important. FreeNAS being built on ZFS, the appliance integrates robust encryption from the get-go, but disk encryption alone leaves several attack vectors wide-open.

The sharing economy is a buzzword which has gained enormous traction despite the fact that it remains misunderstood, in my opinion. The luddite politicians who have been vocal against it on the grounds that it’s a dishonest loophole for escaping regulatory frameworks have it obviously wrong, but I feel that even enthusiastic participants and users probably haven’t considered all it’s implications. It’s not just about creating internet marketplaces for everything. The true genius of the sharing economy is twofold.