I don’t feel like I have a lot to write about lately, so I’ve been going through my old drafts and found this one from one to two years ago (date unknown, my timestamps have been mishandled pretty bad). We used to run TrueNAS as our NAS solution inside of Proxmox. We realized that it was constantly accessing the spinning disks, which was indeed slowing down our access to files on the NAS and the other VMs that lived on those disks too. Here’s the draft I wrote from that time, largely untouched from then:

TrueNAS was constantly doing debug logging via the middlewared process, which appears to be misconfigured? Why was a production project doing constant debug logging? This caused a lot of disk activity, which with spinning disks gets annoying. Other people pointed this out on TrueNAS forums and got hostile responses like “why don’t you want your disks to be audible?” Some folks asked how to change it, which would require installing things on the FreeBSD OS itself, to which the ONLY answer is “don’t ever do that you have no idea what you’re doing, always install stuff in jails” but then of course they didn’t actually HELP you figure out how to solve the problem using jails. Probably because you can’t tune the core processes from a jail.

MEANWHILE, my wife found OpenMediaVault, and their team is actually supportive of users installing the things they need directly into the OS and will still provide help if you do!! And it’s so much quieter both on the disk and CPU!

So many FOSS communities, and honestly tech communities at large, have this horrible attitude towards new people, people seeking help, and anyone who wants to do things that aren’t seen as “blessed” methods. Just tell me why it’s doing this, how I can change it, and give me a warning that I’m rendering any social support contract void by doing this. There’s no reason to be assholes.