Personally I'd favour it the other way round:

• Have .com as commercial page
• Community stuff is on .org

Even though NexentaStor is a recognized name people now know about I think with the shorter nexenta .com / .org it's easier to distinguish the purpose of commercial and community. There are BTW regularly people asking NexentaStor related questions on .org because they didn't think about searching for -stor.org site.

The .org portal could be promoted to be the home / portal to Nexenta-sponsored / -steered community and its open source efforts.

Hi Linda,

I appreciate your involvement and your proactive communication style. Some comments from a broader perspective:

if I am understanding this correctly since 3.1 the commercial and CE product are based on the same code base. Hence I consider it beneficial, that one might choose to eval via commercial eval setup or via CE. This leads to feedback, bug reports and questions and naturally the question arises, whether it is possible to upgrade/migrate CE to commercial at all and eventually how.

The problem in the past has been, that the community here got the impression, that rarely Nexenta folks bothered to comment on bugs and suggestions posted here. A good example is the neverending story of VMware tools support. IMHO this has improved and maybe was just based on poor communications caused by Nexenta folks reading it but rarely commented. The most important thing with a bug report is to know a status, whether it has been confirmed by others as well and acknowledged by Nexenta.

I'd also like to suggest that sending a request for technical support from the CE should enter a workflow that benefits Nexenta and the testing community. Nobody expects support or responses, but the info submitted might be valuable to others and Nexenta as well and should at least be collected and accessible somehow. This as well leads to the question how to deal with bug reports affecting CE in general. How ist this handled right now?

I consider 3.1 a very important milestone (looking very very good so far!) and sincerely hope, that GUI unresponsiveness is now a problem of the past. IMHO this has been the single most cumbersome flaw so far and severly damaging the good overall impression.

Regards, Gernot

When I first released that the community edition was a sham, the response I got was that If I wanted open source go to the nexenta.org site.

I absolutely think that you should have one site.

The problem with Nexenta is clear, the technical people understand open source, and are no doubt engaged in collaboration through other sites. The commercial people at nexenta dont get open source at all they don't see that having a free version (like Red Hat which allows for Centos) would actually be a benefit to them.

So make this into a real open source product and have one site. But sort your license agreements out first.

Until you do I will treat Nexentastor as I would any other proprietary system, as a necessary evil.

Gernot in his last post above suggests we are the "testing community" and that "nobody expects response" well I am a nobody as I do expect support and responses, we got that from Zimbra and they did very well thank you if you do not support your community you have no community.

So be honest with us, either support the community and make your community edition more open source than it is, or take the open source title from your site, and call this the testing edition.

I am not an open source puritan (otherwise I would not even use the term) and I do recognize that nexenta can have some proprietary elements. But the current non production use element of the existing agreement makes a mockery of everything.

It really is not that difficult to get this right!

I quite agree with Gernot and John about the communication channel between Community (bug reports) and Nexenta. This has (i.e. exactly the vmxnet3 story and UI unresponsivenesses) been a source of frustration in the past about sort of 'not getting listened at' feeling in the community - and has rather lead to a not so good 'carte de visite' for Nexenta.

Licensing:

• I really feel the license agreement of the CE edition is weak point, it can alienate people interested in Nexenta - John is right: Does Nexenta want the CE edition to be real 'community' or to be trial/testing edition? - The message by Nexenta has to be clear what they expect from us to be.
• Just for correctness: the NexentaCore distro should be put under some open license - the components itself are - but it's useful to cover the 'composition' of the distro under a license. Since it's all OSS a simple CDDL/BSD/GPL license would clear that question :-)

Hello,

In my early days of playing with nexenta/stor I found it very confusing as to the split / differences between them. Many times I have posted on nexenta.org instead of nexentastor.org.

I am not in a position to comment on the licensing issue discussed above, but from a usability perspective I agree with John Adams that Zimbra have got this sorted out.

The forums are much more powerful than this rather nasty message board system. The zimbra forum also breaks up in to different sections so that users can be clear about where and what they are asking for help on. In short, a new more powerfull forum with divisions / categories for nexenta and nexentastor is the way to go, combinied with Nexenta personnel participation and moderation. Maybe even nexenta could appoint community gurus to help moderate.

On the subject of the value of a community to help develop and improve a product I agree with Gernot. I believe an excellent example of this is carried out by Mikrotik. (i dont work for them by the way) but their forums are the best by far of any that I have come across on the net. They dont have an opensource product, but the community forum really helps them to develop their product, and even though support may not be expected by community users, the employees or mikrotik are present and contributing in the community. As a result I feel like I know them, know the different skills that each have, and the company feels within reach. Without even buying a support contract.

Anyway, I hope this helps.

Alex

Why not combine all Nexenta forums and have different sub forums in each (Nexenta, NexentaStor CE, NexentaStor EE)? Especially when looking at nexentastor.com vs nexentastor.org, the posts between the two seem relevant to the NexentaStor product as a whole. My vote is for the "less is more" approach :)

this is a fantastic idea.. thanks

Oh and one point about forum capabilities: Redmine is great but please enable more features - the nexenta.org boards allow editing and fixing your posts while this board here doesnt. Most formating functionalities (i.e. 'code section' with pre) don't work either.

And like andy shinn: Less is more - what are you planning about the forum that is on nexenta.com? :)

the nexenta.com forums will be depreciated in the website rewrite... the .org will be the community site. I come from sun, so i am thinking nexentastor.org to become like bigadmin. A real community site. We will be hoping for community contrib's...like docs, scripts, entries and help around faq's. we also have a partner community which i am still not sure what to do with.. Possibly just roll into the nexentastor.org also.

Now is the time to be heard... There is alot of modification taking place right now that we will hope will allow us to build to the next level. With the release of 3.1, all the plans are working together to get our next phase of growth into the pipeline.

I just want to say that I agree with every sentence from John Adams on his last post. I think management of the company still didn't get Community version as it should and it might explain the reasons community have had these issues until now. The Zimbra example is a great example.

Hopefully now with Linda onboard she will be able to sort all that out and show the company the powerful value of the community to contribute back in many ways.

Regarding merging the forums I agree is a great idea. One single point of information to search/post improving its effectiveness.

Regards,

that's my plan!

The current plan is to have nexentastor.org for admin forums and contribs. I am hoping you all will help me with some content, scripts, tips and tricks. Having a good community can really help in driving the products. I believe that our principles understand that...

thanks all!

Gernot,

I wanted to specifically address your comments about info flowing out of nexenta. Most of the problems have been of cycles, not disinterest. The company has had 3x growth in the last year and the people are trying to adjust to the growth and it (in the past) made it difficult to communicate. They have increased the staff and are looking for ways to manage and stabilize at that growth rate. One of the things they did was to hire me. Let me assure you i will give more info than you know what to do with. Many times at sun i got in trouble for saying too much. I plan to be completely transparent and as helpful as i can be.. I will let people know(like i had to do today for the first time) that the problem they are encountering maybe out of nexenta scope... but i will always try.

The proof as always is in the pudding... If you see me dropping the ball please let me know and i will be happy to pick it up!

linda

Linda,

have a look at my posting at [[http://www.nexentastor.org/boards/1/topics/3265]] , I am giving up on Nexenta, right now I have no confidence left that things might change.

Good luck, Gernot

Forums should be broken out into more distinct categories (General and Help -- may as well just have one: "NexentaStor Discussion", the way things are now just fragments the discussion). Also encourage more regular participation by nexentastor.org and Nexenta corp staff. Too many threads go unanswered.

I'd also love to see mailing lists similar to zfs-discuss.

And where did the Nexenta.org blog go?

We have a zfs discuss on illumos. We hope to drive more people from opensolaris.org to illumos.org over time

I do agree that i should have more categories, and that's something i can do quickly.

Since i got here in july, i have been able to drive more answers coming directly from support or engineering. Most of the time i get answers from them and post under my name.

blogs.nexenta.org was cut off this week to the new nexenta.com website, which i believe has blogs.

Forums should be broken out into more distinct categories (General and Help -- may as well just have one: "NexentaStor Discussion", the way things are now just fragments the discussion)

this.

I know this is a little late: but public visibility to tickets (either specific "public" issues, or all issues not deemed as "private") would be nice... I can't see running two issue trackers being ideal for you guys in making NexentaStor a better product (and please don't tell me you just maintain two different Redmine installations, I'd die).

I understand stuff like Enterprise customers will get support first, but when major bugs are found in the core of Nexenta ( [[http://www.nexentastor.org/boards/1/topics/3273]] ) we shouldn't be referred to tickets that aren't visible to us. I don't even know how an issue this large such as VAAI causing LUNs to seize is practically invisible to the community outside of the discussion board.

It really just means the community issue tracker is not really taken care of.

I have no clue what you guys run internally, so I guess you're limited by what that is, but it would be nice, if you also run Redmine there: they've added private tickets since your last upgrade (I see you're running an older version), and within about two months private comments will be available too (along with using private sub-tasks for internal work and investigation between you and customers/specific community members).

William Roush wrote:

I know this is a little late: but public visibility to tickets (either specific "public" issues, or all issues not deemed as "private") would be nice... I can't see running two issue trackers being ideal for you guys in making NexentaStor a better product (and please don't tell me you just maintain two different Redmine installations, I'd die).

Hi William,

this has been brought up so many times in the past, abandon all hope. Nexenta's corporate culture does not include an open discussion about defects nor listening to customer feedback.

Regards, Gernot

Gernot Schmied wrote:

Nexenta's corporate culture does not include an open discussion about defects nor listening to customer feedback.

I'm fairly new to the company (~6 weeks), but this doesn't seem true from my eyes. Linda has left Nexenta, so I am working on filling that gap.

There is two areas here.. Paying Enterprise customers, which via the support portal have their issues/feedback worked on. The Community site here may seem more lax, which I am hoping to change. There is not a lot of resources focusing on the community site currently, but I am doing my best to get that moving forward. Open discussion on issues is welcome, and we do listen to feedback.

Derek Glover wrote:

Gernot Schmied wrote:

Nexenta's corporate culture does not include an open discussion about defects nor listening to customer feedback.

I'm fairly new to the company (~6 weeks), but this doesn't seem true from my eyes. Linda has left Nexenta, so I am working on filling that gap.

There is two areas here.. Paying Enterprise customers, which via the support portal have their issues/feedback worked on. The Community site here may seem more lax, which I am hoping to change. There is not a lot of resources focusing on the community site currently, but I am doing my best to get that moving forward. Open discussion on issues is welcome, and we do listen to feedback.

Remember to drive home this important fact:

Community members help drive enterprise stability (and are a major source for enterprise sales when they grow), I've caught bugs before running the free version of TeamCity being as community members are willing to run bleeding edge while enterprise users wait a little while due to various processes in place. We should be involved in issue tracking and our concerns escalated and visible (and we're looking to possibly go enterprise soon, but I still want the community feedback).

Their development process is pretty open for both community and enterprise users. We all benefit from it.

Which a little tidbit about that before someone brings it up:

It doesn't mean we're QA, we just have a wider array of hardware and deployment configs.

I have to second William and Gernot.

The VAAI causing the LUNs to seize was a massive problem and being a paying customer (not gone call Enterprise), I have seen others like the problematic mapmgr/failover

The corporate culture is the root of all these problem, that never changed or will change. I don't think they have anyone there that actually sees and understand in order to advocate for changes.

FREDY . wrote:

I don't think they have anyone there that actually sees and understand in order to advocate for changes.

I am working on that. I am your advocate into the 'nexenta corporate'.

Derek, no offense, but we heard that already, only the previous iteration it was Linda, not you. We have no visibility into what goes on inside Nexenta, so all we can go on is what externally visible changes/communication we see/hear. In the past, that's been close to zero (at least that is the perception here.)

Help me help you? ;)

Of course I can only go so far. Some bug tracking stuff will remain internal, interacting directly with the customers reporting issues, with fixes going into next release builds.

I want to engage you guys, the community, to better enable everyone.

With 4.0 on the road map, shifting the base from NexentaOS over to Illumos, I think things will be more clear. Nexenta among others such as Joyent are grouped together to build the better foundation. I hope with that transition, we can be more 'open'.

Derek Glover wrote:

Help me help you? ;)

I'm a lot more willing to give you guys a good shot at doing this right than some others that have been butting their heads against Nexenta for awhile now... New people can sometimes enact real change, but it takes a lot of butting heads with old ways that things were done...

I'll give you that chance, and I hope you do well with it.

Of course I can only go so far. Some bug tracking stuff will remain internal, interacting directly with the customers reporting issues, with fixes going into next release builds.

That is understandable, new features will be under wraps, tickets pertaining to unique customer issues and such, critical security bugs that aren't in the wild yet... sure.

However these words should never be said:

"If you're a paying customer look up ticket ####", a ticket once deemed shareable with enterprise customers should be shareable with the rest of us. We should all be on one ticket system, with private and public tickets.

At this point Redmine is used as nothing more than a really poor message board and a bunch of disjointed barely if at all maintained community projects... I'd almost say: throw out Redmine, roll us into the enterprise customer ticket tracking system as community members, set up community forums using any of the commercial forum software available (with auth tied into your ticket system), and set up the community site as a portal to both.

Community projects can move to where they should go as long as you're not hosting the code itself here: bitbucket and github. Maybe have "Sponsored Community Plugins" at some point in the future for some of the more mature plugins on the community site.

With 4.0 on the road map, shifting the base from NexentaOS over to Illumos, I think things will be more clear. Nexenta among others such as Joyent are grouped together to build the better foundation. I hope with that transition, we can be more 'open'.

I agree however that it's going to be a business attitude towards putting resources towards being open and engaging the community, as opposed to running a few year old version of Redmine on some server and not really taking care of it, and less to do with what software we're using.

Derek Glover wrote:

Help me help you? ;)

Of course I can only go so far. Some bug tracking stuff will remain internal, interacting directly with the customers reporting issues, with fixes going into next release builds.

I want to engage you guys, the community, to better enable everyone.

With 4.0 on the road map, shifting the base from NexentaOS over to Illumos, I think things will be more clear. Nexenta among others such as Joyent are grouped together to build the better foundation. I hope with that transition, we can be more 'open'.

Hi Derek,

I am closely monitoring Nexenta's "communication progress" now for over 2.5 years and have provided all kind of feedback, technical, conservative, rants and provocative, nothing changed. Linda didn't want to hear it and nobody else at Nexenta wanted to hear that this is a corporate culture and attitude problem, not a community or communication problem. This went so far that postings that were unfavorable for Nexenta were removed (not mine though). Besides, Nexenta has an attitude of always pushing future releases without fixing even trivial issues in deployment releases such als alarms about DVD-drives.

I am asking myself whether "we band of brothers = community testers" are better off on a private experience exchange because most of the continuous feedback has been simply ignored, what would we lose?

my 5c, Gernot

William Roush wrote:

However these words should never be said: "If you're a paying customer look up ticket ####"

Agreed. Doesn't help you at all but tease you with something you can't have.

as opposed to running a few year old version of Redmine on some server and not really taking care of it, and less to do with what software we're using.

Agreed, thats one of the first things I noticed. There is an internal review going on to see if we can migrate the existing Redmine to a latest gen version. This revision had a lot of custom patches back then, so its not a straight forward upgrade. It is in my pipeline to move this server and its CMS to a better framework down the road.

Derek Glover wrote:

Agreed, thats one of the first things I noticed. There is an internal review going on to see if we can migrate the existing Redmine to a latest gen version. This revision had a lot of custom patches back then, so its not a straight forward upgrade. It is in my pipeline to move this server and its CMS to a better framework down the road.

I manage Redmine where I work + have submitted patches for Redmine/maintain a plugin (https://bitbucket.org/StrangeWill/redmine-inline-attach-screenshot/), what modifications have you guys applied? Outside of a custom template I'm not seeing any odd behavior...

Though I'm assuming you guys are on like 0.9 from the date... which we've had people come out of the woodworks with 0.9 and have upgrade issues.

I don't know all the changes, and I can't find anyone else here that knows all for sure. We basically have to download a stock 0.9 and diff it to see where changes were made. I think some of the changes were things like sitemap that weren't in the base redmine in that era.

Gernot, That's another major issue on Nexenta other than the corporate culture, the QA team. In the past they have let pass so many issues, sometimes of the most basics that I had my doubts if there was actually a QA process in place or if things went directly from Engineering to the repositories. Seems also they were more concerned on release new features that they could make marketing of, instead of fix the current problems and make it rock solid, besides that support when the person didn't have a clue about the others were so overwhelmed that they kept repeating "We had a fast growth and are in process of hire more people", but that saying last for near a whole year. Even now it doesn't seem to have improved much showing management wasn't very much in touch with these major company problems and if they were didn't know how to resolve them.

FREDY . wrote:

Gernot, That's another major issue on Nexenta other than the corporate culture, the QA team. In the past they have let pass so many issues, sometimes of the most basics that I had my doubts if there was actually a QA process in place or if things went directly from Engineering to the repositories. Seems also they were more concerned on release new features that they could make marketing of, instead of fix the current problems and make it rock solid, besides that support when the person didn't have a clue about the others were so overwhelmed that they kept repeating "We had a fast growth and are in process of hire more people", but that saying last for near a whole year. Even now it doesn't seem to have improved much showing management wasn't very much in touch with these major company problems and if they were didn't know how to resolve them.

Hi Fredy,

I couldn't have summed it up better. They simply don't understand how critical it is to be in the storage business, there is no room for bugs and lack of rock solid QA.

Well 3.1.4 should be out soon. From what I've heard, there aren't really any new features, only updates/bug fixes/patches. So there is progress being made on that front, hopefully will address stuff for you guys.

Derek Glover wrote:

Well 3.1.4 should be out soon. From what I've heard, there aren't really any new features, only updates/bug fixes/patches. So there is progress being made on that front, hopefully will address stuff for you guys.

As much as the GUI leaves a ton to be desired... I'll gladly take more stability and bug fixes.

I can easily explain my way around a poor GUI with a smaller company like Nexenta, I can't explain my way out of storage going offline. ;)

... Not that you guys get a free ride on not scrapping and re-writing that in the (hopefully near!) future....