I am really impressed with IPFire. I am even donating to the project on a monthly basis now. If I could add any functionality to the distro it would be Storage Area Networking. There isn’t a lot that would need to added to get this working. We already have mdadm and lvm2, but we would need either an iSCSI target or NBD server add-on. Both are mature technologies and both have their pros and cons. I would bow to the wisdom of maintainers as to which would be the best fit. I do not feel that ZFS or BTRFS are required for SAN functions. Although they do make life easier the testing needed to bring them into the distro would be burdensome.
Other than that, I would like to see a new network defined in IPFire just for SAN functions: the Black Network. Black because it would be a “black box” network that doesn’t have any data routed into it or out of it. It would be a pure storage network and required a separate NIC on the server as well as the clients.
While a WUI would be nice for SAN functions I think it would need to be a lower priority for the foreseeable future.
Thanks for reading this, and thank you for all the time you spend making a great distro. I hope you will seriously consider these ideas.