Add ncdu to TrueNAS SCALE

Feature Requests
1

Problem/Justification
The command line tool ncdu (which I believe stands for ncurses disk usage), is an excellent tool for recursively viewing disk usage for a directory. It was part of the TrueNAS CORE distribution but is sadly lacking from SCALE. Please could it be added, as I don’t see anything equivalent in either the web interface or in the other command line tools provided.

Impact
The impact should be nil for everyone that doesn’t know or care about the tool (apart from approx 500kB for ncdu + libncurses). For people that need such a tool, the impact should be very positive. I can see no negatives.

User Story
A user will typically SSH into the TrueNAS SCALE server and run the tool as follows:
ncdu /mnt/pool0/some/nest/of/files
The tool will run and present the disk usage for the tree of directories and files beneath that point. The user can navigate the hierarchy easily with an intuitive interface and choose to launch a shell from any directory and delete files or directories easily.

6 Likes
2

It’s very necessary! :smile:

3

Yes indeed ncdu is a valuable utility as far as I am concerned (I came here to ask these feature request).

4

I would also say that ncdu is a necessity on a linux based storage system. I’ve been playing around with my new TrueNAS box for a little while now, and ncdu is the first and so far only tool that I’m severely missing.

5

I totally agree! This is a tool that is sorely missed when analyzing a file server, whether it is a home or a business server.

Although I am not a great security expert, given the small number of packages that ncdu uses (only its own utility and ncurses), I believe that it would not be a problem to keep in TrueNAS Scale!

I know that the idea of ​​the project is to keep it as basic as possible to reduce the possibility of breaches, but in this case I believe that the risk, since it is very small, would be worth the gains that it can bring to users.

6

Including ncdu would be remarkable. But I just found out it is actually already included inside rclone…

  • Open the rclone config: rclone config
  • Create a new remote type n
  • Type a name I chose local
  • Type 28 for local disk storage
  • Save

Finally, type rclone ncdu local:/mnt/pool0/some/nest/of/files

:tada: