It’s been just over a year since I made the migration from TrueNAS CORE to TrueNAS SCALE (ok, it’s now just “TrueNAS”) and I have been wondering… since the move from a jail-based application system to a Kubernetes → Docker application system, are you running more apps now under SCALE than under CORE?
For me, the answer is yes. I made the upgrade so that I could utilize the Audiobookshelf application, and, as a bonus, get Sonic Analysis for Plex functionality. After making several backups of my Plex data (yes, I turned off the “Empty trash automatically after every scan” function as part of the migration), I proceeded to make the migration… which was less painless than expected. The other application I was using, qTorrent, has no data that needed to be migrated, and was set up as a new application.
Afterward, I ended up setting up more applications. First, there was Kavita for eBooks. Then, so that I could access my Audiobookshelf remotely, I installed DDNS-Updater to update the DNS record (I use subdomain.domain.net), then Nginx Reverse Proxy to provide the connection and Let’s Encrypt certificate. Hey, lets also set up Uptime Kuma to monitor my network. Then it snowballed… TautUtil for Plex analytics, Immich for photo uploads from my Android devices, LinkDing for bookmarking web sites, Changedetection for monitoring changes to external sites, Tailscale and ZeroTier for VPN access, OpenSpeedTest for testing network speed, and finally Authentik to handle SSO for several of my apps plus front-end authentication.
While several of these apps were available under TrueNAS CORE, I was a bit hesitant to use them because of the update cadence which became much better under scale. I feel like Jack Nicholas’ Joker… “All those wonderful toys”.
When iX threw out k3s, that destroyed the last vestiges of trust I had in their ability or will to maintain an apps catalog[1]–I’m running their Dockge app, through which I run everything else (except Tailscale, which I’m also using out of their catalog).
But I had been running a number of TrueCharts apps–many, but not all, of which deal with data on the NAS, and many of which I had not been running under FreeNAS/CORE–so I’ve recreated them under Docker Compose.
That trust may return in time, but it will be on the order of years. ↩︎
Because this was a one-way upgrade from FreeBSD to Debian, I made sure to have backups of my data on external hard drives. With eight 8TB drives in a RAIDZ2 configuration, I expected the migration to take several hours. It was much quicker than that for the migration. I’m tempted to say “30 minutes” but it was certainly less than a hour.
The loss and rebuilding of Plex and qBittorrent took. qBittorrent was expected to be set up from scratch, while Plex took a little bit longer because I was following the instructions at Move an Install to Another System | Plex Support . There was an issue with the TrueNAS version of the Plex app which prevented direct connections that has since been resolved. It also took several days to perform a sonic analysis of the Music library, but my Plex data was migrated successfully. So, the Plex migration was more painful than migrating from TrueNAS Core to TrueNAS Scale.
Running less here since I moved all my core jails over to a FreeBSD server. The only things I’m running on Scale are Plex because it makes sense to and 2 others that are only available via Docker.
During the breef 2 months i used core in 2022, before i switched to the beta of scale, i only ran plex because bsd jails were a mysterie to me. After switching to scale i’ve gradually increased my apps to now 29. First with truecharts apps and now my own compose stacks managed by portainer.
I had a freenas build (yes still freenas!) And had it going for about 10 years before the 1st drive in it failed, the only thing I had installed on it was Plex, it was a thrown together pc of mostly spare parts
Decided I got my moneys worth out it and decided to do a proper build this time around, and in preparation for the swap to docker I installed linux mint and had a play about ieth containers to learn the ropes
When I build the current system around December? Of last year I started off small and have slowing been adding containers since, atm I have:
Portainer
Plex
Nginx proxy manager
Qbittorrent
Teamspeak 3 server
Favonia (auto updates my ip in cloudflare)
Emulatorjs
Firefly iii
Glances
Home assistant
Homepage
Nord meshnet
Nextcloud (fpm)
Paperless ngx (with paperless ai and a llama model to go with it)
Qbittorrent
Watchtower
Wordpress
Cloudflared* (the cloudflare tunnel)
I think* thats everything, sort of went all in this time around
with Core, on one hand I really appreciated the jail-isolated system, the ip dedicated on each jail, also to mention that scripts provided by community users help me a lot at time (especially on firsts attempts, and on how to correctly setup every jail)… but on the other side, installing some apps has really been a pain (dependency, eol packages,…), and not everything is supported with freebsd.
At some point I started to abandon jails, switching them one by one into a docker instance hosted in a dedicated VM with Alpine Linux… and sidegraded to Scale EEL (mostly for apps management, but not only for that).
As already pointed, i prefer manage everything with Portainer (the only catalogue app i have, with tailscale but unused), and actually i have developed
actualbudget
drawio
emulatorjs
excalidraw
glacens
heimdall
it-tools
jdownloader
jellyfin
joplin
jupyternotebook
mealie
mssql+sqlpage
navidrome
nextcloud
nginx_webserver
nginxproxymanager
paperlessngx
photoprism
pihole
taiga
ubooquity
uptime-kuma
urbackup
vaultwarden
watchtower
wg-easy
(i don’t keep active stacks that i don’t use much, just to keep the power consume less than i can)
because i feel more control on app data then using the catalogue
