Bring Back the Classic Setup Wizard for Pool and Share Creation

Feature Requests
1

Problem / Justification

Back in the FreeNAS days there was a setup wizard that guided users through the process of creating storage pools and configuring services like SMB shares. This feature was incredibly helpful for both new and experienced users allowing them to quickly establish a working configuration while learning from the process.

Since the removal of this wizard, we’ve seen an increasing number of forum posts from users struggling with:

Pool layout decisions (especially around RAIDZ vs. mirrors)

Dataset creation best practices

Correctly configuring and securing SMB shares

A guided setup wizard would provide a structured, user-friendly way to create sound configurations and promote good storage practices without requiring users to navigate dozens of individual options manually.

While the likes of HexOS are going someway to address this a default wizard could dramatically lower the learning curve, reduce misconfiguration, and serve as a teaching tool by letting users inspect the resulting settings.

Impact

Reduce support load on the forums and community by helping users avoid common mistakes.

Improve user experience, especially for home users and small businesses who don’t have deep storage knowledge.

Accelerate deployment of production-ready systems with best-practice defaults.

Educate users through exposure to the automatically generated configuration, enabling them to replicate or modify it later.

User Story

As a new or intermediate TrueNAS user,

I want a setup wizard that guides me through creating a suitable storage pool and setting up an SMB share (or other service),

So that I can get up and running quickly and learn the proper way to structure my system without needing to study advanced documentation first.

2

Compounding the problem is that the pool setup process is far more complex than it was in the FreeNAS days–the user now appears to need to step through eight different pages in order to do so. That isn’t actually necessary–the user can click Save And Go To Review at any point after specifying the data vdev(s)–but that’s what clicking Next is going to do.

Edit: not voting because I just don’t believe it matters–iX is going to do whatever they’re going to do. There are feature requests with 60 votes, like this one:

…with no input at all from iX. But this one, with 2 votes, is accepted:

1 Like
3

The two examples you linked require vastly different amount of work to implement.
They commented on this in this weeks T3 video and mention a few more things about how they determine what to work on and what is put on hold or declined, have a listen if you haven’t already.

I personally voted for first one you brought up and have installed uptime-kuma as a custom app because I prefer full control over how the app is set up (it was very easy).

Most of my votes are for things that expand or improve the apps features, 4 have over 60 votes each… so my wish is obviously that they will make another dev pass of that eventually.

4

No doubt–though I don’t expect the first would take a great deal of effort, it would certainly be more than the other. But 60 votes from the community doesn’t even warrant a “we’ll look into it”? Here, as with the last feature-requests system, as with so many other areas, they have a good idea, but fail to follow through.

5

Yeah… I have been eyeing the Allow apps to have their own IP request with its 83 votes and wondering what it would take.