I’ve been planning to switch to Truenas for months. I convince myself of the shortcomings I see. That’s why I’m asking these questions. To fully convince myself…
help me!
Thank you all very much
We’re not here to sell you on TrueNAS. The forums are here to provide a community so that people can answer your questions and you can achieve your goals.
If your goal is to make TrueNAS like Synology… then its probably not for you. We like user feedback, but its generally in a personal story about why something sucks and the pain it causes you. Sometime the solution is already there, but not well documented.
If your goal is to have reliable and secure data with great performance and flexibility to meet your application and user needs, then its probably a good solution. We’d love to be part of your journey.
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What I wrote above is the trivial part of the matter.
thank you for your explanation
I have been using Synoloyg for 5 years. However, Truenas’ advanced VM support and other flexible settings, as well as the fact that it is open source, pushed me to this. It’s nice to be able to make your own hardware.
This is where I felt the need to ask the above questions that came to my mind.
In addition, the fact that big companies use it gives people additional confidence.
This is my view.
Ah. but for me more “user friendly” means less flexibility in a technical aspect.
like other posters mention might want to checkout other NAS such as UNRAID.
User friendly generally means less flexibility, security and reliability tools. Consumer vs professional-grade solutions.
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Hi @sene ,
I was in the same boot less than a year ago, moving from 10 years on a Synology to TrueNAS.
In th beginning it was tough and I almost gave up but now I have almost everything I want running as I would like and once the learning curve passed I’m not sure I would come back to Synology.
My main reason to change (and not buy a new Synology) is that I was mostly using Nextcloud on it, and installation and update of my Nextcloud was a nightmare on my Synology. It might be better with a new model powerful enough to run Docker properly with Nextcloud as a Docker but I would prefer to install the app directly form the UI of the OS.
The second reason is that I wanted open source software, unlike some of the Synology app that are not really open source (as far as I understood). This is also why I didn’t went with UnRaid.
So first I can say that Nextcoud is running wonderfully on TrueNas, I use the TrueNAS community package, not the TrueCharts one. I never had trouble with updates, even to a major versions, and it’s super fast (on my hardware). Nextcloud has so much app (like plugins) that you can already do most of what you want out of a NAS without further apps and then you add users to Nextcloud and not to TrueNAS directly.
Beside that I agree that the user creation in TrueNAS and the permissions are a nightmare to understand, I’m still not sure I did it 100% correctly but it works at least for me. As said I have mostly “fake” users for some apps and backup tasks, so no real user that need a network mount or something (except for a TimeMachine backup but it’s only used for that purpose, not as a real network drive).
If you really want to use the native system as a NAS for users, then I agree an effort in UI/UX could be made to give basic set of permissions (this user access this folder, this group access this folder…) without have to set mask and whatnot that we don’t understand in the first place (I still don’t).
My next big complain and I gave up on this, is the backups. I missed a lot Hyper Backup. This was so powerful and easy to use. Basically I want to be able to pick folders (within several dataset) that will be on-the-fly encrypted and backed up to a distant machine via rsync. I don’t want to store an encrypted copy of the files locally, obviously as it will double my storage need and I don’t want to install a second TrueNAS with exactly the same hardware at the second location (in my case the old Synology is now the backup destination).
In the end I could achieve my distance backup using Tailscale and rsync (both direction) but it’s not encrypted, you can read everything at the destination. It’s not a huge deal for me as the destination is at a safe place where I trust that nobody get unwanted access but I would still prefer encrypted out of principle.
Last point I’m not super happy about, is the split between TrueNas Community and TrueCharts. I tried to run TrueNAS Community version of everything important, as it seams better implemented and resistant along OS and app updates. But some apps are only on the TrueCharts repo or some refuse to work with the TrueNAS version, so I still have some apps from TrueCharts and each update is a real nightmare. I did 2 OS update in less than a year and both were straightforward for TrueNAS app and a complete nightmare with the need from Discord support, for TrueCharts apps.
I really wish TrueNAS community has more apps and that they have the right parameters to make them work out of the box, if I could choose I would get ride of all TrueCharts apps.
Beside this, I’m super happy to made the move from Synology and I hope I will learn more with time and master the OS and kurbernetes more and more in the future.
So welcome to TrueNAS and I hope you will stay and be happy as well!
Very important and good findings. It was enlightening for me. I hope the truenas team evaluates what you wrote. (They’re probably working on making it better, too.)
We want to see a much more user-friendly Truenas without sacrificing professionalism.
Thank you for your time
Have a read for the roadmap for TrueNAS 24.10 (Electric Eel) with regards to Apps - we’re going to be moving to a Docker Compose backend, which will open up the Apps catalog much wider.
- We generally get advice not to open truena outside. maybe a user will use it as auxiliary or secondary repository and not as Main repository. So not for vital data. It’s like a “common area” for in-house and remote people. In this case, it needs to resort to a solution such as ftp, sftp, tftp. Therefore, even though it is a “NAS”, shouldn’t there be a security policy (a precaution against future attacks - the attacker may be IP banned or something else)? 2) ftp, sftp etc. services are already for remote users. Therefore, security measures must be inevitable in a machine with this feature. Am I thinking wrong?
A good approach is to setup a vpn for access into your network.
There is no reason to expose any of TrueNAS’ default services to the internet.
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Or in cases where a VPN cannot be used, Cloudflare Access is also very easy to set up and provides similar levels of security (this is what I use as I often like to check in on things while working, and we only have general web-browsing traffic permitted).
I definitely agree TN should never be exposed out to the open internet, though
Thanks, that’s super interesting. With full docker (including docker compose) support, this will be unlimited possibilities. I managed to install a couple Docker manually but it’s quite hard to get all the right parameters.
If you have a webservice on it, how can you not expose it to outside?? At least the NPM reverse proxy must be exposed to 80/443 to be able to give access to web services (Wordpress, Paperless, SearXNG, Invidious, Jellyfin, …), even Nextcloud is barely useless without external access.
Am I doing it wrong?
For this I use Kopia, not rsync. I install as a custom app. Pick folders, super fast backup, seconds each night and encrypted to remote machine. FWIW
Depends who needs to use it. Myself, I use wireguard (on Truenas, already installed) to be able to access any service remotely with zero open ports. One can use VPN on their router for inbound access. I can’t open any ports anyway as I am behind CGNAT. Since I am behind CGNAT, this then means I do need a cheapie (Oracle free tier) VPS somewhere as my point of contact. This is not needed if not behind CGNAT. My address book, calendar, reminders, and all other nextcloud services easily accessed and automatically from anywhere. Even Emby remotely accessed. Nothing is exposed to the internet.
So your nextcloud is not with a domain name, you access with the local IP while on VPN?
I tried Kopia but never worked for me. I might give a new try but now that everything is setup and working I will not keep it as low priority.
You can set it up with an FQDN also, but only allow internal IP’s in. You can do this easily with a reverse proxy and even with SSL.