Greetings to all in the TrueNAS community.
My name is Bob I am officially retired and now have time to experiment. My geographical region is the SF Bay Area. Any meagre knowledge of the inner workings of command line is ancient and fuzzy, and yet I have been planning to establish a home network with a server to bring at least some services in house (justification for the spousal unit), and to provide a sandbox (OK… now we’re talkin’) to play in.
This journey started with the idea that a NAS device on my home’s network would be really convenient. I started researching, and my determination was that a NAS device of the size and reliability I wanted, was going to cost at least a significant fraction of the cost of a server. I started looking into and experimenting with different Linux and Linux derivative distros, NAS Storage options, apps…
In my pre-project research I would see statements like, “Linux will run on practically ANYTHING!” (Now that I think about it, the statements were probably more like, “You can get Linux to run on about anything.”. My experience points out that these two statements have very different meanings!). I evaluated my spare PC parts and already had most of a PC.
I thought that all I actually needed for a first ‘test machine’ was a new power supply (every power supply I had on hand was decades out of date!), but in addition, I also purchased:
an LBA (Broadcom/LSI – 3008, 8 channel),
3 x 4TB sas drives for a ZFS data pool,
a NIC (intel, PCIE x1 – 2.5G Ethernet x2),
and 64G of DDR4. Don’t judge… my server has 64G of 2666 ORCA DDR4 memory out of Tiawan. (I have been planning this for a while, so I got this ORCA stuff from AMAZON right about the time $$ for DDR began to skyrocket!
On a completely different subject, this ORCA memory is the only DDR4 memory I have installed that did NOT trigger a bios load – I went from 32G of DDR4 3200 (4 x 8G) to 64G of DDR4 2600 (2 x 32G), the system recognized the changes and these changes did not trigger an automatic BIOS load on the old x470 board - strange.)
I am attempting to install my host service (Proxmox), and I am having no success – nothing but issues! My first issue was that nothing Debian based would install on my server. I could install anything Ubuntu flavored and some others I tried. Mint installed, I could install Open Media Vault, and UnRaid (I think that’s what it was) and various other distros I sampled, but both Proxmox (my intended host), and TrueNAS experienced fatal hangs on attempted installation. The next sticking point was getting my LBA to properly initiate and enumerate drives in this environment. The darned thing worked in WIN 11, and Ubuntu, and pretty much anything I didn’t want t run… my new server was mocking me… it would not run anything I wanted to run.
While searching for solutions I read that there was a ‘known issue’ with Debian, and all Debian based distros, and derivatives running on ASUS, AM4, x470 boards. As luck would have it, both my extra MOBOs were ASUS x470 boards. I tried suggested ‘solutions’ and ‘workarounds’ for days. In the end the x470 board defeated me. I could not get it to install Debian(ish) distros. On top of that, throw in a finnicky LSI 3008 controller… nothing worked. So, I bought another board. I needed something readily available and compatible with the balance of my hardware and box.
Now, my server is made up of:
ASUS Tuf Gaming B550 II WIFI
Ryzen 5700G – with VEGA on board Graphics
64 G DDR4 2600 (Orca)
LSI/Broadcom 9300-16i (on PCIE 16-1, and yes, I know I do not have the power available to spin 16 channels of drives in this box. I picked it up as it was only $39, and I was having issues with the first LBA)
3 x 4TB sas drives (on LBA – passthrough to TrueNAS VM)
2 x 250G SATA SSD (on LBA – passthrough to TrueNAS VM)
1 64 G SATA ssd (Proxmox boot drive on MOBO sata channel)
2 x 500g NVME drives (on MOBO M.2 – allocated to Proxmox)
2 x 2.5G Intel NIC (not yet in use as I have not yet established reserved IP Add for them)
1 MOBO 2.5g nic
1 2070 Super (on PCIE 16-2 – in this configuration this GPU runs at PCIE X1 bandwidth)
The ‘known issue’ I mentioned earlier was being attributed to an older kernel, with an older LSI 3008 driver. On the new motherboard I removed my HBA for startup, and installed Proxmox on a stripped-down machine (only the 16G SATA on MOBO, and 2 NVME on M.2 - SUCCESS!). I then was able to update the Proxmox update repositories to non-subscription, then install all my (71) Proxmox update packages (Yay!… new kernel…) I was slowly able to get my hardware reassembled and everyone playing nicely together.
I now have the latest stable version of Proxmox running on my server with 1 TrueNAS VM. On my TrueNAS VM I have 1 SMB share and 1 user so far.
I have read that PiHole is a good app to install. Dockers has been written about a lot, and I’ve also read that I could attempt to train an AI model.
Any suggestions or insights would be appreciated! And… I apologize for oversharing!
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In Community,
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