I am looking for advice and ideally a guide for remotely administrating my home TrueNAS Scale setup via the GUI. All I have come across so far is the very sensible advice of not exposing my GUI through port forwarding.
Why do I even want to do this? I am regularly staying away from home in a hotel room and I get bored. Messing about with my NAS is a strong use of my evenings and healthier than hitting the pub. Thanks.
Just use a vpn to your home network.
Yep, this. Best way to do it, IMO, is to set up your router as a VPN server using whichever VPN protocol you like (I use OpenVPN; Wireguard seems to be more popular now), then connect to that when you’re away from home. That puts you on your LAN, able to do anything you could do if you were there.
Many thanks. I have a BT Home hub style router using copper to the property (fttp not spot) . A quick Google suggested that Asus is the way to go. Any further advice is appreciated thanks.
My answer has been, and is likely to continue to be, OPNsense. pfSense is another decent option. Either can act as a VPN server with whichever protocol you prefer. There are other options; many hardware routers can run OpenWRT which will do the trick, or some of the Ubiquiti routers should do the trick as well.
Alternatively, a Miktrotik router, which features wire guard, etc. built in. Then use a tutorial from the network berg on YouTube to configure the little beastie.
Strong recommend here for Tailscale as a very easy to setup mesh VPN. There’s an App for TrueNAS and clients for many different OSes
I use an Asus router, flashed with Merlin firmware, pretty popular. Supports the usual VPN servers and clients. Works perfectly.
You can also configure a wireguard file on Scale as wireguard is built in, thus installing no apps. Just route the wireguard port to Scale on the router.
Will that expose the TrueNAS GUI, or is that just for command line? How do you access the TrueNAS GUI via the VPN?
The same way you’d access any of its other services over the VPN. The VPN puts you on the same network with the NAS, so you’re able to access anything on that network.
Thanks, I have not installed TrueNAS yet, hence I do not know how one accesses TruNAS. Take pity and illuminate me please. I am, at this point in time trying to decide whether to take the TrueNAS plunge or not. My requirements are 1. GUI remote access + 2. Docker + 3. Omada.
Not really sure what your question is at this point, because what looks to be your question is already answered in this topic. If you want to access your NAS (GUI, shell, apps, whatever) remotely, the only really safe way to do that is to run a VPN server at home, and then connect to that when you’re away from home. It’s best, IMO, to run that VPN server on your router, and several possibilities have been mentioned in this topic. How to configure any of them would really be off-topic for this forum, but we may be able to give you pointers if you have specific questions. TrueNAS itself can also be configured as a VPN server, though I don’t have any direct experience with that.
Say I got a VPN set up. I am in front of another computer connected to the same VPN as the TrueNAS system. What do I do? Open up a terminal session and do … what? Or is that not a terminal session? A Web browser maybe?
How do you open up a remote GUI session to your TrueNAS system?
A popular alternative to running a vpn server on your router (which to be clear, is what I do) is to run Tailscale on your network, perhaps even on your NAS.
Tailscale is essentially a mesh VPN, but there is a a cloud/web front door which makes it much simpler to get working.
I am. as a matter of fact, running WireGuard on my router, so no worries there. As for Tailscale, I run NetBird on all my devices.
Getting back to my question, how would I remotely access TrueNAS in GUI mode please?
Through a VPN
Open a web browser, type http://ip.of.truenas hit return.
If using tailscale(maybe netbird) you may need to use the mapped ip
Open a web browser, type http://ip.of.truenas hit return.
There you go! Thank you! So it’s a browser-based interface! Excellent!
You can access the GUI via http/https depending on settings, yes, which also provides access to the shell.
You can access the shell using ssh too. If enabled.
TrueNAS itself can expose iSCSI, NFS, SMB shares. And supports apps, sandboxes and VMs which can expose other services too.
Electric Eel adds a full docker daemon to the base host, so no need for a sandbox to host docker.
