I am an enthusiast of TrueNAS Scale and have recently installed it on an old PC with the following specifications:
Model: DELL Precision T3500 4 Core
Processor: Intel Xeon 4 Core 2.4 GHz
RAM: 6 GB DDR3
System Disk: 2 drives, 1 Sandisk 16 GB for EFI, 1 Sandisk 32 GB for apps
Graphics Card: NVIDIA Quadro
I am encountering an issue with the configuration of apps. When I select my pool (the 32 GB Sandisk), everything seems to work initially. However, after “Initializing Apps Service,” the process never completes, and my applications never appear.
Could anyone provide guidance or solutions for this problem?
Your hardware–specifically, your RAM–is inadequate to run TrueNAS itself, much less any apps. Upgrade to at least 16 GB and try again. Moreover, the SSD for apps is also very undersized.
OK, that’s another strike against your apps pool. It’d be worth reading up on some of the docs before trying to set up a TrueNAS box, as its hardware requirements are significant.
8GB of RAM is the absolute minimum that TrueNAS needs, and this is only just adequate when you are running no apps or VMs and are not worried about disk performance (because your caching will be very limited for metadata and data).
That said, my own NAS has only 10GB of memory, I run a few apps (which use c. 1GB of memory) and I still get 99.5% cache hits.
Flash drives are completely unsuitable for a BOOT drive because TrueNAS writes all Syslogs to this and this will cause significant write activity which means a VERY short lifespan.
Flash drives may or may not be suitable for an apps pool.
Assuming that you will NOT use your apps pool for anything other than the ix-applications dataset (which holds the app images and some configuration data - and any ixVolumes used by apps rather than host paths) may not be big enough at 16GB.
My own ix-applications usage is 15.6GB but it turns out that this includes copies of several old and outdated versions of containers and a LOT of ancient snapshots, which when deleted brought this down to c. 9.5GB. So on this basis, 16GB might be enough, but I wouldn’t count on it (and you may have to keep an eye on usage and manually prune your old versions and snapshots).
P.S. If your flash drives are USB, then that is another warning flag. USB connected drives (whether FLASH or SSD) are not recommended unless absolutely necessary because USB has a habit of randomly disconnecting and reconnecting and if/when this happens, TrueNAS can crash or pools can go offline.
