Linus of LTT introduces HexOS via video

TrueNAS General
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Looks like HexOS is now in Beta, according to a LTT video released a few days ago:

While I have no use for it, HexOS does seem to make things more user friendly.

One note. HexOS is clearly marketed to home and personal users. Meaning small business might use it, but it is not targeted at them. And what I mean by “personal users”, is that a person who needs a NAS for their single person business may find HexOS meeting their needs.

The fee structure looks promising. At present, you can get Lifetime licenses pretty cheap. Though one of the add-on features does require a monthly subscription, it is not a necessary feature. (Well, some might consider it critical… see the video for details.)

Here are the other 2 threads that discuss HexOS:

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Yes, SIMPLER and user-friendly with way fewer options.

Users with Linux/Unix skills are not the target market.

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As I understand it, HexOS is trying to do two things:

  1. Make TrueNAS administration less technical; and
  2. Provide remote visibility (e.g. on your mobile) for your TrueNAS operational status.

If we look at making it less technical there are IMO actually two use cases that HexOS needs to address, and I don’t know enough about it to know whether it actually addresses both:

  1. Making it easier for a non-technical user to set-up and monitor a TrueNAS system; and
  2. Making it possible for a non-technical user to recover their TrueNAS server when something goes wrong.

The first of these is straight forward - there are a limited number of use cases that you are going to cover.

The second of these is much more complex - all sorts of things can go wrong, it can be difficult to determine what has happened, and doing the wrong thing can make things much much worse.

I am personally very doubtful at this point that HexOS is going to cover this technical recovery use case - and if not, then what HexOS is going to do is to encourage non-technical users to adopt a technical solution because it is now simpler to set-up, but when things go wrong they are then not going to have the technical skills to recover it.

But perhaps this is the real business plan for Linus Tech Tips - to offer a HexOS support service whereby when things go wrong their staff work for a fee (just how large??) to do diagnostics and administration remotely relying on the user to make any hardware changes needed.

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I doubt that LTT will provide support for hexos, since linus was just a silent investor and given the latest layoffs at LTT, i doubt they have the manpower to provide such support. The Company behind hexos was founded by ex unraid employees, so my guess would be that they will come up with something.

BTW linus also invested in framework, a company that creates modular laptops, but apart from some shoutouts during videos, and showing in some videos how easy it is to repair/upgrade the hardware in his privately bought framework laptop there’s no indication on any of LTTS company that he is invested in it.

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I just watched the video - and as Jack (?) said, what is there is polished but there is a lot missing. And the video does seem to show this is true.

They have understandably focused on the basic setup workflows - and what they showed here is definitely simpler than raw TrueNAS (not a criticism for TrueNAS).

Trying to look at this positively, I think that this is a great home solution for storing NON-ESSENTIAL data i.e. Plex films & TV shows or backups of data held on other devices. But until I see how recovery will be handled by a non-technical user, I wouldn’t recommend it for storing primary copies of essential files.

Also, I went to the HexOS site, and whilst there is a forum, there is not a lot of documentation e.g. to advise you what hardware to buy, or what network you need etc etc etc. And this means that you still need quite a lot of technical knowledge to get started.

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If HexOS siphons off the “I want to turn my Pentium /// system into a NAS” crowd that currently comes to TrueNAS, that will be a win, I think.

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Yeah - my bad. If there is any form of recovery service it will be the HexOS team that provides it and not LTT.

But not if these forums get flooded 10x the current level of the “I installed HexOS and it was so easy to set up, but I have lost my data / it runs so slowly” crowd - that will not be a win, I think.

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“Here’s the link to the HexOS forums, thread closed.”

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The video thumbnail sais it all…

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As harsh as it may seem, I agree completely. For multiple reasons.

  1. If HexOS created the problem, let them both help the user and potentially learn how to make the user interface better to prevent that problem in the future.
  2. Trying to walk a HexOS user through trouble shooting in the HexOS GUI is outside of this forum’s original purpose. Trying to walk a HexOS user into using Shell or TrueNAS SCALE GUI is something HexOS forums should be doing.
  3. Last, while HexOS users might be limited in configuration options to well known and tested pool layouts and such, if they ignored such and either manually did something that could be bad, we already have enough of that here and now. Or used the TrueNAS SCALE GUI to do something not supported by HexOS. Like trying to expand a RAID-Zx vDev from command line, but instead adding a disk stripe.

All in all, I wish HexOS well. However, other than knowing it exists and being able to point users back to the HexOS forums, I doubt I will have any involvement with it.

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We see enough examples of uninformed people making inappropriate pools here because they try to be clever. HexOS will have even ore constraints on what they can do through the HexOS UI than TrueNAS users have through the TrueNAS UI, and I can quite foresee users wanting to go off-piste with even less knowledge than a newbie TrueNAS users has.

In simple human nature terms, my worries look like this… When something looks dangerous people take a great deal of care. When something has safety rails and the safety rails both make it look safe and be safe, users don’t bother checking what they are doing is safe - they rely on the safety rails. But when they are used to relying on the safety rails but then decide to step beyond them, their habits take over and they treat it as if it was still safe when it absolutely isn’t.

There are two problems in my mind with telling people to “go forth and multiply on the HexOS forums” only in less words…

  1. It may be a survival necessity, but it is going to look bad and feel bad for those of us that want to help people and get quite tiring.
  2. I suspect that as soon as someone uses the TrueNAS icon and goes outside the HexOS safety rails, people on the HexOS forums will immediately say its a TrueNAS problem and direct people here.

Neither of these are good for those who trust in HexOS (with its wonderful TrueNAS technology underneath / alongside) and then find that they are in difficulties as a consequence of trusting.

ALL THAT SAID… there are some swings to trade off against the above roundabouts…

If those newbie people who would otherwise use TrueNAS but misconfigure it go and buy HexOS and then stick to the HexOS UI and configure a sensible pool, we should see fewer calls for help here rather than more.

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Yes, that probably will happen.

And it would look bad on us, to turn them away. Yet, they PAID for HexOS, and NOT PAID ME for support. So I feel free to ignore them unless the problem interests me.

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That goes for pretty much all “support” here via the forums. While there are demi-gods that wander these halls, they are under no obligation to help and most of us aren’t getting paid for whatever help / moral support / dog-piling we provide. :slight_smile:

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I know why I want to provide help to others on communities like these.

  • Thanks to iX I get the benefit from TrueNAS without having to pay anything for it.

  • Thanks to other community members I get help when I have a problem without having to pay anything for it.

My willingness to help others is simply my way for paying something forwards in recognition of the above benefts I received for nothing.

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Harsh, but fair.

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Is this really a thing or just an exaggeration? Pentium III is ancient and I believe 32-bit! Not even sure if TrueNAS kernels (both Linux and FreeBSD) even still maintains 32-bit support. I think at the very least, dropping 32-bit support are in both their roadmaps.

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It’s an exaggeration, but I think we did have someone not too long ago with a Pentium 4. But while exaggerated, it is a real issue, in that there’s a long series of YouTube videos whose basic point is “turn your old castoff hardware into a NAS with FreeNAS/TrueNAS.” And that’s led to no small number of folks with grossly inadequate hardware trying to run it.

And no, Free/TrueNAS dropped 32-bit support many years ago.

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Well we all know you need a 64-bit Intel processor and 8GB of memory, and if you travel back in time you get to the point where hardware cannot meet this minimum spec.

But my box has a 2-core Celeron processor (it is obviously 64-bit, so old but not ancient) and the on-board 2GB of memory has been supplemented by an extra 8GB SODIMM (so 25% more than the absolute minimum). But for my home use as a media server and a backup server and for a bit of shared data, on a 1Gb/s network, this performs brilliantly and does everything I want of it and at Gb network speeds.

So please stop griping about how old, low powered, castoff hardware can’t successfully be used as a NAS. :grin:

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Sort of like reciting to our respective spouses how we still meet minimum ongoing retention requirements? :rofl:

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I think we get too many NUC requests, some wanting to use USB attached storage. These can be successful NASes, but when things go wrong, they tend to be bad. Not a simple fix. There have been just too many horror stories or problems to consider a NUC box or USB attached storage as a reliable TrueNAS server.

While my media server IS a miniature x64 computer, with 12 year old tech, (4 core, single thread per core, AMD64 low power CPU), it does have 1 x mSATA & 1 x 2.5" SATA drives. Plus, even though it has only 1 memory channel, it can use 2 SO-DIMMs for a whopping 16GB of memory. (Their are reports that 32GB is achievable…)

However, I don’t run TrueNAS. But, I do run Linux with OpenZFS quite successfully. And have for 10 years now. (I really need to see about replacing it… Perhaps a nice DeskMeet X600 is in my future.)

As to WHY NUCs, (even mine), are not recommended, is storage ports. Even if a user has only 2 SATA and uses USB, (with SATA or NVMe adapter), for boot, it still may be too limiting. Thus, someone wants to "share" a storage device.

For example, my media server has this on both mSATA & 2.5" SATA drives:

Device        Start        End    Sectors  Size Type
/dev/sda1      2048      10239       8192    4M BIOS boot
/dev/sda2     10240     206847     196608   96M EFI System
/dev/sda3    206848     616447     409600  200M Linux filesystem
/dev/sda4    616448   25782271   25165824   12G Linux swap
/dev/sda5  25782272   84502527   58720256   28G FreeBSD ZFS
/dev/sda6  84502528 3907029134 3822526607  1.8T FreeBSD ZFS

Partitions 2, 3 & 4 are MD-RAID Mirrored, with partition 5 ZFS Mirrored. And the last, partition 6, striped for Media, (which has multiple backups).

This amount of sharing a storage device in TrueNAS is a recipe for disaster. Add in USB, and we are headed for a Titanic style sinking.