I’d followed a guide from YT (apalrd, I think) and installed it with --no-recommends so it probably didn’t end up pulling in as much cruft as it might otherwise default to. 45Drives Houston was way beyond anything I want/need, but they do make a few plugins for cockpit that make life a little easier.
I’m probably coming at it from a weird angle, though: been using Linux off and on since before Redhat and Debian were a thing, but just far enough apart that I spend a lot of the time ‘re-learning’ things, or adjusting to what changed in the interim. Definitely not a power user by any stretch. I like something a little smoother than hand-rolling my own setup from the CLI, but debating whether something like TrueNAS or unRAID are too much the other way for what I want/need. Along the way, I’ve been tinkering with cockpit and TKL fileserver in an LXC on Proxmox as possibly ‘just enough’ GUI. Time will tell.
For me, I don’t see the value in backing up the machines because I can literally spin up a new lxc in 10 seconds fully configured and pointing to my datasets.
Yeah, I was reading the post. I’ll keep an eye on it for sure.
Just re-reading your post. Either way, that is some great savings. I will need to look at that. I’m tight on space, I need to see how much space my ZFS snapshots are actually taking.
ZFS snapshots are incremental, but that is a lot of savings because of deduplication, which is very expensive on ZFS.
Not really, last i checked it didn’t have a good zfs plugin.
As much as i love Debian (i use stable for my servers and testing for my laptop/workstations), as much as I hate its relationship with zfs.
I can get it working. I have done that before but I do not want kernel headers and gcc on my NAS.
The issue I have with TN that makes me tempted to roll my own is apps. Ever since I migrated to scale I have been hoping for a stable apps implementation.
Currently, I have some apps in jailmaker jails and some in lxc containers. I stopped midway since I learned lxc will be ditched in favor of libvirt managed containers and i don’t want my apps to break again so i stopped the migration.
Have you tried Openmediavault ? It is based on Debian. There are many plugins such as for ZFS, Docker compose, Mergerfs, Snapraid, … I use it on my backup server
I looked into it briefly today and the images of it’s user interface remind me of the simplicity of ReadyNAS, Synology, and QNAP GUIs. Based on what I saw, I’d argue that this is the real competition for TrueNAS when it comes to expanding into the prosumer market.
While TrueNAS offers a bunch of industrial-grade features, folk can get burned and discouraged by the awesome complexity that can get in the way.
I haven’t used it recently, but I’d encourage you to dig a bit deeper before making this argument–if for no other reason than that the need to click “apply” after virtually every change you make in the GUI rapidly becomes annoying.
I’ve heard that OMV’s ZFS management is lacking, but don’t have personal experience there. But unless they’ve greatly improved it recently, I’d put its GUI far behind any version of TrueNAS in the past 6-7 years.
I think it’s so cool that to manage your local NAS, sitting in the next room, you need to login and authenticate to a remote server that sends commands over the internet to manage said local NAS.
Think cloud storage, but without the storage. You have to provide your own storage and hardware.
Right. Which means that “lifetime” license really means “up to the lifetime of the company backing it.” If the company goes away…
In any event, we’re probably going in the opposite direction of OP. Closer to that direction, someone else (now banned here because iX can’t take criticism) is working on something Proxmox-based.
Checked back in to comment… Yeah I wasn’t looking for anything even more appliance’y, or at least if I did, it would have to solve some difficult problem for me which goes above and beyond configuring up standard and readily available components. As for GUI… I guess needs differ but I rarely used it as config doesn’t change too frequently, and when I need to a SMB share or whatever, easily done via CLI. As for stats/reporting, it anyway is much richer through Prometheus exporters and Grafana for visualisation.
As for Debian vs FreeBSD I just went with what I personally am more comfortable with.
See overview of how it’s supposed to work from an article at virtualization how to: Local IT assets controlled by you, TrueNAS scale guts, an easy to use cloud management and monitoring interface on top, local data and apps, see this (shamelessly stolen) graphic.
As I see it, this is an attempt at $199+ to see if people are willing to pay to simplify setting up and monitoring a better-than-synology NAS. Goldeneye apparently will incorporate a (optional) setup assistant system as well?
I’m not convinced a one time setup fee is a viable business model but the devs likely figured that the folk who tolerate subscriptions will be lost to cloud based providers. TrueNAS is still reachable / usable locally, so if the HexOS business / server shuts down, the data is still available.
Trouble is, the admin would then have to learn the TrueNAS scale UI at that point (obviating the benefit of HexOS).
For me, no matter how delightful the cryptographic key exchanges, etc. are, I have a really hard time trusting an online cloud portal with all the keys to my NAS. I can appreciate the desire to run management out of the cloud (easier to update, etc) but I would never use it.
…and it’s as yet undetermined how well it does this, and they don’t have any kind of free trial to kick the tires.
But OK, you’ve got a UI that lives in “the cloud,” that uses API calls to tell your local NAS what to do. Hand-wave away the security issue, and there are still some pretty serious issues IMO. To name a few:
Most obviously, there’s no reason, other than HexOS’ revenue stream, that this UI needs to live remotely; it could just as well be run locally in any of a number of ways.
Similarly, presuming all the API methods they’re using are documented, nothing prevents someone else from duplicating or adapting their UI to run locally.
But since iX are invested in HexOS, it would seem to create an incentive for iX to not make TrueNAS too easy. Not that TrueNAS has ever been accused of that anyway, but…
I’ve mentioned repeatedly that the learning curve for TrueNAS is steep. Unlike Synology, QNAP, and ReadyNas, it can be challenging for folk to even get a pool set up, datasets in place, and permissions assigned (see the queries we answer on a weekly basis here).
Iirc, Synology, QNAP, and ReadyNAS had setup wizards for this job and HexOS seems to be an attempt to offer a simpler route to a properly-configured SCALE server than the present UI offers. Getting a NAS properly configured with scale across all sorts of gnarly hardware is a challenge I do not relish.
For example, can HexOS communicate to a user advice about the suitability of a drive for a SLOG or sVDEV? How about an HBA vs. a SATA port multiplier? Etc. We’re asking the UI / setup assistant to potentially do some pretty heavy lifting here. Mimicry of an TrueNAS expert via AI may help but I’m skeptical.
Getting apps to behave as expected may be even more difficult. Many Apps on TrueNAS are in a class of their own re: setup difficulty unless you are an IT professional or they enjoy “enterprise” support re: setup documentation / management thereof.
TrueNAS may offer better access than most systems to the guts of those Apps but being the Swiss Army knife is perhaps not the answer when all the user wanted was a simple Ka-bar.
The TrueNAS UI / API evolves relatively slowly, so being able to interface well with same over time from the cloud via API should be relatively stable. The same may not be true for App Setup and control?
HexOS is going to have a whale of a time getting all those apps set up and maintained given the constant churn / updates common over there. HexOS, like iXsystems, will likely have to limit its support to a few popular apps like Plex or Jellyfin and leave the more esoteric stuff off the table.
