I have a little dated, but relatively fast dual processor server grade system currently set up with TrueNAS. I have 6 drives on ZFS for storage, but other than storage here is what I want it to do…
Primary purpose: Store movies, photos, docs etc for the family.
Host the files to the local network.
Run my plex server with ability to transcode several 4k streams simultaneously. (video card installed to help with this)
Secondary Purposes:
Run my arr stack for newgroups, downloading etc.
NextCloud file/photo hosting.
Game hosting (valheim, minecraft, enshrouded)
Personal website host.
Was doing a vpn host, but don’t really need it at the moment.
History: I used to have all this set up on ubuntu server, and although it took me months to figure out how to do it all, I eventually did. It seemed like a good way to get it all done on the same box. I tore it down because stuff got out of date and I messed it up when one of my apps went depreciated and tried to do something else. Decided to try something like scale thinking it would be easy to just get it all set up fast and it would just work reliably. I’m having trouble getting nextcloud set up with the truecharts so things have stalled.
The question: I was starting to think trueNAS isn’t really the best thing to do all of what I want on one box. I can move some tasks over to my gaming machine, but I’m afraid of hosting plex (with 4k decoding) and other game servers on my gaming machine because if I’m playing a game while it’s trying to stream a bunch, I’ll slow down. I can’t run zfs with ECC ram, 6 drives etc on a pi, or on windows, but I could make the trueNAS box JUST do plex, arr stack, and file hosting, and then just host the games on my gaming pc. I’d really like to have my server serving the games, like a server should.
Truecharts should be considered depreciated & end of life in my biased opinion. Truecharts has a lot of confusion since the naming could imply that they are officially affiliated with TrueNAS, which they are not. They at some point provided a useful service but have a rocky history; this is the shortest summary I can provide while trying to avoid touching on unpleasantness - you can read up on your own if you’re interested. However, that time would be better spent learning how to do everything you want on TrueNAS, which depending on your exact system specs should be very achievable.
Wow, I had no idea on TrueCharts. I must have set this all up right before that. I’m sure there’s a lot of backstory leading to it, but the anger bleeds through the post. Yikes.
Obviously I’m not super active on the forums or I would have heard more about this, as well as my next question.
What happens when TrueNAS switches to docker? It seems like it will solve a lot of the cross app communication issues which should be really helpful for things like what I want to do. Hopefully that will fix the SMB share and app using the same data issue that I can’t seem to find a good way around.
When it becomes docker based, do we need to use TrueNAS specifically designed containers, or will people be able to use whatever container they want so as to provide flexibility for ANY app to be run?
Thanks so much for the reply. It sounds like TrueNAS + docker may be my ticket.
A somewhat contrary view: TrueCharts built an app catalog that was much larger, more up-to-date, and more featureful than anything iX ever tried to provide. I’ve been using their apps almost exclusively since I moved to SCALE, and I expect I’ll follow their migration path to a TalOS VM once that’s ready. Part of my reason for that is that their apps have worked well for me; and part of it is that I just don’t trust that iX is going to maintain Apps 2.0 any better than they did Apps 1.0, or Plugins 2.0, or Plugins 1.0.
But TC has some, um, prickly personalities, to say the least. I don’t at all blame them for declining to rework their 800 apps into Compose, nor even for archiving their apps catalog[1]. But disabling it entirely doesn’t seem like a mature or well-thought-out move. And using their apps in the future isn’t going to be on TrueNAS as such, but in a VM (that can run in TrueNAS or pretty much anywhere else you like).
after all, there’s only so much time available, and now they need to build a migration path in a few months, meaning there’s less time to keep the charts updated ↩︎
My understanding is that iX promises a seamless transition (for official app catalogue at the very least).
I personally have a rightful sense of impending doom whenever I hear the words ‘transition to ____’ for any part of a network that isn’t actively suffering from a critical outage while also being 10 years EOL… but this is mainly due to work. However, I trust iX enough to argue things will likely be fine. Especially for a home user.
Without knowing even the slightest detail of anything in general; I’m going to assume that official containers will point & click, while having the ability for more ‘advanced’ users to do the needful as they see fit. Kinda business as usual imo.
I tried to be somewhat neutral while cognizant of the drama, yet touching that Truecharts was indeed something useful & admitting my bias openly (like using the past tense just now). They get enough flak & I don’t feel like adding my voice to it because it is more productive for me to simply implement something else than complain.
Not my intention - I don’t have a horse in this race & tried to simply give an overview. I sincerely don’t have any anger because it ain’t worth my time, though I guess my views weren’t as neutral as I hoped
I guess not. But fair enough, to be sure–I don’t expect everyone to share my views on everything, and it isn’t like TC haven’t burned at least a few bridges. I still think it’s sad that they and iX couldn’t get along, but that’s water under the bridge at this point. But I’d still present a contrary opinion to the view that their useful service was entirely in the past, even as I recognize they’re much less relevant to TrueNAS than they once were.
But back to Thumper’s question, I really do think the wisest course of action at this point for someone who wants “apps” is to stay as far away as possible from anything iX controls–which means either to put them in a sandbox (optionally with whatever Docker or other container technology makes you happy) or in a VM. I don’t think it’s wise to depend on iX to maintain an apps catalog until they’ve shown themselves to be reliable in this regard–I probably wouldn’t touch their apps, at least not for anything I considered important, until late 2026, assuming they still exist by then.
So does using “sandboxes with jailmaker” as in the video above provide isolation from iX’s apps? Isn’t that relying on the jailmaker app as well?
I briefly scanned the video, and I do like the idea. It seems like this gives the ability to basically run your own jailed vm on top of trueNAS with pretty direct access to resources. I don’t see a downside to doing things this way once you get the hang of it… though it might have more of a learning curve to start.
Jailmaker isn’t an app; it’s a script currently being developed by a third party. It provides what I’d consider to be a reasonable degree of isolation–nothing running on TrueNAS could be considered completely isolated from iX; they could remove the VM feature entirely, for example, but that seems very unlikely. But Jailmaker is intended to give you something pretty similar to FreeBSD’s jails–give you a Linux environment in which you can do pretty much whatever you want. I think it’s unlikely iX will mess with this in an adverse way, though sadly my crystal ball is in the shop.
Here’s a decent video on installing Nextcloud with Reverse Proxy in a Sandbox, building on my video
Re: migrating from a Sandbox to native docker in EE (Electric Eel, 24.10, next version of TrueNAS)
I’ve been keeping up with EE, running nightlies, looking at the app repository etc.
There will be a Dockge app. You’ll be able to install this and point it at your sandbox stacks directory. Then just stop the apps in your sandbox and start them in TrueNAS.
OR NOT.
You can keep running your sandbox if you want.
The jailmaker script is just a convenient way to interact with systemd-nspawn, an explicit part of the OS now.
Alternatively, you could switch to native apps, but once you begin using compose directly you may not want to.
Compose means you can migrate your apps almost anywhere.
Now, if you do go the jailmaker/compose route, I’d suggest mounting your datasets into the jail
At the same location they are in truenas to facilitate a migration later, ie
Instead of —bind='/mnt/tank/docker/data:/mnt/data'
Use
—bind='/mnt/tank/docker/data'
I plan to make a video on this migration once EE is sufficiently far along to demonstrate.
You’re a solid switzerland. 
