The Best way to combine TrueNAS with a local GUI?

General Discussion
1

I’m starting to get pretty discouraged here. I’ve spent a few full nights trying to find a solution for my project which involves a 3D printed NAS tower which I want to have a monitoring interface on (7" touchscreen), all from one compact PC (zimablade).

TrueNAS works fine with my 20TB Z2 array. Just fine. My issue is that I don’t want to have to use an external web interface to access it. I want that viewable on the same OS. I tried installing xorg and firefox over freebsd/truenas while preserving the seemingly critical packages, restarted, and it hung on some “middlewared” thing. So I pivoted and installed Debian thinking I could passthrough everthing to it like I did nearly 10 years ago now… not possible (or at least very difficult/convoluted processes) without a hypervisor (which would defeat the entire point).

What other options am I not thinking of? Can TrueNAS be installed AFTER a functional linux distro with desktop environment pre-installed? Is there really no way to get a GUI coupled in somewhat easily?

2

Truenas always has been an appliance OS. You cannot install packages on the OS. This is by design. You can only interact via CLI or the webgui.

For your use case: you could install a rasperry pi behind your internal monitor, and have that access and display the webGUI. There are also all in one kits on the market. Not cheap tho.

OR… install any ZFS ready OS yourself and manage ZFS by yourself.

2 Likes
3

No.

Other than the WebUI, no. You could do nice things with grafana, but you would have to create your UI from scratch.

4

And even with grafana, all he’d get would be metrics, no option to configure his nas.

5

There is this:

:scream:

1 Like
6

Yeah, but I doubt he would be able to convert his SCALE to a desktop…

7

Install a browser in a sandbox or VM and have it display the TrueNAS interface on your touchscreen.

8

That’s an idea… does TrueNAS support onboard graphics (iGPU) and USB passthrough to VMs?

9

Yea that’s the problem. This is supposed to be a cheap-as-possible build. I do have an old Pi model B+ somewhere around here though that I’m not using. Suppose worst case I can add that additional failure point

10

Yes is does.
BUT, you need 2 GPUs. 1 for the VM and 1 for the host. Truenas wont allow passthrough of a single GPU in the system.

USB passthrough is supported as well.
For it to work, the devices need to be in an IOMMU group with nothing else in it.

11

Proper IOMMU grouping is a motherboard issue.

Why do you say that? Server boards are perfectly happy to passthrough a sole GPU. TrueNAS does not need a GPU. Whether consumer boards can boot without a GPU is, again, a motherboard issue, not a TrueNAS issue.

12

Afaik the GUI will throw an error. Someting like “one gpu needed for host operation”.

Could remember wrong tho…

13

I wish I would have checked back here sooner. It would have saved me a lot of time.

Yes, you are 100% correct, as I found out. You need either two GPUs, or at least an external GPU for pass through. The BIOS reserves one, so you cannot pass through the iGPU on a single board PC

14

I’m just going to post my adventure (read: comedy of errors, or complete waste of 20+ hours) highlights for the past week here, in case it helps any other newbies in the future.

  1. Truenas Core is practically abandonware. Use TrueNAS Scale
  2. VirtualBox ceased support for PCI(E) pass through in version 6, shortly after introducing it. They’re currently in version 8.x.
  3. VMware was bought out this year (2024) and ESXI is no longer free. My codes that I had for older versions were nuked along with it.
  4. Proxmox and any/all hypervisors currently cannot pass through GPUs if it is your boot GPU. This means that single board PCs are SOL unless they have a PCI port free (I have one on mine, but it hosts a SAS/HBA card). Proxmox in particular will allow you to try, but will crash the entire host as soon as you try to boot the passed-though client VM.
  5. Debian + QEMU & virtual machine manager is the way to go if you have a ZimaBlade. I could not get Ubuntu to make it through the setup, no clue why.
  6. Don’t install Cinnamon desktop environment unless you never want to switch from it, even if you install other environments. (my preference for the foreseeable future is dual Gnome and KDE Plasma)
  7. Bridging for QEMU/virtu is as simple as deleting your PHY adapter and setting up a bridge through the networking GUI using the physical adapter, then naming the QEMU network that bridge name.
  8. InfluxDB2 has killed itself for use with all TrueNAS guides I could find for setting up Grafana. It’s probably possible, but now there’s an extra layer you need to go through because it does not support Graphite directly anymore. I’ll be looking for any other way to use Graphite reporting from TrueNAS because the netview in Scale sucks.
  9. Murfy’s Law bore its full force on me for this project. Everything that could possibly go wrong, did. Nothing is easy with Linux anymore, I guess. But at least I have a functioning TrueNAS Scale with desktop environment. Still working on a buggy autoboot with host.