I upgraded my long runningTrueNAS Core 13.0-U6.1 system to TrueNAS Scale 24.04.0 just to be able to use apps to replace my Plex Server with Jellifin and hopefully replace my PiHole running on a Raspberry Pi with the Pihole app.
What a mistake that was!
While the change from Core to Scale went smoothly and the installation of the Jellifin app also works mostly great. The PiHole install and configuration has be nothing but a nightmare.
First, after installing the PiHole app from the TrueNAS Charts Catalog and then configuring it to act as both my DHCP server and DNS server, I could never get it working perfectly. Always had DNS resolver issues for the TrueNAS Scale system itself. Everything else seem to work ok, but resolver issue was a show stopper.
So after digging on the net to find out how to do this properly, I kept finding comments about using a catalog called TrueCharts and loading the PiHole app from there. After installing that catalog and then trying to go through the install of PiHole, I realized that I didn;t have a clue what half of the configuration parameters were or how to respond to them.
So, why is there both a TrueNAS Charts catalog and a TrueCharts catalog with the same app that is configured so differently??
I am in desperate need of help here to get this PiHole app up and running. I figure with TrueNAS Scale getting all the attention, TrueNAS Core will soon be going the way of the Dodo. The only reason that I migrated to Scale was because of this and I would like to use an open source product like Jellifin in place of the proprietory Plex app.
TrueCharts are a third-party group who have been working on their app catalog for quite some time. Their catalog is much larger than the iX and “community” catalogs put together. In my opinion, it’s also much better thought out. But you need to read their docs to set them up properly.
But I’m not aware that either version of the PiHole app serves DHCP.
The official catalogue is managed by iXsystems, as were CORE plugins. Your woes were probably related to it being limited to port 9000 and above (so no port 53 for DNS).
TrueCharts is managed by another organisation, uses more advanced Helm configuration to make stadard ports available, but tends to break at each major TrueNAS release.
If you want to stay with SCALE, I suggest you look into jailmaker.
I’d written a bit of a rant about the stupid default settings in the PiHole app, and I’m sure I’d previously seen them, but on reinstalling the app, sure enough, it’s listening on 53 (both TCP and UDP). So my memory’s wrong, or they made a change. It still doesn’t listen on port 67, though, which would be required for it to act as a DHCP server, and neither does the TrueCharts version.
It broke from Bluefin to Cobia–or, perhaps more accurately, they communicated poorly what users needed to do with that transition (which was “remove and reinstall all your apps, manually”). From Cobia to Dragonfish, AFAIK (because I can’t run Dragonfish yet), the apps will continue to run without issues, but storage needs to be migrated in due course–but they have a script which should automate that.
Really, TrueCharts is objectively a better app catalog in every way than the iX catalog–except that for whatever reason they and iX don’t play well together. And that’s a real shame.
The TrueNAS Charts version of PiHole is what I started trying to use. After configuring it for BOTH DNS and DHCP, I found that it listened on port 53 for DNS and it certainly gave out proper addresses using DHCP. I reset all my clients (3 Windows boxes, 1 Linux box, 3 TV boxes, 2 printers, 4 iPads and a phone. Checking all these devices, they did get their addresses from the PiHole DHCP server, along with setting their default route and DNS Server(s).
The only box having a problem was the TrueNAS Scale server. Just using a simple nslookup of the server returned it’s correct (DHCP Static address) for about two minutes. After that time the same nslookup query would return with an IPV4 address of 0.0.0.0 while the IPV6 address looked correct. I ran my network with this configuration for about 2 days before I noticed anything wrong. The server runs a script every night and sends an email message about the status of the script and I was not getting this email message. After investigation I noticed the network settings were wrong and the server could not access the internet. Meanwhile, all my clients were working as normal with the execption of my Windows boxes which run a Veeam backup to a SMB share on the server and this was not working because the clients could not contact the server! So had to back everything out and revert back to the PiHole on Raspberry hardware.
Then did some more investigation and found people who mentioned that the TrueCharts version of the PiHole worked better. I looked at the app I had installed and saw that it was a Charts app, but after further research, the Charts app was really the TrueNAS Charts and not the TrueCharts.
Next I figured out how to add the TrueCharts catalog to my server, then after removing my existing PiHole app, installed the TrueCharts PiHole app. The I started looking a the huge amount of configuration options available and freaked. In addition, I read the docs a saw that to use this app, I would need to load a number of other apps first. That immediately turned me off.
So, that’s where I am currently sitting. Not sure whether to back out everything (go back to TrueNAS core), or just keep what I’ve got minus the PiHole app or to continue to try and figure out how to make this work.
Scrap using the built in Apps. Migrate to “jails.”
Run your jail using a bridge so the jail can talk with its TrueNAS Scale host.
Long term wise this will be more performant and stable.
I know you are looking for “technical” help on running Pi Hole with either the iX catalog or Truecharts but I do not think it is a good solution if you want to run Pi Hole on Scale to act as a DNS and DHCP server.
Absolutely. While the Kubernetes environment is good, it is not for the faint of heart and is a huge hit on processing power. Just to get an “App” to talk in/out of it is a major pain. Jails are much simpler.
what I read today on truecharts page: TrueNAS SCALE Apps are considered Deprecated. We heavily advice using a more mature and solid kubernetes platform such as “TalosOS” isntead.https://truecharts.org/scale/
What does this mean? I need Nextcloud running and want to try some other apps like paperless ngx, pihole, photo prism, …
Will the truecharts catalog will be deprecated or only the official catalog?
what is a future oriented solution? I never heard about TalosOS? And I don’t want to set up a second system. Perhaps the best solution will be to set up proxmox and run trueness in a container and the other apps separated from truenas. Too much changes in the last months.
Or are the new jails a solution for setting up and testing apps easily?
TL;DR The “stunning release” will get native docker-compose and remove k3s. iX intends to migrate its charts to compose; TrueCharts is considering what it can do for its users (other than ranting over the divorce from iX, that is…).
If you already have TrueCharts set up, I expect it will continue to run and you’ll be able to install and use new apps with Dragonfish. iX has announced that 24.10 will throw the apps ecosystem out the window and replace it with something completely new, and TrueCharts won’t work directly with the new system. They’ve said (in the topic @etorix linked) that they’ll provide a smooth migration path, but as it sounds like they were completely blindsided by iX’ announcement no details are available yet.
Unfortunately the updates don’t work anymore, they locked the access to the git repo and even if you were a user you can just keep running outdated containers. You can’t even modify any settings as that will cause the container to stop working. It is quite horrible for people that spent a lot of time setting up their NAS. Moving to another OS is a lot of effort, but also going without all the apps is a no go. There is no good solution for me, I will likely look into a different OS now because I don’t see any good option if i stick with iX, unless I missed some important announcement for its users.
I’d suggest migrating to docker compose, which you can run in a sandbox now, and can trivially migrate to the official docker compose support in Electric Eel
I’ve moved away from truecharts about a two month ago and migrated everything to docker-compose inside a jailmaker jail. Took me a total of 3 weeks to migrate everything and get everything running as i had it with truecharts.
I migrated 23 Truecharts apps from the whole *arr suite, qbittorrent, traefik, authentik, firefly, nextcloud, blocky with grafana and prometheus for metrics, homepage and code-server to edit the yaml files directly.
It took me 3 weeks because i knew nothing about docker and had to learn it from scratch.
For someone who already knows docker the whole process will be a lot faster.
They haven’t updated their charts for TrueNAS since May, so updates haven’t worked for that long. But their pulling their repo entirely is something new and unexpected (at least to me).
I haven’t experienced this, but I don’t edit app settings that often.
iX will be rolling out their Docker Compose-based thing in October with the release of 24.10. How it will compare to what TrueCharts built is anyone’s guess. TrueCharts will have their Talos-based solution out by then and, AFAIK, is still planning on migrating any of their apps to that.
Or, of course, you can follow Stux’ recommendation and run anything you want in a sandbox.
Or you can decide to let your NAS be just a NAS, and run all this stuff somewhere else like on Proxmox.
Thanks for sharing, for me it would probably be a bit faster, but still investing even days of work when I built this setup just a couple of months ago is so annoying and frustrating.
yeah that could be an option indeed, but then I don’t have the convenience of containers and easy config, I would run VMs and have to setup each app separately. Some stuff like VPN would probably be easier for me, but others will have to be sorted manually, like networking between different services.
iX will be rolling out their Docker Compose-based thing in October with the release of 24.10. How it will compare to what TrueCharts built is anyone’s guess. TrueCharts will have their Talos-based solution out by then and, AFAIK, is still planning on migrating any of their apps to that.
Makes sense, it’s just anyways a migration in that case, I doubt they will have the same options I already setup for TrueCharts.
I ended up here after getting the automated email last week from my box when it couldn’t sync the catalog.
When I first set up my box I was using most of my apps (I only have a handful anyway) from the TrueCharts catalog. I had the joy of reinstalling them when TrueNAS updated to Cobia (I think it was).
I have since most migrated most of them to the native versions after I got fed up of there being updates to them almost daily because something had changed somewhere. Down to 2 TrueCharts apps, 1 of which I can live without.
I’ve been debating offloading all the apps to something like Proxmox, though setting up a sandbox with docker looks like my next step to get round the TrueCharts issue.
