This might be ridiculous for someone but still it’s not for me.
I’ve got Ugreen 2 nas and installed truenas immediately to an ssd, booted it and then I realized that I can’t utilize GPU of this device and HDMI port. Ugreen native OS support feature to play video via connected TV right from the device, so you don’t need any other device to play video, and you don’t have any latency between e.g. chromecast and nas.
This is powerful enough device to even play some games, so I’m really sad to lose this feature, despite the fact I’m not sure I will use it.
I thought that TNAS has something unique, but quick research showed that I can easily install zfs lib on any linux, create raid1, setup SMB share, install portainer and manage all my dockers via network, install graphana and have any charts I want.
I understand that setup of raid and shares will be more complex, but I need to do this only once.
But maybe I’m missing something, is there anything else that TNAS gives and that’s not possible in other linux distro, or much more complicated?
but zfs pool is created by literally single command, isn’t it?
creating share also is quite simple.
For both tasks there is gui options like webmin or cockpit. As far as I can see cockpit support creation of pools, snapshots etc. I’d say it’s not even harder.
I think OP is looking for the best of both worlds. Houston or Cockpit may help shore up some of the missing TrueNAS features in a vanilla Linux OS. But it’s not quite the same
exactly.
I accept laughs above, I expected that, but that’s clear for me that I can get more or less the same functionality on any linux, but I can’t make gpu work on TNAS.
I mean this is the million dollar question right? Just remember though you’re asking this question on the TrueNAS forum where a lot of us are die hard TN fans and have spent many years using the software (sometimes a decade in my case). Fact is it’s not for everyone for but for the people it works for it’s brilliant. I’ve tried so many other storage appliances and just vanilla DIY over the last 10 years or so but TrueNAS wins hands down every time. It’s not perfect and we all have things we would like to change but we’re given a platform to raise those issues via big tickets and feature requests.
Two comments.
This is the TrueNAS forums.
It’s alot easier to break things and shoot yourself in the foot if you don’t know what you are doing. TrueNAS has alot of safety belts to prevent you from bricking your data.
Because it’s an appliance weird unexpected bugs from software package updates are usually validated and fixed before the users ever even see the updated packages. It’s never a good day when apt-get update && apt-get upgrade bricks your NAS. TrueNAS doesnt have this problem.
Without making a tempest in a teacup; remember, people have been rolling their own Linux/Unix servers for far many more years than TrueNAS or other software’s have been around (combined). The reason why NAS software like TN exists is to save you time and typing. Rolling by hand often requires constant maintenance in the beginning but once you get the server on auto-drive you can pretty much let it sit (I’ve got a Linux server just sitting there and I haven’t touched it in about 7-10 years; I SSH’d in last week just to make sure it was still working–that’s a joke; its running fine).
Because people have been rolling servers by hand for many years, there are tons of examples and writeups on “best practices for ‘this’ or ‘that’” you just need to read and evaluate which works best for you. Often times you start off simple and work your way up to a better solution for XYZ task. Take backups. You may start off with a simple TAR system that backups your config files every day at noon (and call them “monday, tuesday, wed…”) so you have 7 backups. This may work great until you learn about ZFS Snapshot or you corrupt something and all your TARs are wonky. You’d have to decide if the change to your system is worth the extra effort to implement. If one method works for you than that’s all that counts in setting up your server (-e.g. “*meh*, I have the config files, so all I have to do is install fresh, restore configs and I’m done. 15 minutes. let it ride, baby!”).
I agree the updated packages can be a very slippery slope but that often falls into a few different scenarios. And I’m trying to think of a really dumb example and the best I can come up with at the moment (need more coffee) is: FSTAB. Let’s say you install a package that gives you an awesome interface for mounting files, and most certainly the next package update could totally break that functionality and put you on your ear, but at the same time, the FSTAB file itself will never break so you need to evaluate what is important at the end of the day for you (interface or not). However, software needs like PHP or RUST, will break your system when 2.0 rolls out so you need to evaluate if you need the latest version or not. And when 2.0 breaks your system, it’s heart wrenching (“shoulda, woulda, coulda’s” start flying)!
Yeah, I actually came from a very expensive top notch self run Debian install, rolled my own N AS and everything, and, in the end, came to Truenas from there. It’s simply less time wasted. I was more than capable of running my own stuff without any fancy UI. It’s more a time issue. While IX may not catch all bugs, they catch more than 0 and even fix some of them.
I tried kubuntu and realized quite fast that there’re too many options that aren’t covered in any known ui - like hdd performance mode or schedule snapshots.
Created separate user smb for samba and restarted nas.
Unable to login via UI - can select user, type password, but enter does nothing.
Installed Mint22 lts, figured out that they decided to go with own distro codenames which makes apt get fail because it uses $(codename) in repository path. I remembered that linux world was cruel 5-10 years ago, but it feels nothing changed.
Gave a chance to ugos: uploaded video from the phone, tried to play via hdmi and guess what - no sound. It wasn’t a movie with some modern codec or something, it was just a video from the phone samsung s20 (quite old already)
So I got back to tnas and I hope it does what it’s suppose to do.
