Wifi Drivers for TrueNAS Scale

TrueNAS General
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Hello, I just installed TrueNAS Scale for the first time. I am trying to install wifi drivers and found this forum post with instruction for installing wifi drivers on Debian

I added contrib non-free-firmware to each line in /etc/apt/sources.list

Then i tried running sudo apt update && sudo apt reinstall firmware-iwlwifi, but I got the following error

“Attempting to update SCALE with apt or methods other than the SCALE web
interface can result in a nonfunctional system.”

What is the right way to install wifi drivers?

Motherboard Info
MAXIMUS VII HERO
https://www.asus.com/us/supportonly/maximus_vii_hero/helpdesk_download/

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In my opinion i.e. this is a personal view not an official position…

  1. There can be no “right way” to install wifi drivers on TrueNAS SCALE - because:

    a. TrueNAS is an appliance and (even though it happens to be based on Debian) users are not supposed to add functionality except through Apps (Kubernetes, Docker, and perhaps now Jails). This is why use of APT is blocked even under root.

    b. It is a deliberate decision by ixSystems not to support wifi connectivity - and given how easy it would be to provide this functionality, I can only assume that there are sound technical reasons that they made this decision.

    So doing this will place you massively outside the SUPPORTED environment - and that is why there can be no “right way” of doing this.

  2. That said, if you are prepared to put yourself way, way outside a SUPPORTED environment, then there might be technical ways to install these drivers and to configure wifi to connect to your network using the CLI.

My advice would be not only to ask how to install drivers (as you have already done) to also to solicit views on what technical issues you might later face if you do this.

As a starter, here is my guess about possible technical consequences:

  • (Unlikely) You will break the system completely.
  • (Likely) The networking parts of the GUI will not recognise the network configuration - partly because you will have to configure it using the CLI and partly because it has no understanding of wifi.
  • (Unlikely but Possible) Some other parts of the TrueNAS code will not recognise the wifi network and will not work.
  • (Reasonably likely) You will lose connectivity every time you upgrade TrueNAS
  • (No idea) You will experience data corruption due to dropped packets (e.g. when other wifi nodes transmit at the same time)
  • (Possible) You will experience very variable performance due to multiple wifi users - and this may become quite likely if you have lower speed wifi and you are talking to the NAS from another device on the same wifi access point.
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What’s the use case to have Wi-Fi on the NAS? If you already have Wi-Fi (from the box provided by your ISP), putting the NAS in the LAN will make it available by Wi-Fi.

If you do not have a Wi-Fi box, the proper solution is to get an Access Point device (Ruckus, Netgear) and wire it to the NAS.

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Maybe this helps?

Not sure why you’d want wifi on a NAS though.

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i just came from a qnap qts system. they had a qwa wireless addon card i was using before which worked with their native app ap station. this let me setup a wifi ap on the nas. this way i could have a faster wifi connection, because my other ap is located elsewhere and so has a worse signal. thats my case use and why i myself might want to somehow get this to work but with truenas.

but considering the difficulty to do this, might just be better off getting a mesh ap and put them in different areas (wired backhaul ideally. if not possible then wireless backhaul) e.g. deco mesh or something else wifi 6e or 7, then call it a day.

so like others mentioned TS, maybe have rethink about this :sweat_smile: cauz i certainly did.

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Actually the last comments prompted me to think wider and there are going to be lots of solutions which do NOT involve trying to install wifi on your NAS:

  1. Consider locating your NAS next to your router so that you can wire it in.

  2. Use a pair of Powerline adapters to give you a wired connection to your router over your mains cables.

  3. Many wifi extenders have an ethernet port on the bottom so that you can connect equipment - these are probably cheap enough to buy and see if it works and what the performance is like without worrying about the cost if it turns out to be unsuitable.

Obviously it all depends on what your existing LAN / wifi infrastructure looks like.

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Note: The Developer Mode documentation says that it doesn’t survive version upgrades, so you would likely need to reinstall and reconfigure the drivers after every upgrade (and you won’t have a network to achieve it remotely either).

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There isn’t one, and there’s no legitimate reason to have WiFi on the NAS. Yes, it can be done (developer mode would be the way), but it shouldn’t.

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Install a VM and pass the WiFi nic in. Perhaps a
Router OS.

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As a side note (because I just got a ticket at work asking for me to configure it) this also means the wpa_supplicant is completely unavailable, so Ethernet 802.1x authentication is not possible for networks that use it.

Gonna have to let a poor guy down and likely convince him his use case of “testing hard drives” may be better suited by something other than a NAS appliance. :sweat_smile:

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Thanks for the thoughtful responses: they helped me stop trying to force WiFi into my new setup.

For others who are reading this thread after the fact, I dusted off an old Linksys RE6500 WiFi range extender & connected my server to one of the 4 Ethernet ports on that and all works fine. I think I picked the RE6500 up for $20 second hand.

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Saying there’s no legitimate use for WiFi on TrueNAS is like saying there’s no legitimate use for LAN.

Fact is, most SoHo or home setups have never seen wired networking. There’s ADLS/Fiber/Cable go into WiFi router, and EVERYTHING is WiFi: phones, tablets, laptops. A small NAS might be placed somewhere in the office to make bulk transfer from attached devices like USB drives faster and more convenient. And that’s that.
Yes, enterprise setups look different, but enterprise use isn’t the only legitimate use.

Heck, one might even have a 5G WiFi router like Netgear Nighthawk M7, placed somewhere where reception is good, and not even have wired internet.

For many people, network cables are “last millennium”

So, yes, there absolutely is a legitimate use for WiFi on TrueNAS, and it’s one of the few things that might justify the migration from BSD to Linux, as WiFi driver support for BSD was atrocious.

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Your opinion is noted and rejected.

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You are in no position to define what’s a legitimate use and what isn’t.
If a user considers it useful, it’s legitimate. Period.

TrueNAS can decide not to pursue a particular market segment, but that doesn’t negate the existence of that segment, nor does it make the use cases illegitimate.

Wired networking is a thing of the past outside of enterprise/data centers.

Reminds me of the time “SATA will never be anything but for consumers” SCSI snob times :roll_eyes:
Or “who needs a GUI?”
Or “nobody needs more than 640k!”

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I’m in as much of a position to have an opinion on the question as you are, but I’m not inclined to argue the point with someone who dredges up a post I made a year and a half ago. You’re welcome to your opinion, misguided as it is. Maybe at some point iX will agree with you. But this is not that day.

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Of course you’re entitled to have an opinion, e.g. “I see no use in WiFi on a NAS” what you’re not entitled to, is to tell others what needs they may have, and that’s what you do, when you say there’s “no legitimate use” for WiFi on a NAS.
E.g. in Austria the best commonly available internet is 5G/LTE based; many providers have WiFi routers without even an Ethernet port. I know several small businesses using such a thing as their internet access, and EVERYTHING they do is WiFi: printers, laptops, phones, tablets. And of course they have storage needs!
Or take a relatively high-end product for the SoHo market: the FritzBox 5690 Pro: a VDSL/Fiber router. While it has 3-band WiFi 7 with MiMo and throughput over 11Gbit, the LAN ports are 1Gb, with a single 2.5Gb, meaning that wired access is a BOTTLENECK. The same NAS on the same LAN could accessed two to three times faster by WiFi than squeezing through the router’s 1 or 2.5Gb/s choke point.

So, yeah, YOU may not need WiFi, iX Systems may not want to support WiFi, but none of that means that there’s “no legitimate use” for WiFi on a NAS.

You’re entitled to your opinion, you’re not entitled to dismissing others’ opinion or needs as illegitimate, especially when the facts clearly show otherwise.

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I don’t think there is a need for WIFI on a server/storage appliance. I’m sure you know 11Gbit is only 1.375GB/s right? Each connection made will to some extent slow that down.

Generally networks are divided up into wired and wireless with static devices including access points being wired and mobile devices being wireless. The speed of the network is then based on the speed of the network devices and not the speed of one point.

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No thats exactly what it means. NAS devices are supposed to be stationary and stationary devices shouldnt be on Wi-Fi at all. That includes PCs, TVs, etc. I understand that not everyone will always be able to wire up everything, but NAS devices can be in way more places than TVs and PCs.

the LAN ports are 1Gb, with a single 2.5Gb

…so you then use a higher gigabit connection? 2.5gbe isnt the ceiling for wired connections

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This is one step too far: Stationary devices can be accessed through Wi-Fi; all it takes is to have an access point in the wired network—the box provided by the ISP generally does that.
Just do not expect the NAS itself to manage Wi-Fi; that’s not its job.

So the engineers who designed the 5690 Pro are stupid? Or maybe they know very well that 11 Gb/s is a theoretical throughput, and that reality will fit with a 2.5G uplink…

Can your NAS saturate a 2.5 Gb/s link? Sustained? Congratulations!

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Stationary devices can be accessed through Wi-Fi; all it takes is to have an access point in the wired network—the box provided by the ISP generally does that.
Just do not expect the NAS itself to manage Wi-Fi; that’s not its job.

Nobody talks about TrueNAS “managing WiFi”, not more than it’s “managing wired networking” when you set an IP address for the ethernetNIC; we’re talking about simply “connecting to”, not “managing”. This isn’t about TrueNAS becoming an AP and managing clients, or doing DHCP service, monitoring, throughput statistics etc. which would be “managing WiFi”.
There are different physical transports for networking: copper, fibre, or wireless. There’s absolutely nothing that makes WiFi “special” or different from fibre or copper, except it’s a different transport. Same TCP/IP/UDP/etc.

So the engineers who designed the 5690 Pro are stupid? Or maybe they know very well that 11 Gb/s is a theoretical throughput, and that reality will fit with a 2.5G uplink…

No, the engineers who designed the 5690 Pro aren’t stupid, they simply know that in the SOHO space hardly anyone uses wired networking. You buy a MacBook Pro for $6000, and there’s no ethernet port. You buy a tablet, no wired networking, SmartTVs, set top boxes: WiFi.
They have SoCs in their box, and they spread the available IO bandwidth and PCIe lanes where it’s needed.
The 2.5GB port is designated as WAN port, in case you have an ISP provided cable or fiber modem, the LAN ports are 1GBs max. If you don’t have such a modem, you can reassign the 2.5GBs port to the LAN.
In short, wired networking is something for the data center or office buildings, but not for home/SoHo.

Can your NAS saturate a 2.5 Gb/s link? Sustained? Congratulations!

In a SoHo I also don’t care about “sustained saturation” of a link, I care about write speed to cache, responsiveness. The NAS in my case will have 56TB SSD, 150TB HD, 96GB RAM, so yeah, I think for my needs (read bursts), the 2.5 can easily be saturated for long enough to be relevant for me.