Totally, it’s one of the first requests I made when iX started caring about the forums a decade ago.
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Contrary to XigmaNAS, STH lets lurkers browse its forum and ask their favourite search engine about the geeky hardware that is discussed there. And when you want to look at pictures of what’s for sale, well, you need an account anyway to make the deal.
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Very interesting article on XigmaNAS. I made the clear decision to stay with Core for as long as i can. It took me a long time to get familiar with FreeBSD and TrueNAS Core and now that i have everything set up just the way i always wanted it, i don’t want to start over again, especially with my Nextcloud instance which has proven very valuable for my business and has been a pain in the past as i had it initially setup up as a plugin with all the unpleasantness that came with that over time.
I do start noticing the little annoyances though that Core is not maintained the way it used to be. I cannot upgrade certain packages anymore because my jail for Nextcloud is still on 13.2 and the package library is at 13.3 now so i will need to wait for the update to 13.3 before updating the jail and so on…I will need have the patience as i cannot risk breaking my Nextcloud.
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Does this impact restoration?
TrueNAS, both Core & SCALE, use a database of some sort to store all normal configuration details. Meaning if you stick to the GUI & CLI API, on loss of boot device, you can simply install again and restore the configuration.
Does XigmaNAS have something similar?
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They do have a config file you can back up and restore, yes but I haven’t tested that part yet.
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How are you running 13.2? My TrueNAS-13.0-U6.2 is only on 13.1-RELEASE-p9 kernel and there are no updates unless I’m willing to switch trains to 13.3-BETA.
Sidebar:
I’m shocked you rely on Nextcloud that much for what seems to be a mission-critical deployment. It was so flaky and slow the short time I used it. I switched to Seafile and never looked back. Much more reliable in terms of syncing, especially to mobile devices.
I admit that I don’t need nor care for the plugins on Nextcloud and only care about the file sharing/syncing part.
Virtualbox is built in, and has its own GUI to manage VMs which is nice. I like bhyve, but since the WebGUI for it in CORE is not really a separate project, I could learn to use virtualbox as a replacement. My experiences with using on a Mac have been promising.
Currently though you can only install its Embedded version with the UFS file system. The Embedded install is similar to TrueNAS as it doesn’t really allow for OS level customization and management. More like an appliance OS.
To get ZFS you need to install the Full RootOnZFS version. This version can still be updated via the GUI though.
My jails are respectively on 13.2 (Nextcloud) and 13.3 (Plex). This is perfectly possible. The only downside is that there was a thread that pointed out that upgrading the jail to 13.3 might cause certain issues due to the base-OS still being on 13.1 so i never upgraded the Nextcloud jail.
Well, you are not entirely wrong. Nextcloud has given me my share of headaches in the beginning and updating it has been a pain until i got rid of the plugin and moved to a base-jail with a scripted install. The thing is, it works now exactly the way i would want so i see no direct reason to change to anything else. I don’t use much other features myself. Mainly syncing and sharing some folders. Maybe that is why for me it just works. I have checked out and it does seem interesting but currently, i see no reason to switch over. More so because i already mentioned, i want to stay with TN Core on FreeBSD.
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Well, this is what shocked me. I know you can run different version jails. It’s the whole point of jails, of course. But I had thought that you can always run earlier versions of FreeBSD, but not later versions of FreeBSD than what the host has. eg. You can run 14.1 or 13.3 or 13.2 or 13.1 jails, but not 14.2 on a 14.1 host.
Just did a config backup and reinstall/restore on a new server with some basic things like users, shares, and network config. It all seems to have restored.
And a note on the ZFSonRoot. You don’t need it on your boot drive. The way it works is it simply writes the image to a USB/HDD, the writes it to RAM once the server boots. That is what they call the Embedded Install. It then runs from your RAM instead of the USB/HDD.
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…just like FreeNAS did before 9.3.