So, asking out of curiousity, is this even a good idea, combining NAS storage and networking like this? I’m not experienced enough with TrueNAS to evaluate it myself.
I fail to see why this is a good idea. I would really want them seperate
Its not like you’re even saving that much space!
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I know it is en vogue in the homelab world to virtualize everything and cram as many features as possible into a single set of low-power hardware, but there are major downsides to this approach.
- Every reboot of the server for updates, which is a regular part of server maintenance, means your entire network goes down.
- Software update breaks a feature of your hypervisor that you are reliant upon? Important parts of your network won’t work until you resolve the software issue, and the solution might not be immediately obvious.
- Running software with a security vulnerability that is currently unknown to the security community, or make a mistake somewhere in your configuration? If the exploit/mistake allows an attacker to achieve privilege escalation, you personally gave the attacker the keys to the castle.
- Hardware dies? All of your network is destroyed. This is especially bad with completely proprietary systems using custom hardware like was mentioned in the OP. A dead power supply or motherboard would equal a catastrophe for which the only solution is buying another one of the same item or building another system.
No doubt it is cool that it is possible to cram every feature of an entire set of server infrastructure into a single box, but it being possible doesn’t make it a good idea. I think it is especially egregious the way these types of solutions are marketed towards beginners because they don’t realize that they are building their foundation on sand. The low-power usage and smaller footprint are attractive and it might work just fine for a while, but as soon as things inevitably go wrong, they go VERY wrong and it can be difficult to untangle the resulting mess even for people who generally know what they’re doing.
At the VERY least, you should always run your router on it’s own hardware. Everything else isn’t truly necessary and one can live without for awhile until you fix whatever issues you encounter, but no internet and all of your home infrastructure being broken is a nightmare one should avoid at all costs.
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It all depends on your requirements, for a home network I’d say it’s more than fine to consolidate several services into one box even without virtualization (that might even be more beneficial in the end depending on hardware and network design). While it’s not ideal we’re talking about a plain home network, it’s not a fortune 100 company and unless you do something very strange it’s very likely going to be fine especially if you avoid having servers facing Internet. In comparison I’d say that your average consumer router with 2y+ old firmware is more of a security concern than a box that uses fairly up to date software overall.
Having all the above in mind I do think that you need to run your own setup on a barebone os for it be reasonably time efficient to admin. You will need to reboot the box to upgrade to kernel but that’s 1 minute or so which isn’t a huge deal and there are other distributions that dont release at least new one kernel version each week… A basic network is a firewall, upnp (optional) and dhcp service so it’s not a lot and you usually only need to do changes a few times a year at best.
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