Linux/ZFS newb assembling a TrueNas Core 13 family nas

Hello There party people!

I’m a 4.5 year windows sysadmin who’s discovered ZFS and already wanted a home nas of some kind for awhile now. after being led by curiosity (by wendell’s zfs videos mostly) down the ZFS rabbit hole, i’m trying Truenas with a ZFS pool.

The storage hardware:

  • 1 LSI 9300-8i SAS controller using SAS-SATA cables (flashed in IT mode according to ebay but i intend to double check)
  • 4 WD Black 8TB HDDs (SATA)
  • 4 WD/Seagate 2TB HDDs (SATA)
  • 2 WD 1TB blue/green HDDs (these are pretty old, 5ish years of use, SATA)
  • 1 1TB NVME (cant remember make/model rn) - truenas currently lives here

The computational goodies & Rest of the build:

  • i7-11700K w/cooler master hyper 212 (doubled up fans)
  • 128GB of Patriot Viper 4 blackout 3200 RAM
  • ?MSI? Z590 motherboard w/2.5gbps intel nic
    *Rosewill 4U 15 3.5" drive bay chassis with 6x 120MM fans (no screamer delta fans allowed)
    *1KW ATX powersupply (something i had laying around)

Use Cases:

Open VPN server to serve as a remote mega storage location for some close friends with their own folders with locked down ACLs. this is where i’m stumbling because it looks like OpenVPN needs certs (including a root) from a CA, and i’d like to use Windows AD Domain users and groups to control shares but i’ve never dealt with AD Certificate Services or made PKI. trying to do that on linux would be an exercise in my google-fu.

Family archival storage, there’s alot of old videos and photos we could put on here as a second copy instead of endlessly copying them from computer to computer as they’re replaced with age, prevent bitrot and what not.

Maybe as VM Host for a Domain Controller and other stuff as needed but this looks weird and i had issues getting to ISO images to setup the windows OS that i’d uploaded to the testing pool i made.

Storage Layout:

since i have disks in even pairs i’m thinking of using one beeg pool and setting up each pair of drives in a mirror. 2 mirrors of 8TBs, 2 mirrors of 2TBs, and mirror the 1TBs. to me this would be pretty failure tolerant, and i dont need uber capacity so i’m fine with using drives in this arrangement.

FeedBack:

Are there any suggestions from people about the hardware of my setup? maybe my pool design needs to be rethought because i’m making some bad newb assumptions, maybe i should never ever use gaming parts for this stuff and it’s bad practice? How have you all handled Share permissions and ACLs on SMB shares for TrueNas? because the ones i tested with dont seem to enforce usage of a specific account to access things or folders.

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