TrueNAS might not be for you, if you are home user

Operating Systems & Open Source
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I have been using TrueNAS since it was FreeNAS and before NAS4Free. So I have some history with it.

I LOVE ZFS . That is the primary reason I went with this NAS.

But.

Last few years, and especially with transition to TrueNAS Scale, I couldn’t notice that I am not the target customer of the developers of this system. Which makes sense, I don’t pay anything. iXsystems is making money from enterprise selling them their enterprise solutions based on TrueNAS. But this created misalignment in incentives between us - home users and the developers of this system.

The user experience for home users is not great. There are known issues and bugs and problems that we regurarly face adn forums are full of, but iXsystems doesn’t do anything about them for years!! For example the bug with setting bridge between VMs and NAS on SCALE. I wasted two days on it before I figured working workaround. And there is many many people with the same issue.

Or another issue is that Apps on SCALE can’t use folder that is part of samba share. Like what??? So what do you think are the apps on NAS used for? Plex, torrents, video, photo apps… all these need to usually access the same folder with data that people aslo want to share over samba.

But because iXsystems assumes you are enterprise by default, they have some kubernetes settings about hostPathValidaton that makes this impossible. And they don’t even bother so show you the solution in GUI when you are installing the app. You have to figure out by searching formus and finding many other frustrated people have the same problem.

There is a pattern there.

Oh and it’s like very hard to reach actuall developers if you are just home user. I posted even on their bug tracking system few times, things got nowhere. It’s like end users are walled of from devs. Maybe they just communicate with enterprise customers, idk.

Honestly don’t know if I invested time in the right platform for my usecase.

Maybe something like Unraid where home users pay the (reasonable) licence fee would be better, because I would actually be the customer. But Unraid didn’t have the ZFS, so I always choosed TrueNAS because of that. Wondering if it is maybe time for me to try someghing else…

What are your experiences?

What do you use for “apps” at home server?

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Proxmox can be ZFS based, and you can run docker/portainer locally, in an LXC or in a VM, or run your own k3s/k8s if you want. Maybe not as pretty as TN, but suites me better, I’m perfectly happy using zpool & zfs, in fact I prefer it as then I know what is happening rather than hoping the webui gets it right. I can use sanoid/syncoid to handle snapshots and replication.

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Honestly I am still in the mind that a NAS needs to be a NAS, and nothing else. I’m rocking 2 x TrueNAS Core setups and then run all my apps in virtual machines on other hosts

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@FunnyPossum @samarium

When you run your apps on VM, how do you do it? Is there some open “catalog” like catalog apps on TrueNAS? Or do you just do it “manually” via docker for each app?

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I just use portainer, or just docker cli, at the moment, and have appropriate backups. I only have a simple environment, mainly one file server, a couple of Pi s, and another couple of misc boxes with portainer or portainer_agent on them, and NFS shared storage if I need it. I have about 10 apps, with some replication.

I will eventually get around to understanding and using k3s or k8s and helm.
I would rather understand what is happening, so the lure of a chart full of apps isn’t strong.

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Try Core; much more mature than Scale. Plugin support isn’t great but you can spin up a lightweight Linux VM for each service.

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If you want to get as close as possible to the original FreeNAS, there is still XigmaNAS(nas4free). I also used n4f for a few years but abandoned it in favor of openmediavault (which is created by Volker Theile, ex FreeNAS dev).
OMV theoretically has a plugin for ZFS, but how stable is it… Underneath is ordinary Debian so.

The problem I often see is that people want a magical NAS for everything and even brewing coffee. Somewhere in the middle, the original idea of the NAS was lost and it became a heavy workhorse for everything… And here the problems begin when we try to keep the eggs in one container that is supposed to do heating and cooling at the same time. :wink:

Apps… Maybe that’s the problem. I just use CLI and do what I need, for other common tasks I will use webgui. You need a combine harvester for all sorts of tasks. The problem is that NAS solutions are not 100% that.

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Don´t know what the plugin does on OMV but ZFS itself should be stable on debian given that proxmox ships with it for a long time now and is also debian based. Haven´t had any issues, yet.

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Truenas scale, being a linux derivative instead of BSD, last time I checked isn’t even out of beta, or is it?
Of course they think the main usage will be enterprise - since that’s where support income etc comes from. I see it as a license thing - you’re free to use it as-is, and rely on community - or pay the piper for the license and support, and be included in a different support structure.

I’ve walked around looking at different setups for home use, but enterprise “grade” or targeted for such use since day 1 - I’ve tried a few consumer releases, closed and mixed, even with dedicated HW - I’ve had better results building the things from scratch and with my distro of choice than “consumer/prosumer” as targets.

It makes a bit of sense not to run the apps on volumes that have smb enabled - ACL’s and all the wonderful bork of samba will create issues - I remember truenas jails being even less fun in that department.

If your main concern is the disconnect with developers - get a license subscription ?

There’s always options - and they are not the same :). Hope you find what you are after!

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I feel this deeply. For 95% of what I do I could just as easily run and admin a couple ZFS pool on the Debian underneath a Proxmox install. However Truenas SCALE does seem to make a couple things easier / more stable (for me namely samba shares especially to MacOS). My solve was the virtualize Truenas SCALE on my Proxmox server with an HBA passthrough. If I had to do it over I probably would have stuck with Core as it is just being a NAS. So far, so good though.

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I use TrueNas Scale only for NAS, iSCSI and ZFS replication, which is also possible with Proxmox, but not via GUI and if you only change something every few weeks, GUI is easier to remember.
But I also don’t want to use Truenas in a company with lots of shares, the GUI isn’t really made for that.

A combination of Proxmox with Webmin and Univention Server as VM might be interesting for you.

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I will probably redo my server once it is up again and try TrueNAS Core again. Back then my motherboard didnt have an integrated Intel LAN and Core outright refuses to work with Realtek. Even Scale spits out some errors frequently.

Despite the availability of the WebGUI config, Scale apps feel like it should be done with minimal custom configuration and should be run directly off the ix-application dataset (despite me wanting it to be put elsewhere).

I am thinking of actually getting two servers where all files are on the TrueNAS and just get another server to do the all the virtualization and apps that I need.

Looks like TrueNAS is already partially undergone enshitification long ago and only I have started to realize it recently.

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I’m guessing it adds ZFS support to the webgui in some simplified way.
So there shouldn’t be any magic here, if linux is doing well with zfs today, then omv placed on top of it should rather work as well.
Potential problems probably arise when we want to touch zfs in a more technical way and this probably won’t be provided by webgui. But then we always have cli to the rescue. :wink:

omv
omv885×308 14 KB

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i used them years back, but after the version fiasco I moved away and embraced containers. For a media nas/server containers are the best since most arr have a official container

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So regarding “apps catalog”, I just run into CasaOS.

It runs on top of debian and has dockerized easy to install apps + all the usual suspects that we are talking about here.

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My comments may not be helpful, but what the hell.

I’ve been using TrueNAS Core for about 3 years (since 2020) and now have 5 in production barebone installs of it, and then one Scale install just for testing. I must confess it’s my first long term experience of NAS, I did try unRAID for a few days, but felt it wasn’t for me. Synology was unappealing due to the hardware lock-in.

Like you, I really like ZFS and its resiliency, especially compared with how I used to store long/short term data (just a spare Windows machine, but at least it had ECC and an Xeon CPU).

I have tried several times to get along with Scale, but do find myself swinging back to Core most times. The current test install is very reliable, but my familiarity with Core does hold me back. I don’t recall the issues I’ve had, but they mainly relate to apps and the lack of documentation.

Right now Core does everything I need; store my stuff (business and personal), run a few VM’s (TailScale) and run a few basic Jails (like SyncThing). I don’t think Core is going anywhere for a while and as far as I know, quite a few heavily invested companies use it, which gives me some confidence.

Normally the only reason I even look at Scale is because I want to run apps that aren’t easily available on Core, such as Immich and a few other things. My priority is on data security though, so Core will be my main storage ‘driver’ for now. I think I’ll probably try Proxmox again sometime, or XC-PNG as I’d really like the easiest possible GPU passthrough experience.

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I do the same within my self hosting environment.

I use TrueNAS core and it’s just a NAS. Have 1 at home and another offsite for backup.

My VM/Docker hosts connect to the TrueNAS box for storage.

I have no interest in virtualizing TrueNAS or building an all-in-one environment on a single server. I think those ideas are both at odds with having a rock-solid NAS.

Media/linuxISOs go onto an Unraid. For data that I essentially don’t care if it’s lost, Unraid is amazing. The storage efficiency is very high and the ease of mixing and matching drives is very convenient.

Everything else goes onto the TrueNAS server.

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That actually looks good.

But I’m concerned about security and privacy. Especially if you’re going to host personal data.

They’re based in China by the looks of it.

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I’m not sure what your expectations are, TrueNAS is a product of iXSystems which is a company that employs people. People and companies who buys hardware and support agreements aren’t interested in shoehorning X into their appliance. They buy it because they want a NAS not a torrent box or whatever and there is a limited amount of resources available of which get prioritized to paying customers. Submissions are accepted but if you need help or bug fixes you’re at the mercy of contributors (community) that have time and interest or what’s left of iX’s resources. Bare in mind that your issues might not align with interest of others and the majority of users ie less prioritized. iX is also very clear about it here, Compare TrueNAS Editions - Powerful Storage Platform

That being said, if you want to run a bunch of apps and use your box for storage just install a generic OS/Distro of choice?

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Might be better on proxmox as they also ship their own kernel. ZFS itself is stable in a vacum. Worst case it breaks with a kernel upgrade and will start working again if you downgrade it. I think it catastrophically nuking itself is quite an unlike outcome. In case of proxmox they would not ship that kernel in the first place or patch it before doing so. Similar would be true for trunas scale.

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