Checking Out TrueNAS Core

this video is brought to you by asrock and the asrock x570 velocita at least i think i'm saying that right this is a high-end 14 power phase design support you know for ddr4 5000 motherboard for am4 so your ryzen 5000 cpus here are going to just drop right in it's got a killer e3100 2.5 gigabit lan along with the killer ax 1650 that's a wi-fi 6 adapter that's a pretty unique combination if you're looking for killer networking on on your motherboard or anything like that this motherboard also features a high-end implementation of the realtek aoc 1220 audio codec it has an any 5532 premium headset amplifier as part of the front panel connection with support for up to 600 ohm headsets that's part of that nahimic audio implementation this motherboard has a low-key black and gray aesthetic but full rgb support with multiple argb and 5050 style rgb headers so it'll go perfect with whatever your next build is it's also got a pretty good pcie layout in terms of if you've got a triple slot gpu or you're going to run you know multiple gpus that's not really a thing anymore but you could run two gpus for like a pass-through type configuration or run virtual machines this is a pretty high-end motherboard with a fairly high end you know power delivery implementation even if you wanted to run a 16 core but you know it's pretty affordable too so azeroth's done a good job balancing features here i think if you're looking for a gaming motherboard especially one that has the killer nick set up let's talk about a sensitive issue that you might not be ready to talk about and that is dependence you wake up and you look at youtube you get in your car and you turn on spotify at work you sweatily run to the bathroom to get in a stadia game just so that you can get the shakes off long enough to get home to your netflix you have an addiction to the cloud now being somewhat hyperbolic there obviously nobody's using stadia but it's a problem that you have and you might regret it because if you ask someone from belarus or sudan or turkey or congo or a list of other countries your stream to the cloud could be turned off and what will you do let's say that there's some future date i don't know let's say november 4th when things get really weird and someone decides hey we need to turn off the internet what are you going to do let me tell you what i'm going to do the same thing i've been doing for the entire pandemic i'm going to be working my way through the last 30 years of action movies because i have data hoarding and network attached storage and we're going to talk about some options for that today today we're going to be talking about trueness what does trunass you ask well it used to be freenas and now it's been sort of segmented into different products anyway we're going to talk about truenas core which is what freeness used to be this is network attached storage it's based on freebsd and it is free and open source and we're using that to create some data hoarding opportunities for ourselves now the installation of trueness core is really really simple i did not capture any footage of this there are only two interactive points to it you tell it where you want to install truenet's core and you set a root password that's it other than you need to prepare your installation media i used rufus on windows but anyway that you write an image you should be aware of how to write an image i hope now unfortunately the installation as simple as it is cost me i would say 12 hours of my life and a record amount of frustration you see this is my major complaint with trunas core if you look at the minimum requirements it will recommend a usb drive to operate truenas from if you go through the wizard of installing well there's only one way to go through it it will say we recommend installing to a usb drive i would recommend you not install it to a usb drive you see there is a critical critical flaw and it's based around this new version of freebsd riding too quickly and i guess too efficiently to work with modern usb drives so uh the first time i installed truenast it took about three or four hours i lost track i walked away from it and i thought that's weird and then it wouldn't boot the middleware would always time out and i kept trying over and over i kept having the same problem and i thought hey it's probably i had like an old micro center usb drive and i maligned micro center when i shouldn't have it wasn't their fault so i started going through other usb drives that i had i think i found a crucial that actually worked it only took 30 minutes to install and it booted and i was like oh so my usb drives must be overwritten too many times they're old they're beat up okay my fault i've got the crucial drive it works now unfortunately i lost that footage so i had to start over and knowing i had to start over i went to amazon and i said let me get some fresh brand new usb drives so i got two of them i got this sandisk and i got a pny and i redid the installation four hours failure to boot after some googling it turns out usb 3.0 is the problem here you see usb 3.0 is too fast and it causes overheating and kind of like a data jamming situation with your usb i didn't have a single i tested four different kinds of usb 3.0 drives to install trueness all of them failed and they don't fail in predictable ways they take three hours to install that's your first sign but then the boot just fails there's a middleware load that has a 240 second timeout it will time out every single time because the drive just overheats and it can't read or write fast enough so it fails but it doesn't tell you that it's it's not obvious how it feels and therein lies the frustration now the crucial that did work it was a usb 2.0 it worked the installation was 30 minutes it boots most of the time if it's already hot and you try to boot sometimes you'll time out that middleware again which again extremely frustrating now if you read the forums not the technical documentation to be fair the recommended system requirements do not include usb drive they say to use an ssd if you use an ssd installation takes about three minutes and it boots every single time i did have another problem though the first time i installed the ssd it installed beautifully but it couldn't find the web gui it couldn't get an ip address and i banged my head against that for a while ultimately just reinstalling rewriting the image again to a fresh usb and reinstalling the ssd again worked so i don't even know what went wrong there but it does show that there was a lot of frustrations with the trunas installer so just if you're gonna go with this i would definitely recommend don't try to use a usb as your operating system drive which is unfortunate because that was one of the things i loved about free nas hey gang slightly further in the future ryan here for a quick addendum to this video i said some pretty bad things about the trunas installer here one of our intrepid editors pointed out that the installation documentation doesn't match what i said about the usb installer and i was sure that it did so i thought did they just change that or has 2020 finally taken its toll on me no the uh the real answer is perhaps more frustrating two sets of documentation there's trueness.com documentation and there's docs.ixsystem.com documentation i was using the latter now if you look at truenast.com the system requirements now says usb stick is not recommended this has actually changed since last night it had some like misspelled words last night so they're actively working on this but they're not actively working on docs docs.ixsystem.com as you can see same exact layout same document hardware requirements but here they still list usb stick as being valid so uh the canon now is no usb stick bad documentation but okay the other thing i say is that they encourage usb use in the installer i was talking about this image that actually the word they use is flash media ssds technically flash media but it's only one kind of flash media out of all the kinds of flash media i'm pretty sure that's the only one that would work hey if you want to go crazy try to install this on an sd card see what happens i don't think you'll have a good time with it so i don't want to uh vilify them more than i have to but i will say that bad documentation just don't use usb and i don't think they get a good enough job telling us about that by default trueness will map itself to truenast.local on your network or you can use the ip address that it shows you on the terminal when it's done booting for the first time and you'll be greeted with this screen the the username is going to be root for your first login and the password is the password that you set during the installation process once you log in and get some information about your system you can see we're skating on the very very low end actually the bare minimum of the system requirements we have a 64-bit processor eight gigabytes of memory and a network interface and uh we're running off of usb as i mentioned before but i don't recommend it the first task you're probably going to want to do with trunas is to create a pool so we'll go to storage and pools and what we're going to do is we're going to organize our physical drives into a single unit into a pool so in this screen we'll go to add and create a new pool and here we can see our physical drives now we used to have four of these drives one of them died so now we're stuck with three and the ssd here which i threw in just for uh demonstrative purposes in terms of caching so you can use this suggest layout and basically what that's going to do is it's going to look at the number of identical drives you have and try to suggest how you might use them we can also do it manually now it's interesting because it will limit you so it has this weird interface where you use the arrows to feed into the data v divs this is you know the actual data drives we're going to put in our pool so if you put one in then you're not going to have any choices down here as to the type of v-day we're doing this it's just a stripe basically you know it's treated as what it is just one hard disk now if you add another one you will expand your options and actually by default it will switch to mirror so now we have data redundancy we have one drive that is backing up the other we could go back to stripe if we didn't want any sort of data redundancy and then we get the the full value of both drives storage like i said these are old western digital hard drives one of them has already died so i'm not too confident about them i'm not going to be storing anything mission critical but i do think i would like to have some redundancy and by adding a third drive to this i will get the raid z option which is going to give me the most storage with a little bit of redundancy so i think i'll go with that there are other types of options in terms of you know how we want to structure the layout of our v div and with four drives we could move up to uh raid z2 for our options however as you can see you know these are not identical discs when we mix in the ssd it's a different size so we actually cannot create that the ssd is here actually to demonstrate one of the things that trueness can do which is to add a drive for a very specific use case in this case we'll do cash now the thing about this build having eight gigabytes of ram a cache is going to do almost nothing it may actually be detrimental to this pool you want to max out your ram before you start messing around with cash because it's probably going to be counterproductive but just for demonstration purposes now you can see that there are other things you can do here you can have logging metadata and uh hot spare that's a cool one so if you have you know if you're worried about your drives failing what i could do here if i wanted instead of using three drives and raid z i could use two drives with a hot spare in case one ever goes bad and you know i'd still only get the storage of the two to stripe them but you always have the hot spare we'll use the cash here and uh put the ssd in there it's not going to help us but we'll do it anyway just for demonstration purposes if you have a lot of ram and the right setup this could really improve speeds now you also have to keep in mind how are you going to use this drive this is for me this is going to be i didn't name it you need to name it i'm going to name this media it's going to be a media server a media server might not be something that is hugely beneficial from a cache also a cache will be good for something where you're hitting the same files over and over maybe an office you know where people are opening the same document in different offices and stuff like that for this use case though uh not a great idea we're just gonna do it just to show it one thing i won't be demonstrating is encryption now you do have the opportunity to uh turn on encryption for your disks uh this has risks involved with it and you know i don't need it for my home media server but it is an interesting option that tunas gives you so with all that said we will take our raid z three disc with a ssd cache and we will create a pool that will give us 1.36 terabytes to work with ah got to be sure don't want to format those disks without this warning ultimately because this is my going to be my media server what i want to do is i want to set up an smb share so i'm going to have a windows computers connected to all my televisions and a surface tablet to stream music and that's the video and music is going to come from this media server now i have this monolithic pool which is all of my available drives and i could go ahead and share that entire pool but i may want to categorize the things inside this pool into smaller sections and that is where we get data sets so within the pool we can create a data set and we can use those data sets for our shares and user permissions and stuff like that instead of the entire pool so we're still using the same hardware in the raid z setup but within it we get these uh new entities that we can work with inside of truenass so going to the pool storage page we hit the dots over here and we can add a data set there are a lot of options here but you really don't need them all the only one that's required is the name we'll take a look at a couple over here though so you can set quotas uh you can set compression synchronization you can add comments for it and then the advanced options down here uh snapshots inheritance things like that uh we're going to stick with the basic this so this is going to be inside of our media pool this is going to be our video data set where i'll store video but i will stream to my televisions and give the name click submit so now within our media pool we have video so obviously i want my video to be available to my windows computers which are connected to my televisions so to do that i want to set up smb shares but first i need to create a user that can connect to those shares so we have our root user but obviously we don't want to use our root user for our media sharing so we'll go to accounts and users and add a new user this is going to be me username will be ryan i will give it a password you can choose your own user id if you want uh you can give it an existing group but uh since we don't have any or since we're giving it a primary group a new primary group that's grayed out we will go ahead and give ryan his own group which will make it easier to deal with our shares later i'm not going to worry about a home directory because i don't really care about using a home directory with him he's just going to access the data set the video data set to get video to the televisions i am going to turn on microsoft account because i will be connecting via windows to this obviously you can do some ssh keys and stuff like that here not going to bother with that i will do basic password authentication now with my user created that i'm going to use to access my media share specifically my video media i can go ahead and set up that share by heading over to sharing and under the sharing you have all the different types of shares you can set up again i will be using windows machines to access my videos so i will create a windows share and we don't have any right now so let's add the path is the only required field and you can get that automatically by browsing your storage up here of course we have the media pool in which we have the video data set and when we click on that it will automatically fill out our name you can change that to something else if you want and we don't really need to set up any other parameters we do have quite a few advanced options here right now this is going to give us the basic window stuff uh the acl this is going to be discoverable on the network it's going to be uh available for shadow copy if you want to mess around with these you can't really click on them unless you switch up your share parameters to no presets and then you're allowed to choose whatever options you want there are also a number of different presets already set up here for you that will change how these things work we'll go with the default parameters and we will create our share it wants to enable smb which it wasn't already we definitely want that when we set up our share we were prompted to edit the acl of the data set and the acl the access control list is a way of setting up which users can access this chair and do various things within it so instead of using the shortcut this is the way that you get to it normally you come back to the pools menu and inside our video data set which is what we're sharing we go over to edit permissions so this basic acl access control list is going to set up three things uh the group at means the uh group that owns it in this case wheel the owner at means the user that owns it in this case root and everyone at means everyone else outside of these two entities so for my media share i don't want anybody else accessing it i'm going to go ahead and delete that one the only thing i'm going to change here is i'm going to add inheritance to uh both the user and owner user and owner group and then i'm going to create a new acl item now the owner and group you know that's root and wheel i don't expect those users to be in windows accessing over smb this is for the user that i do expect to be accessing over smb and that is via a group and this is the group of the user that we just created which will be ryan and we want to allow and we're going to go for advanced permissions and basically we're going to give ryan access to everything so i want to be able to do whatever i want within my video share via smb and we will set the inherit and this will take care of having access via windows to our new share now you can put whatever users you want in here obviously let's say that you're having somebody over to your house and you want them to be able to watch your movies but not necessarily delete them then you create a new user create another acl item give it read only permissions and you know things of that nature with our pool data set share and user created we can move over to windows and test our access for this you will access true nas with backslash backslash true mass you can also use backslash backslash and the ip address that truenash shows you on the terminal when it boots and there's video now you would normally be challenged for a username and password i've already authenticated in this windows session so but you just use the user that you created in this case i created the user ryan and so i authenticated as user ryan here we are this is our video data set now ryan doesn't have access to the pool so you know only video will be visible to that user now you could create multiple data sets with different users which i probably will do we'll just go in here and let's make sure now we did use inheritance so we should be able to create a subdirectory let's call this one movies and go into that subdirectory and we should have full control to do whatever we want let's create a text document and modify it oh you guys can't see the notepad editor just imagine the notepad editor and i'm making some changes and they saved delete it step out delete the folder and there i go i've got full access to my smb share on truenas with uh the raid z file system now we really are only scratching the surface of what trueness can do i'm really when it comes to the network attached storage i'm really just looking for network attached storage and this you know you can use it for for that basic thing but it does have a lot of other stuff and uh you know without going into much detail uh backups and snapshots it's very powerful to automatically do backups and keep snapshots of your storage if you have very valuable stuff you can do that over the network you can do it right there on the file system uh the jails and you know the arrangement of keeping things separated from one another as a very in-depth stuff they even have you can spin up virtual machines here which you know i i don't need that from my nas but it's cool to know that it's there right one thing we will take a real quick look at it are the plugins and uh so we have to choose a pool we've only got one to choose from we'll choose media and the plugins are you know just other applications that you can run on your trunas system and uh i gotta say back in the free nast days i ran some of these some nzb programs which we are not allowed to talk about i didn't have a great experience with that the permissions were kind of a pain and updates were also kind of a pain i might have been i might have made some mistakes there but for the most part i didn't see any reason to use freenas for that kind of thing when i have other linux systems in my house but uh just you know for the sake of checking them out now these are the first party ones plex is something that you know a lot of people like to use i have windows machines as i mentioned connected to every tv that i own so i'm not really interested in that but one thing that does interest me now i did a video recently about an e-book reader that runs on linux and a lot of people commented and say what about uh caliber i think it's caliber and not cal libra i'm going to say caliber and i didn't know i didn't know caliber had a web reader apparently that's a new thing i remember reading about caliber back in the day but they've expanded it it seems so now they have a web interface with bookmarking and keeping track your progress and stuff like that i really like the idea of that and caliber web is one of the third party plugins that comes with trueness so i figure why not check that out so you just head on over to the plugins now we're switching to ix systems is the new owner of truenas not or you know used to be freenas now it's truenet uh community or a third party so let's install it's unofficial it's probably gonna do terrible things yeah you know throw caution to the wind and here we go so we're gonna it's gonna require a jail name let's just call it caliber see what kind of advanced options it gives me auto start seems okay well let's call it caliber i'll just run with it see what happens now the first installation of caliber plug-in failed no default instance found a second install where i have used the basic options seems to be succeeding i have to say this is pretty much it's in line with my experience with true nas so far which is a lot of stuff is obtuse and broken in ways that are very difficult to understand does seem to be succeeding at this point so we'll see our second attempt at caliber has resulted in what seems to be a successful installation and we are given an administrative portal url however it does not seem to be answering i did some googling uh seems like i'm not the only one having a problem here there were some workarounds that involved going into the shell and rearranging some things and running some commands however that kind of uh betrays the whole idea of the one-click plug-in and why wouldn't i just install caliber in a more desirable system so kind of galvanizes my experience with freenas and now truenas especially when it comes to plug-ins i just don't see any reason to do it they are not reliable they have some weird quirks that come from just porting them into this system it doesn't seem like a lot of work has gone into that in terms of file sharing though this does seem to work great i like the interface um it's not the easiest system to use there is a little bit of a learning curve but it does offer quite a bit of depth way more than i even care to use for network attached storage however the installation process was infuriating and the failures uh especially when in the official hardware requirements and even the installation process they encourage usb installation usb installation is a disaster so it's a mixed bag but if you're just looking for some network attached storage and maybe even some of the more in-depth features um i you know based on this plug-in who knows how those virtual machines are going to serve you maybe we'll do some more exploration there but if you want to share files i'm going to say go ahead give true nasa a shot this is a release candidate so there is time i guess for them to clean up some of this but again based on my experience with free nas g this is pretty much what you're gonna get so in retrospect uh when i think about network attached storage i'm personally more inclined to use it as an appliance i'm not looking for the depth that trueness gives me it's nice to have but i just want to set it up and i want to use it as shares so for my purposes truenas i think is perfectly fine but there are a lot of disappointing things about it from the installer to the failed plugins to you know the the way that it fails i had some dhcp problems it's you can access it by the ip address but truenast.local kind of goes in and out not sure what's causing that so it's in release candidate status you would i personally would expect maybe a little bit more functionality at this point but looking back at freenas i had the same kinds of issues with plugins and i had the same kinds of issues with updates it seemed like the stability wasn't incredible but it is a free product and it does do the core no pun intended part of what it needs to do which is to store things on the network very well so we might revisit this we might see if they when they have an actual release if things are much cleaner i didn't try any of the virtual machine stuff i didn't try any of the backup or snapshot stuff but what i did try was definitely a mixed bag now this is the standalone version of truenast truenet's core they do have another product called truenastscale which runs under linux and we probably will have a video coming out that explores that as well maybe that's a better solution especially considering the installer issues that we've had with the standalone version for your network attached storage needs so get started on your data hoarding you've probably got depending on when this comes out you probably got like 15 days to collect all of the music and movies and tv shows to get you through an undetermined amount of internet blackout come november get it installed and start collecting because you're probably going to need it there's a fly attacking me right now

Channel: Level1Techs

Views: 43,877

Keywords: technology, science, design, ux, computers, hardware, software, programming, level1, l1, level one

Id: yTNEevsRk_E

Length: 33min 21sec (2001 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 17 2020