How To Setup TrueNAS Scale Apps With Shares For Host Path Volumes

Tommy here from learning systems and Central launch of trunes scale there's been a lot of confusion about the applications I've ramped a little bit in the past and some of the early ones just how kind of broken the system was but come all the way here to February of 2023 this system works a lot better matter of fact some of the applications now don't have some of the bugs I complained about before and are able to be reinstalled without you having a bunch of data problems or having a lot of challenges and recovering that data now that being said the goal of this video is to give you a framework for how the applications work and how to set them up and we're not going to be talking as much about any specific application in this video of course I'll be using one as a demo I'll just use sync thing because it's easy to deploy and it works perfectly fine but I also want to make sure people are clear on why and how you map config and map data and map shares into an application now the concept of applications is true Nas being a Nas first is a great place to store data and the applications should be essentially ephemeral meaning they can go away at any time we can rebuild them we can delete them it doesn't matter we don't need to back up our applications that's a very old school and way people did things and probably for good reason because applications were kind of intertwined with your data very frequently especially if you think about things in the windows world but by separating things and the way it does it with the underlying Frameworks so sure nances the applications can be reloaded we just point them at the config files and we can reload them on another Nas we only have to back up the data we care about which is going to be the configuration or any shared data within this simplifies things a lot because then you can rebuild apps change them out and move things over to another systems and rebuild the apps Point them at the config file and it's really simple to do the problem and this is where some of the confusion you don't have to map any storage and you don't have to map a place for configs now this is really convenient for testing but for some people they assume that once you install the app it's already done the under the hood parts and it has not so if you deploy an application and just next year yes your way through you're going to end up with an application that will go away along with all the data and configuration that you put into it unless you map that storage so that's a really important part and it's sometimes where I think people get confused because they see it working and assume hey it's on an asset must be backed up and that's not necessarily true so we're going to walk you through the processes step by step for me clean install so let's get started this is a fresh load of trunes scale 22.12 latest version available as of February 11 2023 we're going to go to apps and we're going to hear settings advanced settings one of the things you have to do in order to map the data in here is the enable host pass safety checks has to be unchecked now when you uncheck this it does come up with a warning that when you turn this off and very specifically the note down here is a little bit ominous it says as such this configuration is unsupported and Bug reports in which this configuration plays a role may be closed as a user configuration error without further investigation now this is only needed to map extra data not just mapping the configure iteration part of this it's done with warning that you may not be able to get any support in their forms if you do so because if the problem is created by this well you're kind of on your own now the other thing I did customize here and this is going to be on a case-by-case basis if the IP ranges that are in use by kubernetes by default overlap with your network which in my case they do you will have to customize these as well if they don't and it's not a problem for you then nothing you have to worry about I'm going to hit save and make sure you do this before you start setting up any applications now let's go through the data sets and show you that there's really nothing here we have just this pool I created and The IX applications which is the place it shows when you go to the applications ask which pool you like to put them in now you don't need to back this up you could back this up but there's not any easy way to restore it so it's not that it's an impossible task it's just not a recommended task what you need to do is create a place to put our application data so that's actually going to be our first step we want to add a data set and my app data is the first one I'm gonna put because theoretically I'm going to load more than one thing so for Good Housekeeping and please know I left everything else at default I like to create a one data set and then have it nested underneath such as the one we're going to demo an exync thing so to put sync thing underneath here same thing everything's just generic settings this is going to be where we store sync things data so we have the my app data and if we I want to add another one let's see if we're going to do something with nexcloud for example we would have one called Next Cloud it just keeps things nice and neat it's completely an optional step but I like doing it this way and hit save all right so we have sync thing is the one we're going to demo because it's an easy app to set up but concept is the same for different applications we go over here to apps available applications we're going to go ahead and go to sync thing which is down here at the bottom I'm going to call this one sync thing one why not go down here and as I mentioned it will let you create this without actually storing the data somewhere but of course when you rebuild the app it will go away so you want to make sure you point the app and the data somewhere so we're given to sync thing we hit save it's installing the catalog item and now the app is up and running we can go to the web portal and start customizing sync thing we'll go here to settings actually say yes to this it's going to prompt me a couple things change our settings and I really like the dark theme way better we should probably put a username and password is going to bug us so put username and password on there Dark theme oh https yep hit save it'll restart the application it'll just use a self-signed certificate that's fine for this use case and you know now we've got it set up and we can probably delete this I don't need this particular folder remove yes so now sync thing is all set up and configured and the configuration data has been stored in the location that we pointed it at now let's do a trust but verify I trust I set it there let's verify there's some data there go to the config um yeah here's here's all the XML data and customization that I put in there I can probably find my username and the password I set in there so there's the config data if I need to look at it we can validate it here and great we have this data now that means the data is now separated from our application so if we go here to the application and we'll look at it real quick and see it's right here we'll just copy this to make it quick and we delete the application so we're just going to delete confirm we've now purged it sync thing is dead and gone now we can validate that those customizations will come back by going here to available applications we'll go back over here to sync thing and click install we'll call this one sync thing two doesn't really matter what you call it it matters where the data is so if we go here to the enable host path I'll just paste that back in save it's going to redeploy it now it's deployed we're going to go to the web portal and our customizations are all intact it remembered all of that now in terms of backing up that data we would go here to data sets and you can see the data is right here under sync thing there's 460 kilbit data to back that up as well to use something like data protection you could do some type of cloud sync backup task you could do an rsync task to send it somewhere you could do a replication task and send it to another system that's running true now so all that data gets synced somewhere that's usually my preferred method to send it to another one of my true Nas boxes to have it replicated and yes you can take a true Nas scale and replicate it even still to a true Mass course so you can go back and forth to the data I've got videos on how replication Works in some of these other tasks linked down below now let's cover how to map a shared storage that we want to be able to use as an SMB share but also share with this application the first thing you have to do is have a user and I do so we go over here to credentials we're going to go over here to local users there's our user Tom that we already added add whichever user you'd like though make sure it's not matching one of the built-in users but hopefully your name doesn't match something that's already in the system and add that user so user Tom has already been set up then we're going to go over here to data set and we want to add a data set now you can create another nested data set if you want but even though my update is here let's create our share outside of it because it doesn't have to be there we'll just call it share data now worth noting is don't put spaces in a name that can sometimes cause problems we'll just call it shared data and go down to the bottom here and this is a very important step check SMB please do that or you will have some problems and the shares won't work properly when you get to the ACL part all right now we're going to edit the permissions and build our ACL so we hit edit and we want to put the user Tom right here the user Tom right here apply owner apply group so we have Tom allow full control group allow full control built-in users built-in administrators all this is perfectly fine and we have to add one more we're going to add one item and that item is going to be a user and a user is called apps this is a built-in user I didn't have to create this this is the apps user that is also with sync thing we're going to give it full control over here this allows the user apps which is the user that same thing is running as to have full control to read and write into this particular share now one more thing I will note and I always check these by default I don't have any data in there but in case you do applying the permissions recursively saves you some headache of having some files that may have different permissions because you were monkeying with this and didn't have these setup when you added data so we go ahead and apply it and save Access Control list once the permissions are applied I like to go back in there and click them again and edit I just want to make sure they all look the same and I didn't goof anything up or change a user but I hit edit again it looks the same great now we need to go ahead and create a share so we've already share we're going to add a share Chooser shared data again and we'll leave it the name shared data so name and path they don't have to match but I recommend they do to save yourself some headaches so hit save restart the service because I had to enable the share I'm doing this in Linux but it works the same in Windows we have the share name we'll go to the share data folder here folder is empty we gotta put a few things in here let's just grab some random documents that I have right here we'll copy those and we'll just paste them in all right we have a few documents in here let's go over and now map that into our app so we go here to the application we have sync thing up and running and this is pretty simple we're going to go here and edit now this is going to vary a little bit between applications and I say a little bit because some applications may not be able to read things in exactly the same path but same thing has no problem reading things out of the root path provided you have the permission set so we're going to here to mount puddle the share data then we're going to mount this and make sure there's a slash in front of it here inside the application it's just in root it may have to go in different places for different applications that's going to be on an application by application basis but for here we just want to mount it right here and the external part is this host path here shared data and if we did everything right we should be able to hit save it'll rebuild the application we go over to the web portal add the folder and hit slash and we see shared data because it's able to see the root there and we'll just call it that same thing here shared data folder labels shared data it's going to scan it and find the seven files that we put in here now we're ready to start using sync thing and we have this folder that we have an SMB Sharon to add files to and same thing will also be able to read it and share it with other instances of sync thing for synchronization now I hope this video provided some clarification on how the apps work how you can map storage within them but please note I use sync thing as an example because it's an easy one to set up but on each application or maybe different places where you have to put the mount points on there or different user setups you have to do so hopefully this serves as a framework to get you started leave your thoughts and comments down below if you find an application that isn't working properly head over to the Tunas forums that is where you would be reporting that of note when you check that box it does warn you that there may not be a lot of support for that host path mapping in there that's going to be on an application by application basis it does work fine with sync thing as of today when I tested it it's not something I use very often but I I wanted to give people the framework to understand how to use it and of course the knowledge for when you're setting these apps up how you should validate them by putting some sample data in there going through the rebuild process and making sure that you can delete the app and just point it back at the same folders and it works this is a challenge I've ran into in the past and why I complained about the next Cloud app because in the early versions of it next Cloud wasn't working properly if you pointed it at the same data sets that you had mapped it to when you originally set it up it wouldn't read the configuration as of February 11 2023 today it does read that configuration and will reset itself back up but if there's a feature where an update breaks something back over to the Tunas forums is a great place to report that type of bug if you run into it but I just want to make sure people don't lose data I never like the well when someone reaches outgoing can I recover all the data I didn't map any host pass I rebuilt the application and now all my data is gone I feel bad but a little bit of pre-planning here and a little bit of pre-testing will go a long way to help protecting and understanding where your data is and where it lives on the true Nas scale application and where all that is at all right once again leave your thoughts and comments down below and thanks

Channel: Lawrence Systems

Views: 68,406

Keywords: LawrenceSystems, truenas scale apps, truenas scale apps catalog, truenas scale apps list, truenas scale apps user, truenas scale apps ingress, truenas scale, nas build, truenas scale docker, truenas scale setup, truenas scale nextcloud, Host Path Volumes, hostpath volumes, kubernetes hostpath volumes

Id: vXGs221il3g

Length: 14min 12sec (852 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 12 2023