I Loved FreeNAS
This blog is a bit of a con, as I drafted it to post on the iXsystems forum in the hope that I might get some ideas about what to do with my TrueNAS server. I’ve posted it below, but I still haven’t added it to the forum!
I loved FreeNAS, and since first installing it over ten years ago, I have learned so much about hosting and maintaining my own micro data centre, much of it from the old forums.
The death of the old forum and the focus on TrueNAS Scale have been quite disheartening, and I don’t know where I go from here. Obviously, everything is still working, so I don’t have to make any immediate decisions, but I feel I should at least be thinking about what the future holds and how I might get there.
I was hoping that if I described how I was currently using TrueNAS Core, I might gain some of the forum’s incredible wisdom to help reinvigorate my love for all things Free to TrueNAS.
For background, I started this journey running an HP N40L Microserver and about 8TB of RAW storage. That was upgraded to an NL54 and 16TB, and then I built my own server in a Fractal Define R5 case with an Intel Xeon E3 and Supermicro motherboard, ECC RAM and 36TB storage. See, I was paying attention! This was upgraded about 4 years ago using the same case, an updated Xeon and Supermicro motherboard, 64GB ECC RAM and 64TB storage, with some SSDs for jails and VMs. I still have the old one and replicate to it monthly (it used to run 24×7 until the cost of electricity went through the roof), so I have something I could play around with using Scale.
Obviously, my main use is storage. I have two pools. This main pool is 8x8TB RAIDZ2 WD HDD which is currently running about 75% (I know, too high really but I was considering upgrading the 8TB drives to 16TB over a few months). The second pool is 2x1TB Mirror Crucial SSD which is currently running about 65%. The main pool is predominantly long-term storage, and the second pool is for the jails and VMs and associated databases.
I know Scale will do all the storage stuff, so that’s not my worry. I’m worried about the jails and virtual machine I have running lots of externally facing services accessed through NGINX Proxy Manager, now running on a separate Raspberry Pi (it was running in a jail for a few years)
I have six jails of varying degrees of importance. My Nextcloud jail is probably the most important and is used by family and a small charity I was a Trustee for. The files and database are in separate datasets, and I know this could be run on Scale, but moving it and breaking it scares me! I also have an emby jail used by around 15 family members and friends. It has the emby_server folder mounted to a separate dataset, so again moving should be possible. I’m assuming it is possible to mount datasets into containers or VMs similarly to jails, but not whether the structure of these will be the same cross-platform? I also have a WordPress jail, which used to run my company website, but it’s now just my personal blog. It’s a similar set-up with a dataset stored outside the jail. I have three other jails running OpenVPN (so I can connect back to my network remotely), Limesurvey (running small surveys, which could be lost) and Airsonic (an old music streaming service, which has pretty much been replaced by emby).
I then have some VMs. The first one I created, running Ubuntu 20.4, was to play around with Docker. I’m still no expert, but I have become quite dependent on this VM as it is running Bitwarden, Teslamate, Calibre-web and a test instance of WordPress (for playing with new plugins and themes). It does have some mount points to a Docker dataset with more permanent storage, but it’s not as consistent as I’d like. It became a little unwieldy at one point, as I was also trying to run other things, so eventually, some of these got moved to their own VMs. I have an Ubuntu VM just running ONLYOFFICE Document Server, which is linked to the Nextcloud service for an Office 365-type experience. I have another Ubuntu VM running Pi-Hole and another running Mattermost, although this is still pretty much a playground and not used in anger, so I wouldn’t be too upset to lose it. The last one is a ubuntu 22.4 VM running CrashPlan, which backs up any irreplaceable data in the cloud.
Having learnt to set all this up and maintain it for the last 7-8 years gives me hope to learn the necessary skills to do it all over again. My only worry is this time I have data I don’t want to lose, and services I’d be devastated to have to start again from scratch, which I didn’t have when I started my FreeNAS > TrueNAS journey. I know ownCloud was rebuilt a few times, as was emby, before iocage allowed jails to be upgraded after the version of FreeBSD was!
Recent Comments