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Brad
Selfish Heathen
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Zone of Pain
 
2022-07-31, 03:02

Correction to my last correction: TrueNAS CORE is based on FreeBSD, which has been their flagship product and was previously known as FreeNAS, but last year they also released a new Debian-based version called TrueNAS SCALE.

After playing around with both of them in VMs, I decided to go with the Debian-based TrueNAS SCALE because I'm a lot more comfortable with Linux than BSD.

Installing either of them was a major headache with my ancient motherboard, though, because Etcher, the drag-and-drop app that I usually use to burn ISOs to USB flash drives, for some reason failed to write the ISOs in a way that my old mobo would recognize as bootable. While troubleshooting, I copied ISOs for Pop!_OS and Fedora to the exact same USB flash drive, and they booted flawlessly. I also tried three different flash drives. So, in a moment of desperation, I resorted to using `dd` from the terminal to write directly to the /dev/ device… and that actually worked. Weird!

Once I fixed the flash drive boot issue, it was easy to get the rest up and running. Pretty much the same super basic installer as most modern Linux distros with very little user input or expertise required. Choose the boot drive. Define your root user password. Confirm detected network settings. Wait and reboot.

This old tower just has one 256GB SSD and two very old 1TB platter drives in it that may also be doomed to crash any day now, but that's perfectly fine for my experiment, and frankly I look forward to seeing how ZFS handles a drive failure. I created a mirrored pool of the two 1TB drives, defined some datasets in my pool, enabled SMB, copied a few video files over SMB from my Mac for testing, configured a Docker container to run Jellyfin, and boom! I have a NAS that's also a working media server! It even recognized my old NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960, passed the hardware into the container, and successfully used it for GPU-accelerated transcoding. Nice!

I'll grab some screenshots of the management UI to share later. Happy to answer any questions if you're curious.

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