This is some really good insight, IMO! I'm a long time FreeNAS (now TrueNAS) user who is pretty experienced with computing in general, but not exactly a Unix/Linux guru. I've learned a lot as I've gone along with integrating FreeNAS into my environment and doing various things with it.
One thing I've definitely found is that the plug-ins are embarrassingly sub-par. Even for commonly used ones that don't have a real complex environment, like Plex server? You have to download additional tools and use a custom script added to it, just to make it possible to update Plex to the latest releases. (The plug-in is never updated regularly enough to keep up with them.) And on top of that, I've had issues where I installed the Plex plug-in and it appeared to run, except it was only partially functioning at transcoding (lots of errors when a Roku unit tried to stream video from it, for example) and its web UI wouldn't pull up from my local server at all. Installing the latest version over the top of what the plug-in set up fixed all of it immediately.
I ran Nextcloud in an iocage jail for quite a while now, with pretty decent results. I did the whole thing using Samuel's web site on how to install a "hardened" one and it was super helpful.
Unfortunately, that installation completely broke on me recently (I think as a result of doing the latest FreeNAS upgrade, which seemed to bring the iocage jails to a newer version of BSD and subsequently require a newer SQL version and so on.) I think things really went wrong for me when I tried to do a "pkg update" command from a shell in it, and it decided to update something like 40 or 50 packages. In the middle of all of that, I didn't notice it was uninstalling mariadb completely (due to dependency issues, it said). That rendered the SQL server non-functional for my installation at that point, and I never really got it all working again when I tried to get a newer mariadb installed manually.
(I should probably note that I'd previously edited a file on the TrueNAS that allowed the pkg command to check for package updates from a whole BSD update tree, vs the "limited/locked down" subset they normally allow you to do from jails.)
Anyway -- short story is, I'm starting over from scratch now and considering a different approach. Looking at how viable it is to just run Nextcloud 21 from inside an Ubuntu Server v20 running as a virtual machine under TrueNAS. I guess I have to do some voodoo with creating a VLAN and bridge so it can talk to the outside world, via the TrueNAS? I'm hoping this option lets me set up Collabra Office suite to run from that same VM so Netcloud can properly link to and use it....
One thing I've definitely found is that the plug-ins are embarrassingly sub-par. Even for commonly used ones that don't have a real complex environment, like Plex server? You have to download additional tools and use a custom script added to it, just to make it possible to update Plex to the latest releases. (The plug-in is never updated regularly enough to keep up with them.) And on top of that, I've had issues where I installed the Plex plug-in and it appeared to run, except it was only partially functioning at transcoding (lots of errors when a Roku unit tried to stream video from it, for example) and its web UI wouldn't pull up from my local server at all. Installing the latest version over the top of what the plug-in set up fixed all of it immediately.
I ran Nextcloud in an iocage jail for quite a while now, with pretty decent results. I did the whole thing using Samuel's web site on how to install a "hardened" one and it was super helpful.
Unfortunately, that installation completely broke on me recently (I think as a result of doing the latest FreeNAS upgrade, which seemed to bring the iocage jails to a newer version of BSD and subsequently require a newer SQL version and so on.) I think things really went wrong for me when I tried to do a "pkg update" command from a shell in it, and it decided to update something like 40 or 50 packages. In the middle of all of that, I didn't notice it was uninstalling mariadb completely (due to dependency issues, it said). That rendered the SQL server non-functional for my installation at that point, and I never really got it all working again when I tried to get a newer mariadb installed manually.
(I should probably note that I'd previously edited a file on the TrueNAS that allowed the pkg command to check for package updates from a whole BSD update tree, vs the "limited/locked down" subset they normally allow you to do from jails.)
Anyway -- short story is, I'm starting over from scratch now and considering a different approach. Looking at how viable it is to just run Nextcloud 21 from inside an Ubuntu Server v20 running as a virtual machine under TrueNAS. I guess I have to do some voodoo with creating a VLAN and bridge so it can talk to the outside world, via the TrueNAS? I'm hoping this option lets me set up Collabra Office suite to run from that same VM so Netcloud can properly link to and use it....