Building my very first NAS, looking for advice/help

[Crossfader]

I am building a new gaming PC, and because of that I am retiring my old gaming PC and a secondary PC I had that will not be needed anymore.

I decided to build a NAS with my secondary PC for two purposes, to store games (Steam Library and a directory with my roms collection) and to run a media server with all my movies, tv shows and music. I decided to go with TrueNAS after watching some videos on youtube about NAS building and the various plug-ins it supports like Plex.

So here are the parts on the Secondary PC:
CPU: Amd r5 3600x 3.8 GHz 6 core / 12 threads
RAM: 32 GB 3200 Mhz
Motherboard: Gigabyte B450a Aorus Pro Wifi
GPU: Gigabyte RX 570
PSU: EVGA 750 watts G3
Case: Corsair Obsidian 750D Airflow Edition Full Tower (bought this specifically for the extra HDD space)

This was a very budget build, mainly for storage, torrenting, watching movies, TV shows, podcasts, youtube. The motherboard has limited pcie lanes, for example, it has 6 x Sata, but in reality it is 4xSata + 2xASata, the ASata shares the same lanes as the NVMe slots, so if you use NVMe, then the ASata can't be used.

I downloaded the FreeNAS Quick Hardware Guide pdf and the 2021 updated version and I had a quick read through certain sections and I have learned a few things, seems that Intel is much preferred over Amd, and I can't go with cheap chinese SATA expansion cards of Amazon so I need a SAS controller card.

So this made me think that maybe my old gaming PC might be the better choice because I think the motherboard might be better in terms of available PCIe lanes, and it has an intel cpu but older.

Gaming PC:
CPU: Intel i5 6600 3.3 Ghz 4 core / 4 threads
RAM: 32 GB 3000 Mhz
Motherboard: Asus Z170-A Rev. 1.03
GPU: MSi RX 6600 XT (This was an update I made a bit over a year ago to replace an old MSI R9 390X and keep the PC going for a while longer).
PSU: EVGA 850 EQ
Case: Corsair Obsidian series 450D Mid Tower

Ok, so the NAS I wish to build will be used as a media server (most likely I will use the Plex plug-in, I'm very new to this), and to store my Steam library and roms library for the emulators I will be running on my new Gaming PC.

My new Gaming PC will be using Linux Mint, the new motherboard will have a 10GbE port, I ordered an Asus router GT-AXE16000 that has 2x10GbE ports to work as middleman between the NAS and my Gaming PC, I bought an Asus 10GbE pcie card for the NAS.
I plan to purchase 10 x 16Tb 512mb cache WD Red Pro, and hope to achieve maybe 2 Gb read/write speeds between my gaming PC and the NAS for newer games, not really concerned for emulators since I have loaded PS3 games on RPCS3 off a HDD and not really noticed any lag despite the forums there recommending running the games of SSDs. I just noticed that games from ~2015 and newer, specially open world games, lag and stutter a lot when running off a HDD with it's read/write speeds of 80-130 Mb/s. SSD's are certainly faster, averaging around 500 Mb/s, but anything above 4 TB is quite a bit of money and new games are very large.

NAS seems the way to go, if I can achieve speeds 4 times of an SSD I should be future proofed for a while, and I will have a lot of space too.
But upon doing research, people recommend the ZFS file system, but from the few searches I could find, ZFS does not seem to cooperate well with Windows based games, so for that reason I plan to go with ext4. Then again, the search results were from a couple of years ago, not sure if ZFS (which I have never used before) and Steam library are more compatible now.

I am going to be using the 750D case for the NAS, I have bought this HDD rack to expand the space HDD Rack , added a fan I had laying around to keep them cool.
I am not sure which motherboard and cpu to use so I would like advice on that.
I am planning to buy a pair of these mini sas cables.
I need advice here, I know I need a pcie sas controller card, but don't know if I should go with the SAS 9211-8I or the SAS 9300-8I, here.
I have read that the controller card needs to be flashed, do any of these cards require that? And does anyone have a link to a guide in doing that step?

Since I plan to use the NAS also as a media server, I was planning on leaving the RX 570 GPU in, I thought the encoding from the GPU would remove some of the
work on the CPU side, most of the stuff I have at the moment is 720p and 1080p, but I do have a 4k TV and would like to get some 4k movies. If the RX 570 is overkill, I do have an MSi 1050Ti sitting on a shelf gathering dust, maybe that would be better?
I will be buying 2x128 SSDs, one for installing TrueNAS and the other for backup. Is that large enough or should I get 2x256Gbs?
Lastly, the PSU I think I will use will be the 750 watts, I think that should be enough?

I hope I was clear enough with how I plan to use the NAS, it will be a personal NAS, if you have questions for me, or need extra information, like more hardware information, don't hesitate to ask.

 

[Whattteva]

Intel is much preferred over Amd, and I can't go with cheap chinese SATA expansion cards of Amazon so I need a SAS controller card.

It's mostly really because of well-documented ECC support, which really doesn't apply to you since you have an i5 (no ECC support).

So this made me think that maybe my old gaming PC might be the better choice because I think the motherboard might be better in terms of available PCIe lanes, and it has an intel cpu but older.

Number of PCIe lanes really have more to do with the CPU type rather than whether it be AMD or Intel. Server-grade CPU's will always have more PCIe lanes.

My new Gaming PC will be using Linux Mint, the new motherboard will have a 10GbE port, I ordered an Asus router GT-AXE16000 that has 2x10GbE ports to work as middleman between the NAS and my Gaming PC, I bought an Asus 10GbE pcie card for the NAS.
I plan to purchase 10 x 16Tb 512mb cache WD Red Pro, and hope to achieve maybe 2 Gb read/write speeds between my gaming PC and the NAS for newer games, not really concerned for emulators since I have loaded PS3 games on RPCS3 off a HDD and not really noticed any lag despite the forums there recommending running the games of SSDs. I just noticed that games from ~2015 and newer, specially open world games, lag and stutter a lot when running off a HDD with it's read/write speeds of 80-130 Mb/s. SSD's are certainly faster, averaging around 500 Mb/s, but anything above 4 TB is quite a bit of money and new games are very large.

In my opinion, it's better to not bother with HDD for games. Yes, they are large, but how many games do you ever play more than once? Steam download speeds are so fast that I usually never bother with more than 4-5 games installed at once. When I move on to a different game, I just uninstall the games that I no longer play and install the new one.

NAS seems the way to go, if I can achieve speeds 4 times of an SSD I should be future proofed for a while, and I will have a lot of space too.
But upon doing research, people recommend the ZFS file system, but from the few searches I could find, ZFS does not seem to cooperate well with Windows based games, so for that reason I plan to go with ext4. Then again, the search results were from a couple of years ago, not sure if ZFS (which I have never used before) and Steam library are more compatible now.

This makes no sense and kinda' incoherent. If you're using a NAS, the file system does not matter from the point of view of the client system since it will be using a sharing protocol. Also, TrueNAS doesn't support anything besides ZFS and this is a TrueNAS forums... so mentioning Ext4 makes no sense.

I am going to be using the 750D case for the NAS, I have bought this HDD rack to expand the space HDD Rack , added a fan I had laying around to keep them cool.
I am not sure which motherboard and cpu to use so I would like advice on that.

IIRC, this case has pretty bad thermals and you're planning to throw in TEN HDD's in there.... Uh yeah, good luck, I hope the HDD's don't get cooked in there.

Since I plan to use the NAS also as a media server, I was planning on leaving the RX 570 GPU in, I thought the encoding from the GPU would remove some of the
work on the CPU side, most of the stuff I have at the moment is 720p and 1080p, but I do have a 4k TV and would like to get some 4k movies. If the RX 570 is overkill, I do have an MSi 1050Ti sitting on a shelf gathering dust, maybe that would be better?

In my opinion, this is really where consumer-grade Intel i5 (like yours) shines. Their support for QuickSync is excellent for applications like Plex transcoding.

I will be buying 2x128 SSDs, one for installing TrueNAS and the other for backup. Is that large enough or should I get 2x256Gbs?

TrueNAS install only requires 8 GB. The install size on my system doesn't even reach 3 GiB. Backup is really unnecessary and, in my opinion, a waste of an SSD since it is so easily recoverable if you regularly backup your config file.

Lastly, the PSU I think I will use will be the 750 watts, I think that should be enough?

The bigger concern really is less your capacity and more of... if you have enough SATA power cables. Most PSU's in that range will come with probably 8, maybe 10 SATA power ports max. Jerry-rigging more ports is generally not recommended, and quite frankly, dangerous if you don't know what you're doing.

Reading your port, I think you should take more time reading resources on this forum over watching YouTube videos. You seem to have a lot of misconceptions and half-baked understandings of what makes a good TrueNAS build.

 

[ChrisRJ]

Reading your port, I think you should take more time reading resources on this forum over watching YouTube videos. You seem to have a lot of misconceptions and half-baked understandings of what makes a good TrueNAS build.

That is indeed a problem with YouTube videos. Especially since people are usually interested to get things up and running only. But that is the easy part and by far not sufficient. Instead the NAS must be running stable even under adverse conditions. Because at the end of the you are not after views but a stable place for your data.

 

[Crossfader]

This makes no sense and kinda' incoherent. If you're using a NAS, the file system does not matter from the point of view of the client system since it will be using a sharing protocol. Also, TrueNAS doesn't support anything besides ZFS and this is a TrueNAS forums... so mentioning Ext4 makes no sense.

I was working from memory, but it seemed I could change the file system. Thank you for clarifying that.

In my opinion, it's better to not bother with HDD for games. Yes, they are large, but how many games do you ever play more than once? Steam download speeds are so fast that I usually never bother with more than 4-5 games installed at once. When I move on to a different game, I just uninstall the games that I no longer play and install the new one.

I'm someone who likes to revisit games I have previously played, and because I don't like to wait, I prefer to leave everything installed. Especially games that are 20 or 30Gb + (average game now seems to be 80-120Gb, really not fun downloading that). But thanks to what you said, I think I have an idea of what to do. I completely forgot that Steam allows me to backup my games, I guess I can push them to the NAS, uninstall it, and when I feel like playing again, install them from the backup, never tried it but can't be that hard.

IIRC, this case has pretty bad thermals and you're planning to throw in TEN HDD's in there.... Uh yeah, good luck, I hope the HDD's don't get cooked in there.

I think Corsair had two 750D cases, one with a cover with side vents, and the other was a front mesh which is what I got. It has 2x 140mm fans, and a 120 mm fan in the back. I did add two more 120 mm fans. One on the roof, pointing at the cpu cooler, and one on the new HDD rack. The case should have quite a bit of positive pressure. The HDD racks that came with it are 3 hdd vertical racks, two of them, they sit in front of the bottom 140 mm fan.
But reading what you said, I will upgrade these old fans, something with more flow, and remove the single 120mm fan on the roof, and add 2x 140 mm fans there, one pointing at the cpu (middle position) and one pointing at the new hdd rack (front position) to help the 120 mm fan that is in the new hdd rack keep cool the 4 HDDs i'll put in there.

TrueNAS install only requires 8 GB. The install size on my system doesn't even reach 3 GiB. Backup is really unnecessary and, in my opinion, a waste of an SSD since it is so easily recoverable if you regularly backup your config file.

Alright, i'll look for a small nvme, this will use power from the board and not from the sata power cables. Again, thank you very much for all your advice, you have been very helpful!!

The bigger concern really is less your capacity and more of... if you have enough SATA power cables. Most PSU's in that range will come with probably 8, maybe 10 SATA power ports max. Jerry-rigging more ports is generally not recommended, and quite frankly, dangerous if you don't know what you're doing.

Alright, I'll keep an eye on the system and PSU and it's consumption. When reading the quick hardware guide, it had a rule of thumb to consider 30W per HDD which would be a total of 300W just for that. When looking at WD Red Pro pdf, the specifications for average read/write watts was 6.1, and 3.6 at idle for the 16TB, so I adjusted for maybe 15 to 20 W per HDD perhaps a total of 200W which honestly sounds like mid-range GPU levels of power running through 3 x 6 pin sata cables, should be fine. The MSI R9 390X was a 320W card using 1x8 pin and 1x6 pin vga power cable. I'll use the 850W PSU, 3 hdd running of sata1, 3 hdd running of sata2, and 4 hdd running of sata3. Each cable has 3 outputs, so for the 4 hdd setup I'll use a splitter in one of the ports.
I think it will be fine, BUT, because of your warning, I will keep an eye on it.

That is indeed a problem with YouTube videos. Especially since people are usually interested to get things up and running only. But that is the easy part and by far not sufficient. Instead the NAS must be running stable even under adverse conditions. Because at the end of the you are not after views but a stable place for your data.

I am extremely green and honestly, very ignorant in most if not all areas. I'm going ahead with the build and see what happens, I expect to fail a lot, but learn along the way. The videos on youtube is how I came to find out about truenas.
I wanted something that would act like a driver, that Linux would see as a driver and I could mount it, and use it as any directory. Don't want to have many SSD's on my new gaming PC, would like to have everything in one place, but it still being pretty fast at transferring data and have it protected so I don't have to go around downloading everything that I lost, I do want protection too.
This is when I learned about NAS and came across videos talking about QNAS and Synology, I considered buying it but then a couple of videos talking about building a NAS appeared in my recommended feed and the DIY in me said why not re-purpose one of the PCs I'm putting away soon? So here I am.


I do have a few more questions if it isn't too much trouble, when I was watching a video about the installation of the TrueNAS software, during the installation it gives a local IP address at the beginning so I can then connect to it through a browser later. Does this IP address change if I ever turn the system off, for the purpose of cleaning the case or maybe moving? Is shutting it down one of those, "It's ok, but not recommended" type of situations?

Is the pool expandable? In the future, if I decide do add more HDDs, will TrueNAS be able to add them to the current pool? Or is it best to treat it as a new pool?

Also is the whole system transferable ? @Whattteva pointed out my case has some problems, i'm going to try to mitigate some of them, but in the future if I wish to get something better, a used server perhaps, can I transfer the HDDs and the driver that TrueNAS is installed (maybe an nvme) and have it boot just fine?

 

[Whattteva]

Alright, I'll keep an eye on the system and PSU and it's consumption. When reading the quick hardware guide, it had a rule of thumb to consider 30W per HDD which would be a total of 300W just for that. When looking at WD Red Pro pdf, the specifications for average read/write watts was 6.1, and 3.6 at idle for the 16TB, so I adjusted for maybe 15 to 20 W per HDD perhaps a total of 200W which honestly sounds like mid-range GPU levels of power running through 3 x 6 pin sata cables, should be fine. The MSI R9 390X was a 320W card using 1x8 pin and 1x6 pin vga power cable. I'll use the 850W PSU, 3 hdd running of sata1, 3 hdd running of sata2, and 4 hdd running of sata3. Each cable has 3 outputs, so for the 4 hdd setup I'll use a splitter in one of the ports.
I think it will be fine, BUT, because of your warning, I will keep an eye on it.

PSU use is a lot more nuanced than just adding up wattage. A PSU has several rails on it and what you need to pay more attention to is the individual rails and the current rating on each rail. Also, the reason I brought up the danger of daisy chaining ports is because there have been cases where people do that improperly and had the cables melt or even worse, catch on fire during high loads (current draw). Why do you think the PSU manufacturers give you multiple SATA cables instead of just giving you one long cable with 10-12 SATA ports on it, which would also cost them less.

I do have a few more questions if it isn't too much trouble, when I was watching a video about the installation of the TrueNAS software, during the installation it gives a local IP address at the beginning so I can then connect to it through a browser later. Does this IP address change if I ever turn the system off, for the purpose of cleaning the case or maybe moving? Is shutting it down one of those, "It's ok, but not recommended" type of situations?

The IP won't change if you make it a static IP either manually on the NAS machine itself or through static DHCP from your router.

Is the pool expandable? In the future, if I decide do add more HDDs, will TrueNAS be able to add them to the current pool? Or is it best to treat it as a new pool?

A pool is always expandable by adding more vdevs. However, a RAIDZ vdev cannot be expanded nor shrunk once it is created. The only way to expand its capacity is by replacing the drives and resilvering them one by one and you won't see the capacity increase until the last drive is replaced. Striped mirrors are what I run and what I feel give you the best balance between robustness, performance, and upgrade flexibility (though people in this forums seem allergic to it from what I've observed). You only have to resilver two at a time for upgrade or you can just add another vdev of 2. It's much easier to stagger your upgrades as buying 3+ drives at a time can get very costly. You also get the best overall performance out of striped mirrors. Resilvers and degraded performance are also orders of magnitudes faster.

Also is the whole system transferable ? @Whattteva pointed out my case has some problems, i'm going to try to mitigate some of them, but in the future if I wish to get something better, a used server perhaps, can I transfer the HDDs and the driver that TrueNAS is installed (maybe an nvme) and have it boot just fine?

As long as you set it up correctly without using crazy shenanigans like USB drives or cheap SATA port multipliers or fancy RAID controllers, they will move from one system to the next with no issues. Also, try to stay away from advanced features like dedups, encryption, etc. The less features you use on the pool, the more portable it is. This is also one of those few rare cases where you don't want to get updates for the latest and greatest as a pool upgrade is a one-way street and irreversible.

 

[ChrisRJ]

When looking at WD Red Pro pdf, the specifications for average read/write watts was 6.1, and 3.6 at idle for the 16TB, [..]

Those are not the relevant numbers for sizing the PSU, because they were measured with the drive up and running. What you need to look at instead is the power draw during spin-up. The latter is considerably bigger, usually around 20 W.

Alright, I'll keep an eye on the system and PSU and it's consumption.

Easier said than done, unfortunately. The commonly available power monitors are not suitable for this. You would at least need something that is able to record the wattage with a pretty fine time resolution to catch the initial power draw. I am not an electrical engineer, so there is likely more to consider. Plus the gear to measure will be expensive.

The bottom line is that those things require more care than is obvious at a first glance. Since you seem to be aware of that, I would say that you are on a good way. What I can highly recommend is to spend a lot of time here on the forum. Just by reading you will learn a ton of stuff.

 

[jgreco]

Alright, I'll keep an eye on the system and PSU and it's consumption. When reading the quick hardware guide, it had a rule of thumb to consider 30W per HDD which would be a total of 300W just for that. When looking at WD Red Pro pdf, the specifications for average read/write watts was 6.1, and 3.6 at idle for the 16TB, so I adjusted for maybe 15 to 20 W per HDD perhaps a total of 200W which honestly sounds like mid-range GPU levels of power running through 3 x 6 pin sata cables, should be fine. The MSI R9 390X was a 320W card using 1x8 pin and 1x6 pin vga power cable. I'll use the 850W PSU, 3 hdd running of sata1, 3 hdd running of sata2, and 4 hdd running of sata3. Each cable has 3 outputs, so for the 4 hdd setup I'll use a splitter in one of the ports.
I think it will be fine, BUT, because of your warning, I will keep an eye on it.

We do have an article on the topic.

Proper Power Supply Sizing Guidance

I've seen about 1,000 threads like this one where people decide that they can power a dozen hard drives off a 360 watt supply. DO NOT DO THIS. I've seen another 1,000 threads where people decide to buy the cheapest power supply that they can...

www.truenas.com

 

[Davvo]

Why is this in off-topic?
What you want to do with steam is easily done, you just need to have a share (SMB or NFS depending on your OS) and put the steam library in that path.

Please read the following resources:

Show : General Knowledge

Introduction to ZFS

This is a short introduction to ZFS. It is really only intended to convey the bare minimum knowledge needed to start diving into ZFS and is in no way meant to cut Michael W. Lucas' and Allan Jude's book income. It is a bit of a spiritual...

www.truenas.com

ZFS Storage Pool Layout

This amazing document, created by iXsystems in February 2022 as a "White Paper", cleanly explains how to qualify pool performance touching briefly on how ZFS stores data and presents the advantages, performance and disadvantages of each pool...

www.truenas.com

Show : Hardware Knowledge

Don't be afraid to be SAS-sy ... a primer on basic SAS and SATA

With the introduction of SAS 12Gbps, seems like "it's time" to do a braindump on SAS. Work in progress, as usual. History By the late '90's, SCSI and PATA were the dominant technologies to attach disks. Both were parallel bus multiple drop topologies and this kind of sucked. SATA and Serial...

www.truenas.com

What's all the noise about HBA's, and why can't I use a RAID controller?

This is relevant to FreeNAS and TrueNAS CORE. Some parts of it might also be relevant to Scale, but I don't really know how reliable the Linux drivers are. 1) An HBA is a Host Bus Adapter. This is a controller that allows SAS and SATA devices to be attached to, and communicate directly with...

www.truenas.com

Multiply your problems with SATA Port Multipliers and cheap SATA controllers

In the last year or two, we've had a resurgence of users asking about SATA Port Multipliers and cheap SATA controllers. Please, do NOT use port multipliers, and use cheap SATA controllers only after extensive research. SATA controllers and SATA...

www.truenas.com

Is my Realtek ethernet really that bad?

One of the longest running issues faced here in the forums may be people who come to these forums, wanting to recycle an old PC into a NAS. In general, this is a bad idea because typical PC hardware isn't optimized towards the task. However...

www.truenas.com

Hardware Recommendations Guide

This is the latest edition of the FreeNAS Community hardware recommendations guide. The current major version is R2, dated January 2021, with the last minor update on 2021-01-24. The format has moved away from the forum post form factor, to...

www.truenas.com

Hardware Buying Guide - some tips for not getting ripped off

I've been giving this information out piecemeal for years, and should maybe have it summarized in one place. There's been a lot of people who are wary of secondary market sources for hardware, such as eBay, due to bad experiences with other...

www.truenas.com

Fake server cards

Some time ago, forum frequenter @artlessknave kindly sent me a pair of LSI HBA cards that had failed to work out in a FreeNAS build. Having suspected that these were fakes, I asked for them to be shipped here for comparison. However, COVID...

www.truenas.com

For more knowledge you can look directly in the resource section or in my signature.

 

[jgreco]

Why is this in off-topic?

Probably because that's because where it was posted. It can be moved. The forums list is a bit of a mess right now and it isn't clear where the best place to post it would be though.

 

[Crossfader]

Hello people, coming back to let you know that it has been built, and it is working!!!

Made a set of mistakes along the way, specially hardware wise. But I'm happy with the build, and quite impressed with the GUI, although I don't understand a lot of it since I'm completely new to networks.
What I was most impressed was the write speeds, I saw a peak of 370 MiB/s, that is pretty fast!!

I do have one problem, when I first installed TrueNAS, and using the motherboard's ethernet port, I went to the Plugins section and saw all the available plugins offered by iXsystems and the community.

After I replaced the Asus XG-C100C with an Intel X550-T1 because TrueNAS would not recognise the Asus card, created an account, set a pool, sharing, storage, interface, static IP, i noticed that the Plugins give me an error, and also if I try to check for updates.

This is the error I get when I select Plugins:

Error: Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/local/lib/python3.9/site-packages/middlewared/job.py", line 355, in run await self.future File "/usr/local/lib/python3.9/site-packages/middlewared/job.py", line 393, in __run_body rv = await self.middleware.run_in_thread(self.method, *([self] + args)) File "/usr/local/lib/python3.9/site-packages/middlewared/main.py", line 1155, in run_in_thread return await self.run_in_executor(self.thread_pool_executor, method, *args, **kwargs) File "/usr/local/lib/python3.9/site-packages/middlewared/main.py", line 1152, in run_in_executor return await loop.run_in_executor(pool, functools.partial(method, *args, **kwargs)) File "/usr/local/lib/python3.9/concurrent/futures/thread.py", line 58, in run result = self.fn(*self.args, **self.kwargs) File "/usr/local/lib/python3.9/site-packages/middlewared/schema.py", line 979, in nf return f(*args, **kwargs) File "/usr/local/lib/python3.9/site-packages/middlewared/plugins/jail_freebsd.py", line 372, in available return self.middleware.call_sync('plugin.available_impl', options).wait_sync(raise_error=True) File "/usr/local/lib/python3.9/site-packages/middlewared/job.py", line 326, in wait_sync raise CallError(self.error) middlewared.service_exception.CallError: [EFAULT] Cmd('git') failed due to: exit code(128) cmdline: git clone -v https://github.com/freenas/iocage-ix-plugins.git /mnt/Home-Nas/iocage/.plugins/github_com_freenas_iocage-ix-plugins_git stderr: 'Cloning into '/mnt/Home-Nas/iocage/.plugins/github_com_freenas_iocage-ix-plugins_git'... fatal: unable to access 'https://github.com/freenas/iocage-ix-plugins.git/': Could not resolve host: github.com

It seems it's trying to access the internet, which it should be able to, since the NAS is connected to my router directly.

Did I miss a step?

Edit: Forgot to mention I am using TrueNAS Core, not sure if that makes a difference.

 

[Davvo]

Hello people, coming back to let you know that it has been built, and it is working!!!

Glad to hear it.

Made a set of mistakes along the way [...] I went to the Plugins section and saw all the available plugins offered by iXsystems and the community.

Yup, big mistake.
CORE's plugins are a massive pain to deal with.

It seems it's trying to access the internet, which it should be able to, since the NAS is connected to my router directly.

Did I miss a step?

Yes, since you changed the network interface you probably need to reconfigure each plugin (which I have totally no idea how to).
Kinda same as with VMs.

 

[Whattteva]

I would forego with the plugins and just do everything yourself within its own jail.

Yes, it's harder to setup and requires learning, but that learning experience is very valuable and a lot of that shell skills will be transferable to other things you may do (Linux admin, etc.).

You will have more complete control of what goes in and out, what packages are installed, how it's installed, etc.

Best of luck to you.

 

[Crossfader]

The reason I posted the error I got with the plugins was to show the problem I am having, not that plugins is broken, I guess I explained the problem poorly.

TrueNAS core can't connect to the internet, that is the problem I am having, it is why I said that it can't even look for updates.

The error there showed it is trying to connect to github to pull the latest list of available plugins and it can't connect, this is why I said I might have missed a step, since this is my first time building a NAS.

I did come across a thread where people pointed out it is something to do with the global configuration in the Network, which I have not touched, all I did was edit the interface, and disable DHCP and create a local static IP Address.
That thread talked about DNS Servers, but I have no idea what I need to do with that and what Nameservers are for.

I don't understand why it was able to connect to the internet before I created a pool, storage and static IP, and now it can't.
I swear I saw the list of plugins offered by iXsystems and the Community at the beginning, and now all I get are error messages when I go to Plugins, when I try to update TrueNAS core, or when I select Jails.

The Nas communicates without an issue with my PC, the storage is mounted, I can access my files. I just expected the Nas to behave like any other device I connect to my router using an ethernet cable, it just access the internet without needing to setup anything else. Like my PC or any console.

Just to be clear, LAN is fine, WAN is not.


UPDATE:
Figured out the problem.

I found this thread:

Reddit - Dive into anything

www.reddit.com

Apparently my router has been blocking static IPs, I have an asus router, the GT-AXE16000.
I went to LAN -> Route , in Basic Config, Enable static routes. The router will reboot after.

Then in the NAS:
Network -> Global Configuration , in Default Gateway, set IPv4 Default Gateway to your router's local IP, and the Nameserver 1, to your router's local IP. Not sure if Nameserver needs to be done, but I followed the steps from a guide and it works.


Sorry to ask this, but what is the DNS Servers for? I'm just curious.


Anyways, thanks everyone!!

 

[jgreco]

Sorry to ask this, but what is the DNS Servers for? I'm just curious.

DNS servers translate domain names like "www.apple.com" into IP addresses that a computer can connect to over the network. You can either use the DNS servers your ISP has provided to you (you might need to ask their tech support) or you can use publicly accessible ones such as Google's "8.8.8.8" service, one of a variety of commonly used ones.