I think this would be *VERY* helpful for all users

[winnielinnie]

An online UI interactive "demo".

Here is an example of this concept: https://demoui.asus.com​

Hear me out: It would only be the surface UI elements of the TrueNAS Core/SCALE web UI.

Nothing "virtual". Nothing runs in the background. Just a simple "clickable" skeleton web page.

This would allow users, new and longstanding, to explore the web UI with each iteration of TrueNAS Core/SCALE. (Especially useful for SCALE.)

No need to hunt the web for screenshots of different menus and pages. No need to install on a VM. (Core users can help with surface-level problems for SCALE users, and vice versa the other way around.)

Sure, we have the "Docs", but they are a hit-or-miss, nor do they offer the "hands on" feel that you get from an interactive demo UI.

This can also be used to assist in troubleshooting, as well as finding superficial "bugs" such as tooltip typos or inaccurate wording.

Is this even feasible? Is the web UI portion of the codebase "detachable" in a sense that it can be broken off as an interactive "dummy" website? Wouldn't it be very lightweight?

 

[WI_Hedgehog]

There's this site called YouTube....

 

[LarsR]

Yeah there is, but youtube is not interactive.
watching a "tutorial" on YouTube is different then an interactive "demo" where you can click on everything yourself instead of relying on the person who made the video to go to exactly the menu point you need.

 

[winnielinnie]

There's this site called YouTube....

Where new users hop onto the fast lane for breaking their system? Besides, they use the YouTube videos to simply "tell me what to do" rather than explore an interactive interface to get a "feel" of the layout, structure, menus, etc.

Here's an example: https://demoui.asus.com

 

[WI_Hedgehog]

Where new users hop onto the fast lane for breaking their system? Besides, they use the YouTube videos to simply "tell me what to do" rather than explore an interactive interface to get a "feel" of the layout, structure, menus, etc.

Here's an example: https://demoui.asus.com

That's quite impressive, though not nearly as rewarding as when I did a TrueNAS test install and 7 minutes in connected to the web-UI and the well-designed and attractive interface loaded with everything I needed to spend the next seven minutes setting up data pools and shoving test data into them, which was snapshotted after a few clicks in the UI combined with 17 keypresses. iX has done such a great job at making deployment "easy' that I'm fairly convinced if they to do any more I'd have to offer them tea and biscuits because they'd be pressing the keys for me.

Granted, iX community members like yourself have provided volumes of information on how to do just about any practical task easily and affordably, for which I'm very thankful. So, thank you.

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

What about a ready to run virtual appliance or Vagrant project? I did one for OPNsense. Using it boils down to:

Code:

git clone git@github.com:punktDe/vagrant-opnsense.git
cd vagrant-opnsense
vagrant up

Voila - running firewall on your desktop/laptop system.

 

[Arwen]

It is also reasonable to load a VM, (like with the free VirtualBox), and have some fake disks. You won't get the SMART stuff working. But it does appear to be a great way to have actual data disks to work with.

For example, my TrueNAS SCALE VM allowed me to verify you can't Mirror L2ARC. That came up a few weeks ago, and I KNEW it had not been possible in the past. Sun considered loss of a L2ARC device as non-critical because it had a fall back to the pool data.