Installing Truenas Scale on USB flash drives. Is it possible?

[jjstecchino]

This weekend I wanted to try Scale on my hardware running Truenas 12 U1.
The setup I like is booting in EFI mode from 2 mirrored usb flash drives.
I do this as the usb drives act as physical keys for my nas. If I turn of the system and remove the keys, my encrypted pools would remain unaccusable to anybody.
And for the curious... yes I keep the pool keys backed up somewhere else as well. So if the event both usb flash fail simultaneously nothing is lost other than time recreating the system.

I wanted to replicate this setup with scale.
The installer seems to allow the creation of a mirrored boot drive allowing you to select multiple disks, however it doesn't show my 2 installed flash drives. I dont know if it is a bug or is it by design as I realized booting from usb flash it is frowned upon.
If I drop to a console I can see and access the flash drives.
It would be very nice to be able to continue using usb drives if possible. Is there any workaround?

 

[ornias]

Done so myself during ALPHA 20.10
Didn't require any workaround, so might be system related.
Just be aware it isn't best-practice to do so and don't expect many people here willing to help you troubleshoot if you run into issues along the way.

 

[jjstecchino]

On second thought it is a bug on the installer.
I have a bunch of drives so that the drives assignment goes past sdz. In particular the usb deives are sdad and sdae. I have noticed the installer list all drives up to sdz but it doesn't list drives with 4 letter assignment i.e. sdaa, sdab etc.
In fact as it turned of a bunch of drives and restarted the system the usb drives, now recognized in the 3 letter range, were listed and the installer did work. Ill file a bug on Jira.

 

[jjstecchino]

Done so myself during ALPHA 20.10
Didn't require any workaround, so might be system related.
Just be aware it isn't best-practice to do so and don't expect many people here willing to help you troubleshoot if you run into issues along the way.

Thanks for the reply.

 

[jjstecchino]

Bug link [NAS-109300] Truenas Scale installer install disk selection does not list drives past sdz i.e. sdaa... - iX - Bug Tracker (Jira) (ixsystems.com)