Is TrueNAS a right fit for my situation?

[Green Hippo Tees]

Hello everyone,

This is my first post on these forums. I want to explain what I had, what I used in the past and what I am hoping to use TrueNAS for. Hopefully I can get a little insight here as to what to setup. I appreciate any help with this project!

What I had:
I own and operate a screen printing and embroidery company. Back around 2014 I purchased a 2TB Western Digital My Cloud device from an office supply store. I hooked it into our network back then and it worked flawlessly. I liked the feature that I could also save and access certain directories on my phone as well (ones that I had setup to allow). With the WD My Cloud, it was setup with a directory that was loaded with tons of music. That music directory was accessible on any office computer, and we could have play list or add more music to it. The music folder was just a common share folder and we had backups that we kept manually. Next on my main art computer I have a folder for my business. In that folder are all of my company files and all of my customer's artwork, etc. The folder was on my computer but is synced with the WD My Cloud and was my backup for these files (the files were both on my computer and the cloud). Next, each office computer had a similar folder that synced for their files. I could go to any computer and with a name and password could access anything that I wanted.

Why I am changing:
I had to close my business in 2018 due to some extreme circumstances. Long story short, I reopened in November 2019 not knowing we were going to have a pandemic upon us soon after. While re-opening, at first, I only had all of our aging computers to hook up and get started at a new location. The WD My Cloud when hooked up needed an update. I was quickly notified that the WD My Cloud device was at the end of its life and needed to be replaced. I don't like how Western Digital did that and I really don't want to buy and setup a new WD My Cloud server every few years. This is why I have looked at other options.

What I want to do:
I have been testing TrueNAS. (1) I want to have directories on certain computers attached to my network that sync with TrueNAS and maintain files/data on both the specific computer and TrueNAS server for backup. (2) I want to copy our music to a TrueNAS directory that can be accessed from any computer but not stored anywhere except the TrueNAS server. This might be confusing to a lot of people but only a couple of radio stations come in where we are located. We setup playlist and listed to our music commercial free. We also have people here that speak other languages and the music folders contain their music as well. As of today, we are using, and iPod touch hooked up to a speaker (made for it). But we do not like the iPod setup we are using right now. A lot of people suggested Pandora, YouTube etc... yes we have and do but not really what we like to do on a daily basis. Also, free versions and adds are a pain. (3) Virtual Machine, I have been testing this on TrueNAS and I really like this! I want to install our Quickbooks POS in the Windows VM so that it can be accessed anywhere on our network.

Our Hardware:
I am not using a huge powerful fancy setup. I have TrueNAS on a Lenovo M93 Tiny, Intel i5-4570T processor with 12GB ram. This is going to be in a VESA mount and screwed to the wall up above the ceiling tiles. It has an internal hard drive and a USB SSD drive hooked to it. My plan and hope if to be able to turn this on and off remotely. There will probably be a small APC UPS mounted on the wall next to the Lenovo Tiny computer.

The current problems with TrueNAS (that I am having):
I downloaded and did a fresh install of the latest TrueNAS Core stable version. I followed YouTube videos to get this done. I have zero experience with FreeBSD. I do have strong experience with Windows, DOS, MacOS. I have some experience with Linux, I have used several distros over the years but currently use Ubuntu quite a bit. After installing TrueNAS I had to watch videos to make the IP Static, that is done. One of my biggest problems is that TrueNAS won't check for updates, there is a network problem. For days and every single Google search in the world, I haven't been able to get the update working. I found that in the TrueNAS settings, the date, time and time zone are perfect. When I went to shell and typed "date" it was completely wrong and had a date of 2011. The solution was simple but out of the dozens of posts about the date problem there wasn't one bit of help on exactly step by step how to do it. For me, all I had to do was type: "date 2301211334" into shell and boom, date and time corrected. That information shouldn't have been so difficult to come across. Even with the proper date, update dousn't work. As for NTP servers, I tried lot of them. None seem to work, I originally believed that I couldn't get on the outside network and that all of internet in TrueNAS wasn't working. But this isn't the case. I have a VM setup with Windows 10 Pro and i used the VirtIO drivers. In the VM the internet works flawlessly. Next issue but not a big issue is that TrueNAS forced me to use 2 hard drives to get this setup. I don't really want to put a computer up in the ceiling with a bunch of portable SSDs hooked up to it, but whatever.

This is where I am at. I really like the idea of the VMs in TrueNAS. I want to be able to do sync folders soon, I think I need to try "Syncthing". Accessing certain folders remotely outside of network is something I would like but only if it is very secure. One of my concerns is that as I am learning this and trying to set up TrueNAS, people like me that post questions get answers that assume they are FreeBSD experts or know this system. It took me 2 days and several hours of reading and trying to get the date set in shell but I had to learn to paste as Shift+Insert, this was all new to me. The reason for my post here is to get advice and see if TrueNAS is right for me? Of course, I understand that TrueNAS is free, and it isn't just going to be plug and play. I appreciate any help or thoughts or suggestions.

Thank you everyone!
Jim

 

[garm]

Hi and welcome to the forum

What I had:

TrueNAS isnt a turnkey solution like the Western Digital My Cloud you used in the past, it comes with a significant sys admin workload.

I want to have directories[..] that sync with TrueNAS

Syncing is one of those things that will require you to set up some kind of server-client architecture on top of TrueNAS.

copy our music to a TrueNAS directory that can be accessed from any computer but not stored anywhere except the TrueNAS server

This is how network sharing works, you specify a folder on the NAS that you want to share and all the computers that connect to the share will see that as a local folder, but noone will have the files on their client.

Lenovo M93 Tiny, Intel i5-4570T

This wont be a very powerfull machine and with only 12 GB or RAM and two cores you will struggle to manage both TrueNAS and a Windows Server VM.

but only if it is very secure.

This is going to be a challenge with the equipment you have, TrueNAS do not come with its own firewall and VMs are resource heavy, you need to look into jails and you need to start looking at security. You need a enterprise grade firewall like PFSense (and know how to use it) between your ISP and TrueNAS. For remote access you need some way of securely accept requests from WAN (wireguard, IPsec, zerotier). But you also need security in depth for any service remotely accessible. And you will need physical security as well.

It has an internal hard drive and a USB SSD drive hooked to it

This is massively inadequate... you do not want to hook up disks for vdevs over USB... and you need more then one disk, minimum two, per pool to get basic data integrity protection. If data integrity isn't something you care about and VM is your main focus then maybe running Proxmox or something similar is better

 

[Arwen]

I agree with @garm, your suggested server is not suitable for TrueNAS, (Core or SCALE). In essence, TrueNAS was designed for Enterprise use, as was ZFS used in TrueNAS. While both TrueNAS & ZFS can be used in very low end PCs or servers, the experience will be less than ideal. Further, without redundancy you have a data risk that most people here in the forums would not take.

Basically, TrueNAS is simply not designed for very low end servers. It CAN work on low end servers, but it's the user's risk. We in the forums don't want to see the user here a year from now requesting assistance because that low end server blew up. (Or worse, having data loss...) We tend to be conservative because we "love our data".

 

[Green Hippo Tees]

This wont be a very powerfull machine and with only 12 GB or RAM and two cores you will struggle to manage both TrueNAS and a Windows Server VM.

I agree with @garm, your suggested server is not suitable for TrueNAS, (Core or SCALE). In essence, TrueNAS was designed for Enterprise use, as was ZFS used in TrueNAS. While both TrueNAS & ZFS can be used in very low end PCs or servers, the experience will be less than ideal. Further, without redundancy you have a data risk that most people here in the forums would not take.

Basically, TrueNAS is simply not designed for very low end servers. It CAN work on low end servers, but it's the user's risk. We in the forums don't want to see the user here a year from now requesting assistance because that low end server blew up. (Or worse, having data loss...) We tend to be conservative because we "love our data".

I agree with you both @garm & @Arwen. Since 2019 I have upgraded all of the tech at our business. All new computers with Windows 11 & MacOS Ventura. I have data back-up practices in place, and we store our data in multiple locations. These backups are not automatic, we do this manually and habitually. I am very comfortable with our backups being safe and current. I know that this doesn't make sense to use a computer worth all of $20. I'm just trying something different, and new and hoping for something similar to what we used to have. But this is not any high-end enterprise use here. There are 3 people that work here.

@garm mentioned: Proxmox. I checked their website and did a little bit of reading. I'll check it out but honestly it doesn't look all that interesting.

With the TrueNAS setup that I have right now, the VM with Windows 10 works surprisingly well. I fully understand this is not a powerful or ideal setup but it performs really good in my opinion.

I appreciate this advice and help. I will setup and try Proxmox. Out of curiosity, is there anything maybe that is just a simple and quick solution? Like I mentioned, I could just buy another WD My Cloud, but I don't want to do that every few years. Also, keep in mind this isn't for our main backup, this is more or less another redundancy. It's mainly more of a convenience for our office for filesharing purposes, and truly this is what it's main purpose will be overall.

Thanks again!
Jim

 

[garm]

I am very comfortable with our backups being safe and current

These backups are not automatic, we do this manually

Those two statements are mutually exclusive

this is not any high-end enterprise use here

I dont agree, its either doing something important or you shouldn't do it at all..

I could just buy another WD My Cloud

I really dont see why you would bother with any consumer NAS if your data is already backed up?