Two TrueNAS Core servers, one server doing all the sharing, posible?

[jallis]

Is it possible to have two (or more) servers, with different datasets, but have one server doing all the actual sharing, on behalf of the other servers?

So that users only have to work with one server "nas", and not "nas1", "nas2", etc depending on which resource they want to access?

I'm mostly interested in samba shares.

 

[Samuel Tai]

Not easily. You'll likely have to export the shares from the other servers to your master server via NFS or SMB, and then share out those exports via SMB from your master. However, the GUI won't let you do this, so you'll have to do it from CLI.

What you want is actually achievable in TrueNAS Scale, but that's still alpha code, not suitable for production.

 

[jallis]

Thank you.

I guess I can solve this using NFS mount from one server to the other as you describe...

I just wanted to make sure I did not overlook a more obvious solution.

 

[Samuel Tai]

Rather than doing a Frankenshare like this, why not front-end both servers with a hardware load-balancer, that will know how to redirect to the correct backend based on the share requested?

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Importing via NFS and re-sharing via SMB is bound to lead to all sorts of "interesting" character set problems, I guess. What is the use case behind this setup?

 

[jallis]

Rather than doing a Frankenshare like this, why not front-end both servers with a hardware load-balancer, that will know how to redirect to the correct backend based on the share requested?

Using a load-balancer as you describe is all new to me.

How would this work in practice? Is there a specific product you can recommend?

 

[jallis]

Importing via NFS and re-sharing via SMB is bound to lead to all sorts of "interesting" character set problems, I guess. What is the use case behind this setup?

Use case:

We are currently running a single Freenas server. Users can access share at \\nas\<name-of-share>\

We are about to setup an additional server and move some of the data over to the new server.

For a best possible user experience I still want all shares to be available at \\nas\<name-of-share>\, and not \\nas2\<name-of-share>\

 

[Chatskiy]

or try samba dfs config https://blog.udance.com.au/2019/03/19/freenas-and-samba-standalone-dfs/

 

[Samuel Tai]

@Chatskiy's link to @Basil Hendroff's writeup on enabling DFS is the best way to go forward.

 

[lroyb]

have you not thought about using iscsi? create a zfs dataset and use it for iscsi locations, then mount the iscsi location on the 1st server that you use, then you'll be able to access the additional storage from the 2nd server as if it was physically attached to your primary server, that way it will also keep your username/passwords in sync too.

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

have you not thought about using iscsi?

There is no UI accessible iSCSI client in TrueNAS. You could do it from the command line and with startup tasks. But it would introduce a terrible amount of overhead to export a Zvol via iSCSI to use as part of another Zpool.

 

[Chatskiy]

@Chatskiy's link to @Basil Hendroff's writeup on enabling DFS is the best way to go forward.

Ha! Didn't realise he is a local :)
DFS is tailor-made for just such a scenario and we have an in-house expert - should be a no-brainer