Why do members here use TrueNAS? (Versus CLI tools)

[nr5463]

About 95% of answers to questions here refer to CLI tools.
Which made me wonder why people use TrueNAS in the first place.
Wouldn’t it be simpler to just install those various zfs tools and be done with it? Or are there so many of them that installing TrueNAS is just more convenient?

 

[sretalla]

About 95% of answers to questions here refer to CLI tools.

Instructing folks and getting information out of them via screenshot is painful.

Those of us trying to help like to have the information we're seeking in text, not pictures as we can use copy/paste to help identify what to do next.

We do sometimes refer to the GUI documentation and certainly say often enough to use the GUI for a whole bunch of the steps that are best done there.

There's no reason you can't install debian (or compile your own variant) with all the modules and reach the same end results with freely available tools (just without the GUI, middleware and API).

That involves a lot more understanding and is a much steeper learning curve for somebody new to the concepts of ZFS, UNIX/Linux and more generally NAS.

 

[jgreco]

CLI tools? Seriously?

The problem with a NAS is that there are MANY interoperating bits that ALL need to work correctly together. That's the value of the appliance. While you might occasionally touch a CLI tool to do some unusual function, you've totally dismissed the complex stuff that has been handled for you. If you just "installed those various zfs tools", which one of those handles sending you e-mail alerts when there's a problem? Which one of them gathers and logs statistics? How do you deal with snapshot management? Replication? Previous versions history integration with Samba? I suggest you read through the manual and figure out how you'd implement the features you need if you were rolling your own.

 

[NugentS]

1. I like a GUI
2. I like that IX are responsive to bugs / errors, even if sometimes:
   1. They refuse to fix a bug
   2. I am a total moron and its user error
3. As an appliance I shouldn't have to worry about software not working with software
4. I can learn about the CLI slowly

 

[sretalla]

An analogy...

I have a problem with my car:

Can you tell me what's wrong with it based on this picture?

If I connected my car to a diagnostic terminal and gave you the output from it, would that be more useful?

 

[WI_Hedgehog]

About 95% of answers to questions here refer to CLI tools.
Which made me wonder why people use TrueNAS in the first place.
Wouldn’t it be simpler to just install those various zfs tools and be done with it? Or are there so many of them that installing TrueNAS is just more convenient?

Valid question.

I'm a CLI guy, loving scripts and config files for getting things done vs. Windows where the registry obfuscates settings and makes things needlessly complex.

HOWEVER, iXsystems created an awesome set of appliances where I can easily see what's going on via GUI, and they work. At the end of the day my objective is to have a working system, and TrueNAS does that.

 

[nr5463]

I understand the concept of asking for logs for debugging but in a bunch of threads that I’ve stumbled across, users are also told to do various management tasks using CLI tools. But maybe that is in fact rarer than I got the impression.

 

[nr5463]

Selection bias and whatnot… (This message is going to look really odd if it will be approved before the previous one. )

 

[sretalla]

in a bunch of threads that I’ve stumbled across, users are also told to do various management tasks using CLI tools

Back to my point:

Is it easier to explain:

Go to Pools | select the cogwheel on the top right of your pool, then select Status and take a screenshot of what you see there.

or

show the output of zpool status

 

[HoneyBadger]

I understand the concept of asking for logs for debugging but in a bunch of threads that I’ve stumbled across, users are also told to do various management tasks using CLI tools. But maybe that is in fact rarer than I got the impression.

It's a bit of a selection bias here, as you'll-

[pauses, approves your newest message]

Well, you nailed it. If everything is working well, and can be managed through the UI, they won't be posting. ;)

Text is, as @sretalla points out, often a lot easier for us to comb through and find the results we need. While I could make a pass with OCR software over a screenshot and then filter and format out the information I want, text logs win big when it comes to pure density-of-information and ease of piping through a shell/grep/paste-into-an-editor and Ctrl+F friendliness.

 

[Arwen]

One other really important, drop dead feature of an Appliance verses Roll Your Own, is backup & restore.

For TrueNAS, recovery of a failed boot device is as simple as:

1. Get replacement boot device
2. Load TrueNAS back on it
3. Restore configuration, (probably takes a reboot or 2)
4. Back in business

Of course, this assumes you have backed up your configuration... But, it is such a small file you can have a cronjob store copies on your data pool too.


For a Roll Your Own NAS, you either have to write down what you did to configure your custom NAS. Or perform a full backup of your boot device, regularly. Especially after any changes. Plus, do to potential backup failures, you need multiple backups.

As far as I know, their are ZERO Linux distros out their that will allow backing up 100% of the non-stock configuration, for easy restore to a new OS load. To be fair, their are so many Linux distros, you might find one that will save it's configuration similar to the way TrueNAS does it.

Of course, since it is a Linux distro, even if one existed to allow backup of just the configuration, can you be 100% certain YOU, the USER, have all your changes in the configuration backup?

 

[WI_Hedgehog]

One other really important, drop dead feature of an Appliance verses Roll Your Own, is backup & restore.

For TrueNAS, recovery of a failed boot device is as simple as:

1. Get replacement boot device
2. Load TrueNAS back on it
3. Restore configuration, (probably takes a reboot or 2)
4. Back in business

I run a triple-mirror, so recovery of a failed boot drive is as simple as hot-swapping in the replacement and a few menu clicks. Other members repeatedly said how cheap SSDs are, so why not?

 

[HoneyBadger]

I run a triple-mirror, so recovery of a failed boot drive is as simple as hot-swapping in the replacement and a few menu clicks. Other members repeatedly said how cheap SSDs are, so why not?

Redundant boot devices are great, but "RAID is not backup" is a phrase often used. If somehow, through a misconfiguration or other issue, you manage to push a bad setting or "break" the software, having that same fault replicated across three disks doesn't correct it or allow you to easily revert. Periodic configuration backups are valuable as a second layer of defense-in-depth to let you quick revert/restore to a known good state.

(But you're running two more boot devices than most TrueNAS end-users run, so you're vanishingly unlikely to have a cosmic ray or errant bad block of NAND put you into said "bad state" to begin with!)

 

[winnielinnie]

Can you tell me what's wrong with it based on this picture?

The hood is open. This causes air drag, which decreases fuel efficiency, especially at higher speeds.

 

[sretalla]

The hood is open. This causes air drag, which decreases fuel efficiency, especially at higher speeds.

Also causes difficulty to see the road through the windscreen...

 

[winnielinnie]

Also causes difficulty to see the road through the windscreen...

I only focus on the important problems. Don't waste my time with with "minor" / "low impact" bugs.

After we resolve the fuel efficiency issue, then we'll consider your other inconvenient bug. (Maybe.)

#Triage #DevLife

 

[somethingweird]

For the next person who replaces me, at least make their lives easier if they don't know cli.

 

[danb35]

Well, you nailed it. If everything is working well, and can be managed through the UI, they won't be posting. ;)

I think this is really it. Speaking for myself, I manage my NAS through the GUI 99% of the time. I generally recommend other users manage their NASen through the GUI. But smartctl -a /dev/foo gets better information faster when there's a disk problem than screenshots in the GUI.

 

[WI_Hedgehog]

Redundant boot devices are great, but "RAID is not backup" is a phrase often used. If somehow, through a misconfiguration or other issue, you manage to push a bad setting or "break" the software, having that same fault replicated across three disks doesn't correct it or allow you to easily revert. Periodic configuration backups are valuable as a second layer of defense-in-depth to let you quick revert/restore to a known good state.

(But you're running two more boot devices than most TrueNAS end-users run, so you're vanishingly unlikely to have a cosmic ray or errant bad block of NAND put you into said "bad state" to begin with!)

Whoa, whoa, whoaaaaa. I'm always talking about making 3-2-1 backups and how easily TrueNAS can help make this happen. I do wish iXsystems would add LTO tape support, but that's kind of a personal pipe-dream honestly.

The only thing I was commenting on is how easy TrueNAS makes fault-tolerance on the boot device. My server BIOS has Primary and Secondary boot device selection for the on-board SATA, and the LSI card has it for SAS, so if one drives fails I should be good on the boot, though even if two drives fail I shouldn't have to reboot, just slam in one of the standby drives.

However, the reason I triple-boot is it seems if there is only a single OS drive and the OS drive fails it could result in the ZFS data pool corrupting, and that's bad. If there are two OS drives the data shouldn't corrupt unless a second OS drive fails during rebuild, hence my using a third OS drive which in that case should mean the rebuild finishes and the server is back up to two OS drives. I probably have another OS drive laying around to bring the count back up to three working OS drives, though if not there's most likely time to get a replacement shipped and installed before another OS drive goes down. Since 2.5" SATA SDD can be hung off either a SATA or SAS controller my system can manage three boot drives, which for others is not necessarily the case.

Anyway, it's good you mention "RAID is not backup," backups should get as much attention and data verification/validation as the NAS drives.