[HN Gopher] How I installed TrueNAS on my new ASUSTOR NAS
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How I installed TrueNAS on my new ASUSTOR NAS
Author : ingve
Score : 50 points
Date : 2023-06-21 19:09 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.jeffgeerling.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.jeffgeerling.com)
| 0x0000000 wrote:
| > No warranty is given for faults caused by alternate operating
| systems.
|
| Sure, but the burden is on the manufacturer to prove the
| alternate OS caused the fault. They can't just void your warranty
| for installing another OS.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson%E2%80%93Moss_Warran...
| WirelessGigabit wrote:
| The problem here is litigation. While you can take them up to
| court you will need a lot of $.
|
| And the Magnuson Moss Warranty Act does not contain a free-
| shifting statute. (unlike the Lemon Law which is a more
| specific version of Magnuson Moss).
|
| What I don't understand however is how we deal with features
| that aren't used by ASUS, say some form of encryption in the
| CPU. TrueNAS uses it and your NAS locks up. And Intel actually
| releases an errata for that CPU.
|
| Who is responsible? Should they give you a new one?
| toast0 wrote:
| My perspective is if they're selling you hardware + software,
| the warranty covers the hardware in the context of running
| their software. If the accelerated encryption doesn't work on
| OtherOS, but they don't use it on their OS, too bad, that's
| not part of what they sold you.
|
| In other words, it's not unreasonable for them to request
| that you (re)install their software and show them the system
| is broken there. Only if you manage to actually break the
| device with OtherOS, does burden of proving who broke it
| matter. I'd personally argue, in most cases, the hardware is
| defective if it can be broken by doing wrong things with
| software; but it kind of depends on how far you go; if you go
| mucking about in the flash roms, it's debatable; extreme
| overclocking is on the user as well, etc.
| phren0logy wrote:
| Related tot he topic but not the article: As of very recently
| UnRaid also supports ZFS. Worth a look if you are evaluating
| TrueNAS and similar options.
| Ruthalas wrote:
| Is this first-class/native support? Could you provide a link
| where I can read more?
|
| I am interested in this, but came up empty the last time I
| looked into it.
| hendersoon wrote:
| I'm looking forward to a bright future when NVMe drives are
| competitive with magnetic disks and we can all afford to put 12
| of 'em in a tiny silent box like this for blazing fast local
| storage. It'll happen!
|
| Also, bravo to Asus for not only opening their hardware to make
| installing an alternate OS possible, but documenting it on their
| site. This makes me vastly more likely to consider them for my
| next purchase.
| jamesu wrote:
| I was planning on doing this, but wasn't entirely sure how much
| of a bottleneck the CPU would be especially in some sort of
| encrypted raid setup...
| favorited wrote:
| iXsystems sells turnkey TrueNAS boxes with Atom CPUs, which are
| comparable in terms of TDP, clock speed, core count, etc.
| Though the Atom CPUs support 16x more RAM, which ZFS will
| definitely take advantage of, and 50% more PCIe lanes.
|
| So they're not exactly apples-to-apples, but I don't think
| encrypted datasets would be the bottleneck.
| jprd wrote:
| My first thought after the page loaded was that I was looking at
| some sort of old Playstation.
| bhauer wrote:
| I note the author added an external USB disk to act as the
| TrueNAS boot disk. I wonder if treating one of the M.2 disks as a
| boot disk is feasible. There are twelve M.2 slots in that kit,
| after all.
| voytec wrote:
| I was setting up FreeNAS, TrueNAS or something similar
| (FreeBSD-based) for a client years ago and they required
| utilizing all SATA ports for actual storage and booting from
| RAID flash drives. They made A LOT of backup copies of these
| USB sticks and were told to make new copies after system
| upgrades and reconfiguration.
|
| Last time I had any info from that site - it worked well for
| them.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| You can do that too, I just chose to use an external drive to
| keep things simple and compare apples to apples in terms of
| NVMe performance (part of my reason for installing TrueNAS was
| to compare its performance to ADM built into the NAS, running
| with the same 12-drive storage layouts).
| wmf wrote:
| IMO it would make more sense to use the eMMC (even with the
| caveats mentioned in the article).
| dfox wrote:
| As a guy who had installed vanilla Debian on a bunch of QNAP and
| Synology NAS boxes I don't understand what exactly is the reason
| why anyone would want ZFS. The thing is completely unintuitive
| when something breaks and also there are slight incompatibilities
| between the current implementations (which will bite you hard
| when you are trying to recover an failed array). The whatever
| filesystem you like on top of LVM2 on top of mdraid is a setup
| that has reasonable layering and one can understand each layer
| well enough to troubleshoot or performance tune that particular
| layer. With ZFS, you just have this neat, shiny, complete black
| box that does something in slightly incompatible ways.
| donmcronald wrote:
| > I don't understand what exactly is the reason why anyone
| would want ZFS
|
| It makes snapshots, clones, and replication very simple to deal
| with.
| donmcronald wrote:
| This is a cool article. I wonder why all the content creators use
| TrueNAS. I evaluated TrueNAS Scale for a storage server and
| decided not to use it. I had two major complaints.
|
| First, when you create a ZFS pool, it partitions drives and puts
| swap on all of them. IIRC it may have even set up some mdadm RAID
| mirrors. It's a bunch of complexity and can leave you with swap
| on spinning disks if you don't notice and override the behavior.
|
| For me, whenever I see a bad default like that, where it might
| have made sense 10+ years ago, I get freaked out about what other
| poor defaults exist that I'm not noticing or what else may have
| been neglected for a decade. I use it as an negative indicator
| and often avoid the whole product at that point.
|
| Second, every time I'd boot (or maybe stop) a VM it would trample
| my ZFS tunables, specifically zfs_arc_max. I couldn't figure out
| exactly what was triggering it, but I don't want a system that
| doesn't play nice with the default CLI tooling.
|
| I actually had a really tough time finding a decent NAS and I'm
| going to end up building a plain old Linux system running Ubuntu
| 22.04. If anyone has any suggestions (not QNAP or Synology) for
| something that can do a good job of ZFS and 2-6 VMs, I'd love to
| hear them.
| simcop2387 wrote:
| I'd recommend not using ubuntu, but instead gp with either
| Proxmox or bog standard debian. Proxmox supports using the zfs
| pool as storage for vms and using zfs as root disk also. Debian
| won't help you do the install with zfs on root but it can be
| done. If you don't go with zfs on root then it's as simple as
| apt insall zfs-dkms on debian.
| voytec wrote:
| Recently tried Proxmox, spent few hours on trying to boot any
| VM placed on ZFS pool but with no luck. Same VMs converted
| from raw to vmdk (iirc) worked on 2 other, identical NVMe
| disks with software ext4 raid.
| simcop2387 wrote:
| Very odd, I'd love to know more since I've got that setup
| going on my router/edge box right now. ZFS mirror on two
| NVMe disks as the storage for root fs and VMs.
| voytec wrote:
| It was a recent Proxmox version (newest ~6 weeks ago).
| It's possible that I used some experimental new kernel
| version and haven't tried on completely basic/default
| setup.
|
| The disks were Samsung's MZVL21T0HCLR-00B00. The pair
| with ext4 sw raid booted all VMs (Linux, FreeBSD) with no
| issues but second pair with ZFS pool wouldn't.
|
| It may have been due to the newer kernel version but I
| asked myself a few questions about what's missing in
| FreeBSD's bhyve regarding my needs and took this route
| instead of trying default kernel. #
| zpool list NAME SIZE ALLOC FREE CKPOINT
| EXPANDSZ FRAG CAP DEDUP HEALTH ALTROOT
| VMs 952G 828G 124G - - 36%
| 87% 1.00x ONLINE - zroot 944G 1.21G
| 943G - - 0% 0% 1.00x ONLINE -
| dark-star wrote:
| > If you don't go with zfs on root then it's as simple as apt
| insall zfs-dkms on debian
|
| That's basically how it works in almost all Linux distros ;-)
| donmcronald wrote:
| I tried Proxmox. I mainly need a storage server that can run
| a few VMs. Proxmox looks pretty good for a VM heavy setup,
| but it adds a lot of complexity that I just don't need.
|
| I like the release cadence on Ubuntu and I had such a bad
| experience with ZFS DKMS (many) years ago that I'm probably a
| bit bias towards Ubuntu because I simply don't have to think
| about it.
|
| I won't use ZFS on root unless it simplifies dealing with a
| failed boot disk. I still prefer CSM over UEFI because UEFI
| makes it more complicated to recover from failure :-(
| noja wrote:
| > First, when you create a ZFS pool, it partitions drives and
| puts swap on all of them.
|
| If you have a drive fail, you don't want to replace the failed
| drive with one that is slightly smaller. It won't work. So they
| pad with swap.
|
| > IIRC it may have even set up some mdadm RAID mirrors.
|
| Yes in case the drive fails with the swap on.
|
| You don't want to use ZFS for swap, it can require extra memory
| to allocate blocks. Not what you want when you are out of
| memory.
|
| > It's a bunch of complexity and can leave you with swap on
| spinning disks if you don't notice and override the behavior.
|
| Perhaps, but you are assuming their reasons are not as good as
| yours without knowing their reasoning.
| donmcronald wrote:
| > If you have a drive fail, you don't want to replace the
| failed drive with one that is slightly smaller. It won't
| work. So they pad with swap.
|
| What advantage does padding with swap give over leaving some
| unallocated space?
|
| > Yes in case the drive fails with the swap on.
|
| There's no scenario I can think of where I want swap on a
| spinning disk.
|
| > You don't want to use ZFS for swap, it can require extra
| memory to allocate blocks. Not what you want when you are out
| of memory.
|
| Is that even possible? Do you mean putting swap on a ZVOL?
|
| > Perhaps, but you are assuming their reasons are not as good
| as yours without knowing their reasoning.
|
| If anyone can justify a reason for putting swap on a spinning
| disk in 2023 I'd love to be enlightened.
| elsurudo wrote:
| May I ask what issues you have with QNAP or Synology?
| donmcronald wrote:
| QNAP had a minor version upgrade a while back that re-enabled
| auto-updates that had explicitly been disabled and there was
| a major version update (v4 to v5) not too long after that. I
| was intentionally holding off on upgrading to v5 because
| there was a Samba related issue that broke my primary
| workload. I almost got burned by it. Yesterday I got an email
| from one of my QNAPs saying an automatic firmware update was
| scheduled for 00:00 today even though I have auto-updates
| turned off.
|
| I don't think it actually updated today, but I don't think
| they have their act together when it comes to managing
| updates and I'm not willing to depend on any of their stuff.
|
| Synology is more complicated and ultimately comes down to the
| use of BTRFS. I don't know a ton about filesystems, but, the
| way I understand it, BTRFS allocates extents and then puts
| blocks into those extents. Depending on your workload, you
| can end up with orphaned blocks in those extents that prevent
| space reclamation (because it reclaims extents, not blocks)
| and it can result in runaway space usage. Search for "BTRFS
| missing space".
|
| I may not have gotten that 100% correct, but I think the
| basic idea is close.
|
| My workload (backup storage) overwrites random blocks in
| existing files and that's one of the scenarios that
| exacerbates the issue. I've ended up with empty LUNs on a
| Synology that are "using" TBs of space on the containing
| volume.
|
| The Synology can also have a pretty complicated "stack" by
| the time you get your data onto it. I think I had an image
| based LUN on a BTRFS volume on mdadm RAID1. That was achieved
| through the GUI without making any crazy choices AFAIK.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I went all-in on Synology a few years ago. I _can_ manage a
| bunch of drives myself, but that 's not how I want to spend
| my free time. The Synology just sits in a corner of the
| house, doing its thing 24/7/365 without me futzing around
| with it.
| generalizations wrote:
| Been looking into the same situation, and decided to stay away
| from TrueNAS for similar (though less specific) reasons.
| Currently looking at FreeBSD with their bhyve VM tooling.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Eh if you want to use truenas you have to do things in the UI.
| Everything you should need to do you can in the UI.
|
| Changes made with the underlying tools often get clobbered
| because that's just not very commonly required and anyway you
| want one source of truth not two.
|
| If you just want a stateless UI on top of the system tools you
| have to create it yourself... but it won't be easy.
| favorited wrote:
| Exactly right. TrueNAS is designed to work as an appliance,
| rather than an infinitely tunable "Unix variant with ZFS
| preinstalled."
| voytec wrote:
| > If anyone has any suggestions (not QNAP or Synology) for
| something that can do a good job of ZFS and 2-6 VMs, I'd love
| to hear them.
|
| I'm using FreeBSD and its native hypervisor called bhyve. It's
| due to overall OS preference, not features Linux lacks
| regarding ZFS.
| davewritescode wrote:
| I personally like that truenas scale has a small kubernetes
| installation for adddons. Makes it stupid easy to write my own
| addons or integrate something like truecharts.
| tempest_ wrote:
| I have found it infuriating.
|
| The TrueNAS portion of TrueNAS Scale seems fine but the Apps
| side of it I have found half baked.
|
| I have multiple apps (both true charts and the base catalog)
| that just hang on init, with no logs, just the spinner and
| then it stops. Debugging k8s when you are abstracted like
| that is frustrating.
|
| I also have had a difficult time getting traefik going with
| either Cert Manager or the TrueNAS certs, one seems to be
| deprecated the other seems to be undocumented.
|
| If people gravitate towards to the apps feature of Scale I
| would recommend holding off till its had more time in the
| oven.
| parl_match wrote:
| > I wonder why all the content creators use TrueNAS.
|
| Because they're content creators, not ZFS tuners. It's plug and
| play. It makes it easy to have some redundancy and do backups.
| dark-star wrote:
| Either that, or (more likely I'd argue), because they're
| getting paid for promoting TrueNAS
| geerlingguy wrote:
| This, basically.
|
| I need storage to work, and I don't have enough time to get
| into ZFS's guts unless I'm going to do a video or longer blog
| post on a specific topic.
|
| TrueNAS gives sane defaults, exposes most of the basic
| features through a (relatively sane) UI, and... works.
|
| I still use ADM on my older spinning disk NASes, though--RAID
| 10 just works, and is fast enough for what I need, and the
| fact I have three copies of everything (one 'offline' (ish)
| on Glacier Deep Archive) means if I do ever encounter a
| corrupted file, I can grab a copy from one of the other
| backups on different media.
|
| If you're a storage nerd / data hoarder, then it's common to
| spend more time and go deeper than what something like
| TrueNAS or some other UI gives you. Otherwise it's like the
| McDonald's of storage software.
| yoshamano wrote:
| > Otherwise it's like the McDonald's of storage software.
|
| This is why I use TrueNAS. I use Core instead of Scale
| though because I prefer FreeBSD. Its main job is to hold my
| ripped media library and run Plex. If I can glue other
| stuff to it (like an Ubuntu Server VM running Pi-Hole) then
| that's just an added bonus.
| predictabl3 wrote:
| Frankly none of the Linux content creators are that good at
| Linux. Or maybe I discount what 18 years of experience with it
| does to a person but LTT is constantly saying stuff that makes
| me cringe, even Luke.
| dualboot wrote:
| Just want to throw out there that people should be allowed to
| be wrong. Especially if they've shown the capacity to
| recognize their mistakes and own them.
|
| Yeah, we cringe but who ever actually learns something
| without making some mistakes along the way?
|
| If we spent all of our time dealing with the anxiety of
| trying to _never be wrong_ -- most of us wouldn 't be able to
| function.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Most people who "create content" don't know much and just
| do the minimum to get something out. This scales from
| tiktok to YouTube to popular nonfiction... honestly even a
| lot of academic research.
|
| It's not about people being wrong. There's a problem at
| every level with how willing people are to publish before
| they've done enough to be sure that their information is
| good.
|
| Being wrong should be celebrated. Publishing for the
| rewards of publishing instead of the quality of the work is
| rightly shamed.
| predictabl3 wrote:
| Oh sure, most of them are inquisitive and thoughtful, they
| just aren't "into" Linux the same way some others are. I
| hope I didn't come off too judgemental.
| pitaj wrote:
| LTT is not a Linux content creator.
| predictabl3 wrote:
| And yet has more videos about Linux than sone other CCs
| that are focused on Linux or talk about it a lot on WAN
| Show, etc; but even they make some Odd mistakes or
| technology choices that feel like they're 8-year old
| holdovers from what they used in industry last.
| eurekin wrote:
| I'm not in any ways an expert in linux. I don't notice
| errors, but a lot of times I'm totally stumped how easy they
| jump to radical conclusions: "we're not using because _single
| detail_ ", "it's just bad", "one would never" without even
| hinting at any true research
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| Looks like this device is for NVME drives. Is there any special
| tuning required for an all-ssd array versus rotational HDD's?
|
| I'm also curious how long SSD's are supposed to last relative to
| an equivalently sized HDD.
| spdy wrote:
| https://www.backblaze.com/blog/ssd-edition-2022-drive-stats-...
|
| https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-202...
|
| With there current sample its 0.89% SSD vs 1.39% HDD AFR but
| the SSD sample is to low atm.
| frankharv wrote:
| 6 NVMe on a single x8 Link Proving if you build it they will buy
| it.
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