TrueNAS or a Real OS?

[levinas69]

Should you use TrueNAS or just bite the bullet and install a real OS?

Basic answer/claim. If you are competent sysadmin, it will be faster and less frustrating to setup a real OS from scratch than TrueNAS.

Experience. You spend a considerable amount of time clunking around TrueNAS's awkward menus and confirmations. TrueNAS has many idiosyncrasies that take time to work out. Plugins are chaotic and unsystematic in terms of consistent uid/gid, for example. Not much documentation to standardize basic expectations about jail/host_os interactions. TrueNAS claims to be an appliance. This claim mainly supports the idea that the UI (in it's endless click-this-now-that silliness) should dominate. The UI is so tedious that clicking things is a constant interference to what you want to do.

Inference from experience. TrueNAS is a bad promise. (1) If you are competent sysadmin, then you could get an actual system/container up and running in less time than learning TrueNAS quirkiness. On the other hand, (2) if you aren't a competent sysadmin, then you do the work of sorting out TrueNAS. What do you know then? Just TrueNAS. If you had put the same time into an OS, then you would know the OS. The OS knowledge is portable, valuable and vendable. TrueNAS is, well, a little desert island.

I can't imagine how TrueNAS could be useful at the enterprise level (which seems to be its ambition). I guess the TrueNAS claim to fame might be taking cheap labour and pushing it into a marginal market where it will remain cheap labour.

TrueNAS claims to be an "appliance." Fair enough. But, appliances are supposed to be straightforward, like a stove or a fridge. TrueNAS is an easy to implement solution for a noob who wants a basic NAS. The idea that this could or might be an enterprise solution is risible. The system is frustratingly ridiculous even for a prosumer.

Look folks, any competent sysadmin can setup FreeBSD with Samba and Transmission (in a jail) from the command line faster than configuring TrueNAS. RTFM people. That or end up dragin' your sorry ass through community forums for various "solutions" that may or may not work, and more often than not, point back to legacy FreeNAS issues.

There is just no point -- if you've got sysadmin chops, TrueNAS ain't for you.

 

[jgreco]

Well, that's ridiculous. People buy appliance solutions to problems all the time because they're more convenient or professionally supported. Your premise is flawed; it's entirely possible to buy a rack scale solution to store 20 petabytes from iXsystems, have them manage and support the system, and never even have to touch any of it. Good luck to you trying to duplicate this on your own.

No one said you had to use TrueNAS. But it's still a rational choice to use an appliance in appropriate roles. TrueNAS for storage. ESXi for hypervisor. Sophos for UTM. Etc. Just because you could potentially build it yourself doesn't mean that there aren't better ways to spend your time and effort.

 

[winnielinnie]

Serious question. Was this written by AI? Something seems "off" about it.

 

[zizzithefox]

Should you use TrueNAS or just bite the bullet and install a real OS?

Basic answer/claim. If you are competent sysadmin, it will be faster and less frustrating to setup a real OS from scratch than TrueNAS.

Experience. You spend a considerable amount of time clunking around TrueNAS's awkward menus and confirmations. TrueNAS has many idiosyncrasies that take time to work out. Plugins are chaotic and unsystematic in terms of consistent uid/gid, for example. Not much documentation to standardize basic expectations about jail/host_os interactions. TrueNAS claims to be an appliance. This claim mainly supports the idea that the UI (in it's endless click-this-now-that silliness) should dominate. The UI is so tedious that clicking things is a constant interference to what you want to do.

Inference from experience. TrueNAS is a bad promise. (1) If you are competent sysadmin, then you could get an actual system/container up and running in less time than learning TrueNAS quirkiness. On the other hand, (2) if you aren't a competent sysadmin, then you do the work of sorting out TrueNAS. What do you know then? Just TrueNAS. If you had put the same time into an OS, then you would know the OS. The OS knowledge is portable, valuable and vendable. TrueNAS is, well, a little desert island.

I can't imagine how TrueNAS could be useful at the enterprise level (which seems to be its ambition). I guess the TrueNAS claim to fame might be taking cheap labour and pushing it into a marginal market where it will remain cheap labour.

TrueNAS claims to be an "appliance." Fair enough. But, appliances are supposed to be straightforward, like a stove or a fridge. TrueNAS is an easy to implement solution for a noob who wants a basic NAS. The idea that this could or might be an enterprise solution is risible. The system is frustratingly ridiculous even for a prosumer.

Look folks, any competent sysadmin can setup FreeBSD with Samba and Transmission (in a jail) from the command line faster than configuring TrueNAS. RTFM people. That or end up dragin' your sorry ass through community forums for various "solutions" that may or may not work, and more often than not, point back to legacy FreeNAS issues.

There is just no point -- if you've got sysadmin chops, TrueNAS ain't for you.

Your arguments are so flawed that I would excuse them only if they came from a sales manager at Synology or QNAP, or something like that.
Listen, I am former sysadmin for now, so feel free to disregard my answer if you want, but here we go.

First of all, the idea that any sysadmin can set up FreeBSD is wrong, as 90%+ people would know Linux, not FreeBSD; it isn't exactly the same, but yes, you can adapt. Besides, you need to have some decent hardware, because FreeBSD is not Linux and does not run on everything (I am talking specifically about peripherals).
Secondly, mentioning Transmission just explains a lot about your point of view, as it is not an enterprise application by any stretch of the imagination.
Several years ago I spotted a colleague (former sysadmin, before I replaced him, totally incompetent guy), who was blocking the internet for entire company with uTorrent, because he though that the upload was in KBit, instead of KByte. IMHO, a sysadmin that does that, he/she should be fired immediately.

TrueNAS is a great appliance, as it takes away a lot of work for standard things; the most important for a sysadmin are:

• Support to ZFS is top notch; management is great; it handles automatic replication very well
• Cloud replication is great, if you are using the correct provider
• Report and notifications of what is happening to your machine is good to great
• Complex configuration that can be saved and restored very easily, and it works flawlessly
• And it's free, if you want; granted, a Linux machine would support a lot more hardware, but most of the time is new/crappy hardware that I am not sure I want in an enterprise solution.
• Only hardware problems can take it down, albeit some occasional bugs can be annoying: just wait U3, and generally a couple of months after the update is released of production stuff

These aspects support all the features that are available through the management GUI.

• You can set up a lot of standard services very very easily; it is actually my first choice to setup a "standalone" server:
  • SMB: I know how to set it up, but why wasting time managing a file server, including setting up ZFS datasets, permissions, Active Directory authentication, etc. by hand in the command line? It's stupid.
  • ISCSI: this is good, although there are better performers; still this is one of the most annoying thing to set up, at least for me
  • OpenVPN: another very annoying thing to set up, although in this case it could be better; the real important thing is that the config is backup up with all the rest
  • SMART: works very well, otherwise you have to set up the daemon yourself, plust notifications, etc... again, really stupid
  • UPS: works very well, again, with embedded notifications and actions
• You can also use it to quickly set up temporary or persistent servers if you need like
  • TFTP
  • Webdav repos
  • NFS shares
  • SCP
• You can use it as a repo for your TLS certificates, avoiding wasting a lot of time with the command line (ever tried generating certificates with openssl by hand?); it is certainly much better than the tools to handle certificate authorities in Windows, just saying...
• Jails are good; I personally don't see any difference with LXC most of the times; I don't know about all the hate they get...
• bhyve sucks balls with regards to performance, but it's stable; so, if you don't need performance, it's not THAT bad

Where TrueNAS Core does not help you:

• Virtualization: as just stated, bhyve sucks in several regards; better not to use it if you don't know what you are doing
• Integration with vmware is tricky, I have never really relied on that stuff, but that's me
• Containerization: it has jails but no docker and other fancy stuff; you need Linux for that
• Plugins: I have never used them, and I will never do; first of all, they don't work; and even if I switched to TrueNAS scale, Synology or QNAP, I would never use plugins for anything, as they are always behind with the release of the software; I don't see the point for anything that you can simply update with "pkg upgrade" or "apt upgrade" or whatever; also, I want to configure them myself
• Distributed storage: not really the product to use here; if you need these things, you'd better employ some supported stuff, not even TrueNAS Scale, unless your budget is very low
• If you never want to use the command line, maybe, but really you still need it sometimes; it's not like you never have troubleshoot anything...

Maybe you haven't noticed, but I also have two TrueNAS installations at home: not exactly cheap for my private needs in 2013-2014 the stuff I have... 2013, by the way no kidding.
I will consider switching to TrueNAS Scale the older one in order to use docker, but I will never do that for my backups, unless TrueNAS core is discontinued. Still, I might decide not to do that anyway, especially because my plan is to virtualize TrueNAS when I substitute that machine.

Just to be clear: if one of these machines breaks, I can set up the other one to do the same job in less than 30 minutes, because I have tried. And I can replace the dead one during the same time, if I have a compatible computer with enough RAM around. Only because I regularly backup some 500KB of configuration file.
Do that with QNAP, for example, or your custom "REAL OS". With Linux yes, you can, but you have to setup backups by hand of the configurations files of /etc /usr/local/etc, etc. etc. etc. etc. Or, you need to backup the entire system (e.g. I like veeam backup free) which takes up several GiB...

 

[SecCon]

• Virtualization: as just stated, bhyve sucks in several regards; better not to use it if you don't know what you are doing

Ehm, I need Virtual desktop, mostly Windows. Considering I am planning my setup as we speak and have got extra hardware for it and making notes of all I need it to be able to do... that statement has me concerned.

I am also concerned about VNC, but I am just assuming it work better nowadays since I tested and crashed and burned it on FreeNAS. ( I see it actually works: https://www.truenas.com/community/t...to-vnc-console-of-a-vm-in-truenas-core.98874/ )

 

[danb35]

OP joined this forum just to post this nonsensical screed--classic troll. Lock thread, ban user, and move on.

 

[zizzithefox]

Ehm, I need Virtual desktop, mostly Windows. Considering I am planning my setup as we speak and have got extra hardware for it and making notes of all I need it to be able to do... that statement has me concerned.

I am also concerned about VNC, but I am just assuming it work better nowadays since I tested and crashed and burned it on FreeNAS. ( I see it actually works: https://www.truenas.com/community/t...to-vnc-console-of-a-vm-in-truenas-core.98874/ )

You are right to be concerned. TrueNAS Core is not a virtualization platform: it is stated everywhere. Although, I have been running a domain controller on it for some years. It works but it is not without glitches. I would not consider it for an enterprise situation.
You are stuck with TrueNAS scale, I guess, which I still have to wrap my head around.

And in fact you actually said the worst word: Windows. By the way, it's got RDP you know, so VNC is only useful for installation, if you don't know how to do it without a GUI.

The only think I can really endorse right now is ESXi + PCIe passthrough for the LBA. That I know it works well, unless you are very unlucky with the hardware choices.
Other than that, you seriously should consider using hyper-v and virtualizing TrueNas in the same way, if your hardware supports SR-IOV.

You can also go Linux (not Scale), but be warned that Proxmox is not that stable (as a matter of fact, on my hardware, it resets for no reason after a while).
I have also tried XCP-ng. It also depends on the hardware, but it's more of an enterprise platform; however, it is way harder to set up.

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

I also run two domain controllers and several installations of Windows 10 on TN CORE absolutely without issues. The builtin VNC is only useful for installation. We use RDP for everything. But even in ESXi I would do that and never use the builtin console.

If you need a single Windows VM and no hardware passthrough like graphics, then bhyve is perfectly fine in my experience.

 

[zizzithefox]

I also run two domain controllers and several installations of Windows 10 on TN CORE absolutely without issues. The builtin VNC is only useful for installation. We use RDP for everything. But even in ESXi I would do that and never use the builtin console.

If you need a single Windows VM and no hardware passthrough like graphics, then bhyve is perfectly fine in my experience.

It depends on the hardware, I guess. I have always had glitches like:
- Difficulty installing it: at a certain point you had to give it only ONE CPU otherwise it would crash
- Paravirtual drivers can crush the installation pretty easily during updates, although it got better with time; last time I mistakenly installed the balloon driver or something else, everything crashed miserably
- Clean shutdowns are not that easy to get like on other platforms
- Slow when compared to other platforms on the same hardware; tested multiple times; it is especially painful if you have some interactive stuff going on

Yes, it can be used. But it's not as mature as KVM or enterprise-grade platforms. I haven't tried it, yet, but I am almost sure that Scale works WAAAAAY better for Windows.

 

[SecCon]

@zizzithefox
Well, enterprise solution do have higher demand, this is for my small SOHO, so I may very well be ok with this as @Patrick M. Hausen says.

If shit hits the fan I can do things in other ways to get a running Windows desktop, but not integrated in one computer/server/solution as I would have hoped for.

I have yet to look at Scale, but it does not seem to be what I have in mind.

 

[zizzithefox]

@zizzithefox
Well, enterprise solution do have higher demand, this is for my small SOHO, so I may very well be ok with this as @Patrick M. Hausen says.

If shit hits the fan I can do things in other ways to get a running Windows desktop, but not integrated in one computer/server/solution as I would have hoped for.

I have yet to look at Scale, but it does not seem to be what I have in mind.

As I said, I am still running a domain controller with it. But all it does is that: a domain controller (DNS server, DHCP server, authentication server and spying on my network probably). But I tried installing veeam backup once and I started crying... 20-30% hit on network, 50% hit on storage. SQLServer is so bad I can hardly believe it, etc.

Who am I to argue with the greats. By, all means, try it: see you when you go ESXi out of frustration, I guess. But maybe the newest hardware is better.

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

- Difficulty installing it: at a certain point you had to give it on CPU otherwise it would crash

Agree.

- Paravirtual drivers can crush the installation pretty easily during updates, although it got better with time; last time I mistakenly installed the balloon driver or something else, everything crashed miserably

I run disk and network as VirtIO, both the latest stable release 0.1.229.

- Clean shutdowns are not that easy to get like on other platforms

I have a script for that to configure as a shutdown task in CORE. I'll attach it.

- Slow when compared to other platforms on the same hardware; tested multiple times; it is especially painful if you have some interactive stuff going on

Mmmhhh not quite sure if the performance I perceive is simply what the Xeon D at home can do or if it could be faster. The systems @work are AMD Epyc all NVMe, so they hide any performance issues in the hypervisor quite well.

 

[awasb]

1st time post.

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[winnielinnie]

If you're looking for a low-cost way to manage your network, TrueNAS might be a good option for you. However, if you're serious about being a sysadmin, you should definitely just install a real OS. TrueNAS is essentially a glorified NAS - it doesn't offer the features or functionality of a real OS, and it's not worth the cost or time-investment. Instead, you should be focusing on learning how to manage your own OS - this will give you the flexibility and control you need to run your network and protect your data the proper way.

TrueNAS is an inferior NAS system that is only useful for small businesses or home users who don't want to bother with the hassle of managing their own OS. If you're looking for a NAS system that you can use for your business or home, there are many better options available. You should just bite the bullet and install a real OS like FreeBSD, Linux, or Windows. TrueNAS is just not worth the hassle.

On the other hand, if you're looking for a real OS that you can manage yourself, there's no reason to use TrueNAS. A real OS offers a lot more flexibility and control than TrueNAS - you can customize the look and feel of your system, add your own functionality, and more. Plus, a real OS is typically more secure and reliable than a system managed by a software platform like TrueNAS.

Using a DIY approach to managing your own OS can be much more efficient and cost-effective. With a DIY approach, you can choose the right tools for your specific needs and have the freedom to customize it as needed. You can also add additional software, such as web servers, database servers, and various other tools, to create a powerful and customized environment.

Additionally, when it comes to maintenance and support, a DIY approach can often be more reliable than TrueNAS. With a DIY approach, you can manage the OS yourself. This can be especially helpful if there are any issues or problems with the configuration.

Ultimately, the decision of whether to use TrueNAS or a DIY approach comes down to the specific needs of your business. TrueNAS can be a great choice for businesses that don't need a lot of customization or for businesses that want to keep their costs low. However, for the serious businesses that need customizability or require more control, a DIY approach is the better option.