Hey again,
This is about
- building your own NAS with TrueNAS Core
- Problems i ran into while setting it up
- Plugins I used (Plex and Nextcloud)
- and how many times i had to reinstall shit on it
so that:
You guys would know what not to do!
Some Introduction:
my roommate and I thought about buying a NAS System – noticed, that they were pretty expensive and we would need to buy hard drives seperately anyway – so I came up with the idea to just reuse the old living room PC to build our own NAS System.
A search later, I found out about TrueNAS (Core) – which is an open source, linux based and most importantly FREE OS/Software package to create your own NAS with plugins for (almost) anything in a VM on your encrypted drives.
I wont go into detail on how this is to be set up ( USB drive, flash .ISO,click a ok a few times – voilá).
Just go on youtube for some basic instructions and check out, what you can do with it.
Main Part:
For me, it wasnt intuitive at first, but after some tutorials, i had a grasp on how Id go about further steps of using it. I had a 1.5tb HDD laying around, I just insterted it, used it for my own cloud plugins (nextcloud + plexmediaserver) and was ready for the hard part: setting up the plugins the right way.
Just make sure you have enough free space on your server (got this “no error” – error really fast). While I had to upgrade on space, I also ordered a backup drive for my 2nd drive – a drive i had used for encrypted backups for some time, encrypted with Bitlocker (Win10 encryption). TrueNAS doesnt recognize those, so i had to decrypt it “real quick” – took 2,5 DAYS – so keep that in mind, while picking your device for doing so. I had to keep my PC running for that, basically at idle, but it still drew power from the wall …
Also: make sure you dont use spaces ” “ in your pool names, as this will fuck you sideways while installing plugins – this is linux after all – dots “.” for example are okay though.
This brought me to my first reinstall of my HDD, luckily not everything, so I could keep my settings made in TrueNAS.
Just make sure you follow your guide step by step.
Quick Tipp:
Pools->Datasets->Shares (ie. SMB)->Users / Plugins (which then create their own vaults)
Also: dont update your plugins while they run, or anything while it runs!
As Im writing this, Im not really finished setting everything up, i just wanted to take a break from reinstalling plugins and setting things up again…
Keep in mind, that you will have to upgrade your system on a regular basis, if you plan to open it to the WWW via DynDNS, therefore i wont do that 🙂
Future plans:
Setting up Wake On LAN (WOL) so that the old PC wont suck my wallet dry. Sadly, TrueNAS isnt supporting that feature, even though my PC does. I therefore opted for setting my HDDs to sleep after 180sec and power mode 1 (spindown). This reduces the power pulled, but isnt really what i wanted.
Ill keep you posted on what im going to do about this in the future 🙂