The Network and Home Servers

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TrueNAS

TrueNAS provides a rather comprehensive Network Attached Storage solution. I prefer it to Qnap.

TrueNAS Qwerks

Any time the system is rebooted, a number of system directories and files are reverted to the originals as installed. These include /etc/fstab and /etc/sudoers.d. It isn't really recommended that they be modified, but this isn't a production shop and some things are easier a non-standard way.

Create

The following script is setup to run during the boot after the init stage:

One that took some time to figure out was getting a storage pool set up on the USB array. It has 4 disks and I use it for things that I don't need too quickly. The interface is reliable but slow. TrueNAS doesn't recommend doing this and the GUI in recent releases is broken when you try to create a pool using those drives. It can be done through the command line though. This is filed under, I hope that I rarely, if ever, need to do this.

The first step is to get and store the drive identification from the system:

Do this as root.

mkdir /mnt/coldstorage
chmod 777 /mnt/coldstorage

ls /dev/disk/by-id |grep usb>drives

This will create a mount location and provide a list of the USB drives that will be needed to create the pool. Edit the drives file that was created in the previous step and insert "/dev/disk/" at the beginning of each one. Then use the join command to put them on one line. Then put the following at the beginning of the single line:

zpool create -R /mnt coldstorage raidz -o failmode=continue -o ashift=12

to get something like this:

zpool create -R /mnt coldstorage raidz -o failmode=continue -o ashift=12 <drive1> <drive2> <drive3> <drive4>

Save and execute:

sh drives
zpool export coldstorage

The pool is created but needs to be imported through the GUI to be available. Go to the Storage Dashboard and import it.

Note: this assumes that there there is only a single USB array if there is more than one, it will be necessary to sort out which drives go where.

Qnap (macey)

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