 Tom here from Warrant Systems and we're going to talk about TrueNAS Scale, specifically version 22.02.3. Now, this is not me slamming on scale. They call it stable, and I'm not saying it's not stable, I'm saying parts of it are stable. I want to get this out of the way at the beginning of the video because the question comes up a lot, should I be moving to TrueNAS Scale? And if you're just using it for storage purposes, as in a NAS for Samba shares, a NAS for NFS shares, yes, seems to work perfectly fine for that, I would consider that part thus far stable from all the testing I've done. It's not without any bugs, but no operating system is TrueNAS Core is pretty much my go-to for a lot of things. And so my preferred first of my virtualization targets, because it seems to be edging out for now the performance a little bit, but that takes time and tuning. And this is a pretty ambitious project, because IX Systems has been supporting the BSD project based TrueNAS Core for a long time. TrueNAS Scale being Linux-based offers a lot of opportunity and they're going to be building any scale out architectural clusters. So, hey, I see all the future and I know that's where they're going in terms of a lot of development. They're going to leave TrueNAS Core to be a quite stable product, I believe, supported for a number of years. But this is where a lot of innovation is going. But all that innovation comes at the cost of stability to applications and building this framework with a Kubernetes managing docker is no small undertaking. There's a lot of tooling going on there. But I do want to cover today and I'm moving some systems to this so I can get more videos out in the future and more tutorials and help with the progress of this project. But I think people should be aware of where it's at. So this is kind of a status of the project right now. I do know they have another beta that I'll be doing some testing on, but that one's labeled beta, so I figured I'll stick with what's labeled as stable. I want to talk about how the applications work, some concepts in there, and kind of what doesn't work with it. But in terms of just setting up storage and doing in-place migrations, most of that seems to be perfectly fine. So too long didn't watch the rest of the video, applications have some bugs, the storage at least seems stable, and IAC systems has years and years of working with ZFS. So where they're building all that stability in, you still get ZFS, whether you're doing it with TrueNAS Core or TrueNAS GAL. So they're both good products, but with ambition comes bugs. We'll just say it like that. Before we dive into details of this video, let's first, are you an individual or company looking for support on a network engineering, storage, or virtualization project? 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Now the first person I want to give a shout out to here is Wendell, who has a full setup guide for setting up portainer containers and tail scale. I'll leave that video linked down below. And there's a link from that video after you watch and go through his version of how to set this up, which by the way, doesn't mean using the applications that AIX systems has, he's setting up portainer to manage them because well, he realizes like I do, there's a lot of bugs that need to be worked out. So it comes down to what kind of experience you want to have. So the level one forums has a in depth step by step guide of how to get a lot of this going that accompanies that video, definitely read through it. Something worth mentioning that me and Wendell talked about is this right here. And it's the snapshot management problem. And I will leave a reference to this because I think it's really important if you run into some unusual problems such as when you're doing some testing on applications and they start crashing and create Oh, I don't know several hundred snapshots later. There's not any way to handle those through the UI. So this bug report, which has been going on for a little while. Yes, this will give you some ways to get rid of some of the bugs that will come with it if you do testing and you end up with a broken, say, next cloud installation with lots and lots of snapshots. So I'll just leave reference to these at the beginning so people can easily find them. Now next, let's jump over here to my system and my setup. Now I have this on a few machines and I did in place upgrades on some and I've done fresh installs on a few lab machines. So I've spent a lot of time testing scales. I'm really ready to dive into it to find any of the little issues that may work. And one of the ones that's happy to see fixed is on my TrueNAS mini specifically. Hey, look, all of this lines up perfectly. So thank you team at IX because this was a bug where the drives wouldn't display properly. But you know, sometimes it's the minor little things when you have some of their hardware and it starts working. The in place upgrade on all the machines I did it with went really well. I didn't really run into any issues other than one of them I created and that was the shares. So when you go over to the shares all the shares copied over perfectly fine but I did realize and this is strange. I didn't get an error in core. I had this bound to an IP address that I had eliminated but the share kept working as in the service kept starting. I would get an error that the service wouldn't start and as soon as they went in here it says bound to invalid IP. I checked the box and hit save and it worked perfectly fine. That was the extent of my troubles in terms of getting this going from the in place upgrade. When I look at like the storage all the storage migrated or perfectly fine even and we'll look at like this example right here for the backup folder that I have we'll click the three dots and we'll go to view permissions and then we'll edit this is an ACL permission that I had and it copied all the permissions over the users everything worked perfectly fine. So great job on the in place upgrades of note when you're doing these in place upgrades they're one way once you've done the upgrade it does not leave a boot slice option to go back. This is something you have to really think about before you do and once you've done any pool upgrades you may not be able to go back to true NAS core at that point because there may be a ZFS mismatch so please be careful before doing it always back up etc etc but in terms of doing the ACLs yes there's definitely some quirkiness in here that I'll be covering because for some reason even though this is an SMB share it keeps one offer NFS shares as an option for the ACL options that might be why I need to do a video on it because well I had some trouble with that but I know how to get around it and in short strip all the ACLs out and add them manually and build these and they share permissions work perfectly fine but didn't have any other issues than that like I said the reason I'm diving into is to do those future coming videos I think it's also worth noting this here is one of my true NAS 13 U2 core machines if we go over here to tasks and we look at replication tasks this was replicating to the system we refer to as APOC is one of the newer systems we added to our fleet and it was running core I did the in place upgrade and all this works perfectly fine replicating between back and forth between core scale didn't run into any issues at all even existing replication jobs just kept working whether they're going to or from scale so if you have those set up and you're still mixing matching which servers you're upgrading I didn't run into any problems there so I think it's worth mentioning that that does work and because I know someone will ask what about active directory in scale I don't have an answer for because I have done zero testing on it I just didn't have time to get to that aspect of it because we don't have anything other than active directory lab at my office so there's not one readily available until I build a new one to attach it to but nonetheless it does have the option to but I've not done any testing to tell you if there's any weird quirks now let's talk about applications and the way they're implemented this is where some of the quirkiness comes in that I think people should be aware of now this is the official list of applications as of right now from true NAS and supported by AI systems there are other ones you can add in here there are other catalogs that can be added such as true charts they are a separate group of individuals that also are building applications that give you a lot of options in it I've got quite a few things are maintaining and you also have the launch docker image option over here but let's start where the first buggyness is and kind of how the UI works I just want to point this out for people that may be getting confused if I go to here amount manage catalog the launch docker is still over here but it doesn't work what if I go to manage docker images it doesn't work but if I go to available applications and hit launch docker it does launch docker so there's one note then we go to catalogs or actually we go to settings and we'll choose pool the choose pool option comes up for over here we go to settings and we choose pool it doesn't come up what about the advanced settings doesn't come up but if you go to applications and we go to advanced settings ah it comes up but if you go to manage catalogs and choose advanced settings it doesn't come up there's a lot of UI kind of unusualness that causes some confusion when you're going how do I get to those settings for things that is definitely kind of a problem for me because it causes me undo clicking to try to figure out why I can't get to a menu I thought I could get to and maybe logging in logging out that little quirkiness is still in here and as I said this is the labeled stable one this is where all the problems I've had have been around the way it's handling applications one of the other notes I did change the cluster and service cider notation here and I did that on purpose because one of my problems is my lab is a 17216 network and they default to using 17216 and a slash 16 so they're using so much of the network and it overlap with mine so I just shrunk them down a little bit and moved them somewhere else because when it overlaps and everything's unable to route back and forth it creates a different confusing problem that I didn't realize until I looked at the advanced kubernetes thing so if you have a network that is overlapping with theirs you will have to change it reduce it to a smaller block that doesn't overlap whatever your options are next networking thing you may notice here is we can choose a zero or choose other network interfaces on there but you may not choose multiple for management so if you wanted some of these applications in some networks but not in others well that's not really an option right here and even though and I'll say even though because we can look at something such as current status of let's look at application like sync thing I know sync things in here right here we go with the install sync thing and they do have an option under the networking that says to use host network that box doesn't seem to work here it works on some applications but not this one this is where well it's kind of quirky as well because if you can't necessarily choose the host networking application you're going to have a problem sometimes with getting things where you want them to be there's not really any easy solution for that so not real fine-grained network I know they're changing this in the future I've seen this in some forum posts that these are on their future workload to get done I don't know when it's going to be if it's going to be in that new beta I'll test that new beta to see how many of those features have made it there but obviously it's still all under development but you know these may be deal breakers for some of you that are building and working on this speaking of sync thing this is the one application that works really really well and unfortunately next cloud works but I don't think it works well and let me explain here if you go through default next cloud install and you follow IX systems videos which I'll link down below they just did a video only a few days ago on this topic and if we look at how they tell you to set it up and if you're following their setup guide and I did and we take the host path for the next cloud data volume it does save the data there the problem is and this comes down to the way docker was implemented in here it saves the data but I can't redeploy a new docker image and just reattach the data it breaks it will not do the proper setup on here it also isn't backing up the database it's only grabbing the user data and files so if you using any type of applications next cloud such as oh I don't know setting up users and tying a calendar to it all that gets sorted in a database now it does have the option which is not covered in the video that IX systems released it does have the option to store the Postgres database I found that by doing this it would cause it to crash though and actually it crashed and created that earlier bug that I alluded to and I know there's a way around it I don't know what that way was and it's going to go out of scope of this to really dive into details but in short yes it's not backing up the database which means you're not backing up your data which could lead to data corruption unfortunately I've seen people who you know had a problem with their system and they go oh where's all my data now because they only backed up like the user data so you have your files but any of that extra data that's was stored in a database is going to go away now the other weird thing is you load Collab or separate if you want to break your next cloud installation instantly go into next cloud go to apps look for the Collab or online built-in code server click download enable and it will quit working you'll have to reset up the application again so that is at least one thing that I know is broken you do load the Collab or online connecting tool and then you connect it to there and actually cover that in the access to video so access to video is accurate in terms of getting it set up with one minor change that's going to be over here in storage and we're going to go ahead and click the three dots and look at the permissions and please note the permissions are set to ww data they omitted that in their particular video maybe it's because it didn't need that previously but if I didn't set that I couldn't get it to write it specifically seems to have to be that user in order to get that writing there if not you'll end up with a different error message when you try to get your doctor to install in your data to go there but please note using this means the database application is not being backed up easily and out of scope of this yes there's a completely different way to do this inside of the true charts version of it and they have a work instruction on theirs but it's not without its quirks as well it's not all done through the UI there's a lot of things you have to do through the command line all right now let's get back to the apps now the good news is sync thing the one tool I use the most on my TrueNAS to synchronize data between several servers of things like my other outside of TrueNAS devices all my different Linux servers I have running I only really care about the data that gets created on them backing up SQL databases and things like that through a series of scripts and then I have my sync thing synchronizing all these and sync thing does it right this was actually well implemented here and one of the easy ones that I'll do a dedicated video for but in short we're going to go here and just point the mount to sync thing data and we'll hit next next next leave everything else at default not going to change anything else and just let it go and deploy I'm actually really happy with the way this turned out in a way it works because this is the way docker applications are supposed to be deployed in work we see it's active and yes it deploys really fast provided already has an image available go to the web portal we're going to say yes it's going to ask me about some settings let's go ahead and set them probably wants the UI to have a username and a password and we'll change it just to a dark theme because you know don't want to blind anyone it's going to reload real quick hey look we've set it up let's add another folder tom's share or well for youtube there we go tom's share for youtube will make the folder id the same we're going to hit save so i've customized it i can always add some remote devices i'll do a dedicated video soon on this now that i've spent a lot of time testing it but let's go ahead and see what happens over here when we stop and delete our application so we're gonna get here and stop it and wait for it to stop actually stops almost slower than it starts so go ahead and delete it we're just gonna blow it away but my data because we told it to have a host path and this is the way it's supposed to work this is the ideal situation for when you're setting things up so this is another think thing next next point it at that same storage and let's talk about that real quick go here and even though we haven't finished building yet i want to stop here and just take a look hey look there's tom's share for youtube there's the config data no application data is in here just that config there's my config xml and different things it created a certificate and the database that got created so let's go back over here and we're just going to point it back to here then next again next next next save so we've just destroyed the application but the data store and the configuration is all saved in here and ideally this is what next cloud should be doing as well where we just point it at one path and say save everything about the application settings save the data that the application and everything over there but don't save the actual application that's just can be blown away the application shouldn't matter that way i can replace it whenever i want i don't need to bother backing it up and whenever there's an update i know my data is safe and i can do something with it and if we open up the web portal here hey look there's our same things again all working so this worked as expected and i hope they have all the apps maybe a few of them worked that way i know mb i tested that worked sync thing worked and next cloud being the most popular one people asked about didn't work i even had a chance to test everything under the true charge one but i see this is kind of an issue and something i want people to really consider now as far as how i have this managed in our network and we have like syncing data right here now we have this data set i created prior and i pointed it at so you do have to go and manually create that data set but truly i didn't have to do any permissions management or changes here it worked right out of the box perfectly fine now from a data management standpoint i can go over here to data protection i can say hey let's go ahead build a replication task for that particular storage data set and go down here to sync thing now i know my data wherever i send it is all backed up even if i wanted to send it to something that wasn't another churnass i could replicate that data with something like our sync nonetheless i have a backup of it and my data is separate from application and that is the ideal way things should work and this is one of the reasons i made this video to kind of just talk about and get you started with the concept of where churnass scale is it's not as easy for me to answer the question of should i upgrade to scale should i move my core system to scale is it ready ah do you need applications like docker to work perfectly fine even if you're pulling manual docker measures or do you need to put things in different vlands and separate networks based on all the interfaces well you're going to have some hard times with that because it doesn't seem to be completely finished uh if you are like me and go i just want to run sync thing does it work yes it does awesome well there's a solution so i can upgrade to churnass scale because that's my use case now for a lot of people they're going to be running things externally and they're going to run as i do most of my servers are individual virtual machines so i have the server itself fully contained and even so i'm not dealing with backing up the entire virtual machine or other linux instance or raspberry pi even that i may have running i just use sync thing because it's lightweight and i load them and it's one of my favorite little tools to you know synchronize all the data both on site and then replicating it off site and using the transport layer and encryption of it so yeah because that application works and i understand it it works well so that's the way to do it now is there a command line way to get your data and databases backed up on the whole next cloud thing yeah i don't know if i want to cover it in a video because i'm hoping that it gets to a point where your user experience is just using it through the ui and it just works flawlessly so i don't know if i'm going to do a video on next cloud until i feel it's something that's more manageable and works really well because if not just run it all the way in its own separate instance now the last thing i'll touch on in wendell talked about this in his video is some of the issues in quirkiness with the way virtualization works i want to keep an eye on it do some testing i didn't spend a lot of time with it because i already know some of the flaws with it it's not as advanced as other things out there for virtualization platforms so i may wait till that gets a little better but wendell has a whole guide on that it talks about installing portainer in a virtualization system on there so you can have a better experience and if you're looking for a portainer level experience well then use portainer this is not that they're not there yet i'm not saying they won't get there i'm not saying this is abandon ship and let me just hate on the product because i realized the developers are working very hard at this this is the goal to get this to a wonderful user experience it just takes time to get there it takes people like me people like many of you testing it finding bugs reporting them looking for the workarounds and you know i'll link down below to that whole true charts thing because they have some good information on there of like how the pvc storage works and things like that so there's a lot of learning you can do for their implementation of it it's something that i think will get there in the future i'm really looking forward to when you know i can start playing with a little bit more cluster on it because hey i like the scale out concept i like that it's running on linux and i think big picture i like where they're going it's just gonna be a bug ridden ride to get there like all big projects are but hey that's life i'll leave your comments and thoughts down below or have it on my forums for a more in-depth discussion and thank you for making it all the way to the end of this video if you've enjoyed the content please give us a thumbs up if you would like to see more content from this channel hit the subscribe button and the bell icon if you'd like to hire a short project head over to laurancesystems.com and click the hires button right at the top to help this channel out in other ways there's a join button here for youtube and a patreon page where your support is greatly appreciated for deals discounts and offers check out our affiliate links in the description of all of our videos including a link to our shirt store where we have a wide variety of shirts that we sell and designs come out well randomly so check back frequently and finally our forums 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