 Tommy here from Learn Systems and TrunetScale Blueprint 22.12 is released on December 14th of 2022. I have been running the beta version for quite a while and nothing fishy happened. The installs all went swimmingly and I'm really hooked on this new Blueprint version. Also, please leave all of your well fish related puns and comments you can come up with with true scale down in the comments because I'd really enjoy reading them. In all seriousness, there is a lot of improvements and I have found even when I was doing the beta testing that release candidate testing a Blueprint, it's to be a very stable system. Two things of note, one of them that's still in the production full release here is not fixed is going to be the virtual machine's ability to talk to the host itself. So if you have the network interface set to whatever network interface your VM and your Trunass is on, they can't talk to each other, not natively without creating a bridge. I find this really odd. I know the solution that someone may comment is create the bridge, but it seems like natively they should talk into reason being maybe you want to serve up some shares from your Trunass system and you think you want your VMs to be able to access those shares but out technically using the network interface like looping out and looping back in. So I'm not sure why that's designed the way it is where you have to create the VM, tie it to a network interface and then bridge the interfaces together seems kind of odd. The second one is your apps didn't start after you upgraded from the old release to the new blue pin release. There's a fix for that and I'm going to leave it linked down in there. There's some changes they made and there's a forum discussion and there's also just a simple command you can run to fix it. But that simple command isn't run by default because it does create some security changes. And so I'm going to link to the forum poster you can read through and if you want to get a deeper understanding or if you just want to get it fixed, you can run this command really quick and it'll get your application starting. Now as far as big changes, we're going to focus on the UI one shortly, but let's just kind of run through them real quick here. And the first one you're going to notice is going to be the non root as admin. It's kind of been a joke to me with true NASA, like why have a username spot when you always have to log in as root? Well, that's finally fixed. And there's going to be instructions that they have how to create those non root admin users. You just really add them to the built in administrators group pretty simple, but they've got documentation on that. The tuning and support for all NVMe systems, this is important. So that's a new feature that came API keys with role based access controls, USB pass you for virtualization. They already had pass you for things like video cards, but using the USB pass through was well, extra steps. Now it's built into the UI store J as a cloud provider. I do plan on doing a video on store J. I think it's a really neat service. And I just haven't gotten around to really digging into it, but I did get my account set up on there. So I will have more news soon on that. But I think it's really cool, but they're integrated not only as a service you can run as an app, but also as a cloud storage provider. Check them out. It's an interesting way they're integrating storage as a distributed system. Now storage performance and improvements leaves a really broad piece on the table. I don't know exactly how much faster this is. So I'm going to do some tests where I, well, compare it to core. And that's my benchmarks I did quite a while ago. And it's because it takes a little while to put these benchmarks together. Now that I know that they've specifically noted they've improved the performance, I'm going to build a core machine, do a battery of tests, reload it or upgrade in place to the Angel Fish and I'm sorry, Bluefin not Angel Fish and do the difference. I probably won't retest Angel Fish compared to Bluefin to see how much those storage performance improvements are. But you can see my old video where I did compare TrueNAS Core and the Angel Fish version. But now that it's getting to be a more mature product, it's nice to see that there's going to be some performance enhancements that are coming from there. Now the thing we're going to drive into next is going to be lots of UI enhancements. That's the part I want to focus on really showing you, because that's where I think they just did a great job of kind of rethinking the UI to make it, I don't know, nicer, easier to use, puts a lot of information in one place as you tap through. But rather than me verbally describe it, let's jump into that. Now the first thing I'm going to do is log in not as root. So we're going to go here and username LTS and then a password I have in there will show you the current interface, which really hasn't changed much in terms of the dashboard. But there's at least one thing I will comment on here that I'm not completely clear on compared to how it worked in TrueNAS Core with it being BSD based. And that's the ZFS cache. Now there is a forum post about this. And it may help shed some light that they're doing some work on this. And you may want to change how much arc is available on there. This has been a little bit of a confusing point because TrueNAS Core system does use all of the ZFS cache based on all the free memory it has. So if the memory is not in use, hey, let's use it for cache. The algorithm seems to be different and are some limitations by default where it's only using part of the memory that you have available. So there may be some tuning you have in there, I'll leave a link to those forum posts on there. But essentially, you're just setting the ZFS max arc size. And as I said, I'm still doing testing on this. This is not something official, this is just discussed in our forums. But you can set that, for example, by saying echo, and then set it to sysmodules, ZFS parameter, ZFS max arc size. Now, if you're just doing it from command line, this will be reverted on reboot. And I'm fine with that for now, because I don't reboot it very often. I don't mind just setting it as needed. But I'm still trying to figure out the ramifications or if there are any problems that are created with that. But the noticeable thing is going to be when you go to arc summary. And let's scroll back up here to the top in here, you can look up your arc summary, and you'll see that I've set that max size 50 gigs. So by default, it was only using like half. I think that's all the defaults for Linux. So I went ahead and changed it. So I think I'm doing this properly. I say, I think there's a forum post I'll link to so you can ask some questions. I'll be asking some questions in there in the forum as well to try to get some clarification. But I thought I'd bring it up. It's at least a big change with how this works inside of Linux versus how it worked in BST, which was completely automatic and I never had to think about it. Now they did make some minor changes to the reporting, which you can get to directly here. They have a nice auto refresh to kind of cleaned it up a little bit. So we can go and scroll backwards actually go right about here. You can see where I was doing some testing on here, switching to the networking. I did some tests. I haven't had any problems with the reporting. It actually seems to be a little bit faster, more responsive. I know if you flip through them before would kind of hang up sometimes, but that doesn't seem to be the case anymore. But the arc cash thing and the memory cash thing still has me a little bit confused as to what makes it go up and down, which is why I brought that up before I brought you to the memory. Because if you're wondering why these changes are happening, these are sometimes reboots, but it seems to kind of go up and down even when I'm not rebooting it. I'm not 100% clear as to why. Now where the big changes come are right here in the storage and data sets kind of being separate as opposed to the way it was where it was one menu with storage. We have where we can manage the drives and a topology of ZFS itself. So we can see the usage, capacity, ZFS health, we can run a scrub, see the disk health, view reports, manage the disk. So you're managing the raw disk right here. And over here, we can manage the devices. So we have a raid Z one and we can expand these out, see if there's any error. And for any one of these, you get these menus that come out on the side so you can get the ZFS info on this particular device offline the device, manage the encryption device info on the device. So you're actually pivoting back and forth between different aspects of the hardware, run manual test, even on the smart drives. I like that all this is consolidated under storage. So you're managing it from the physical to the logical of the way the V devs may be set up. And then the data sets itself here. This is now inside once you have the pool, your ability to manage each of these data sets by breaking all this apart, they're able to put a lot of information together in a more consolidated way I feel. For example, if I click on my LTS video production folder here, I'm able to see that it's a data set file system standard, the settings. But if I need to change the settings for that data set, I can edit has a little slide up menu to change those by default, they inherit. So you can see inherit on or I can off for any of the extra data set features, data, data set space manager, and if I was doing some quotas, ZFS encryption, who the permissions are, I like being able to see that at a glance, and the data protection right over here. So I can forcibly create a snapshot, but I can also see the total snapshots snapshot tasks and then pivot to managing the tasks that are related to it. So there's the tasks related for that particular data set. And these just are really nice enhancements to be able to jump between any of these. And what it's doing is we have period snapshot tasks, and then it's filtering for that period snapshot tasks name, but then we can actually clear it and see all the snapshot tasks. This kind of back and forth makes it just a lot easier to manage and see like, Oh, I clearly don't have any cloud sync tasks that are off-siting this via cloud, but I do know I have maybe a replication task on it. But she got clicked back over here to the video production. There we go. And the same thing, it'll let me take it to that particular replication task, the video production to purple, which we can clear and see the other ones, the Tom computer to back up to purple and sync thing to purple. Now something I'm going to note, and we're going to edit this, the sync thing to purple purple is a NAS that I have, I've had for a long time, it's an older, slower one that does run true NAS core. And because it's running true NAS core 13, you're may wondering, well, do you have any replication problems with it? And I don't. The interoperability with replication between core and scale has been great. So I can still maintain core machines or that machine's kind of dedicated to it just has a bunch of WD purple drive, since the purple name, and I have them all stacked in there and I'm able to easily replicate to it and I can get the data back and forth. So interoperability, when you're doing the ZFS sync hasn't been a problem for doing the replication. So that's one nice thing they've kept compatibility with. Now, scrolling down here, networking looks pretty much the same. Data protection is another consolidated view for seeing all the different tasks and everything in one place, the smart tasks are sync tasks. So instead of pivoting them from the data set, this is just a different consolidated view. So you can see them, but I really, I don't know, I just really like the way they've laid this out. It's been, to me, a lot easier. It is a big change, but a lot easier overall to understand what's going on with any of my storage. Your credentials, local users, and I'll show this, but it's in the instructions link down below and we'll search for LTS. I'm gonna go ahead and edit that user. All you're doing is going to the auxiliary group when you add a user and choosing the built in administrators. Also, have an admin user separate than whatever your users are for things like your shares that still should be done by the way. Don't just assume that you always should use your admin for the shares, that's not good security practice. Down the virtualization. Now, I haven't had any problems with the virtualization. And as mentioned, and we go here and expand out and edit a VM. You can see the way the edit works on the side here, being able to change things, boot method, UFI, and I haven't done a lot on the VMs in terms of like any videos or tutorials. Those are coming. I'm going to do a dedicated one to how this works, because it's a little different than some other virtualization, but I think it's nice. It's got a decent UI to it. It's been stable and has actually survived several different updates I've gone through on here. Now, the devices, this is where they added the USB passers. So if we go here, USB pass through, controller type, and you can pick the different things that are plugged into it and pick the device and go from there to be able to add it to your system. I haven't tested this yet. I don't have anything really plugged in to dive in and test it, but at least it's here and we're building it in, which I think is really slick. Now, as far as applications, the only ones I've tested and the only ones I really use in production here is sync thing and that data, both of them work fine. I've went ahead and done several updates to next cloud and it hasn't had any problems. I don't use next cloud much. I don't use it commercially with any of our clients, but I've been testing it for each update to see if any of the issues cause any breakage and so far, they haven't. As far as available official supported applications from IAC Systems and TrueNAS, this is the current list. They've added a few more on the list. Here's your StoreJ, Plex, Minio is in here now, QT BitTorrent is in here, and I think Photoprism is new, but the rest of them are, you know, it's kind of a smaller list at the moment. Of note, yes, you can add other catalogs to this. There are the TrueCharge catalogs available as well. So that's another third party, so you can have even more application support within here. I haven't dove into it a lot. I've mostly been focusing on testing this with the current catalog that supported from IAC Systems. Now, while I didn't have any problems with TrueNAS scale, Bluefin, that doesn't mean you won't. But good news, it does set up boot environments that you can revert back to. So if you loaded it, had some problems with like to revert back, you can. You just go activate the previous boot environment. But it is good practice to not upgrade the ZFS features if there were any ZFS features be upgraded. You'll get a notice on your pool that there's a feature update to apply, sometimes when you update both TrueNAS core or TrueNAS scale. And if you update to those features and those features are not available in the version you want to roll back to, well, you may not be able to mount your ZFS data set. So that's really important. You don't want to lose the pool. You don't want to lose any data sets or create any weird issues. So don't do the ZFS pool upgrades until you know that it's working. Next, anytime you set up any of the applications in TrueNAS scale, make sure you understand not only how to install them and where the data should be going, but also understand how to restore them prior to putting data in. I just like to give this out there as a warning, because sometimes people get excited. It works. They start using it for data and then they realize they don't know how to back it up or never did back it up. So go through at least one restore process before you really rely on it for data. That'll save you a lot of trouble and hopefully us a lot of consulting calls when we tell people this is kind of broken and it's going to be a lot to recover it or maybe sometimes as people have learned, there's not a way to recover it because they thought it was separate from the pool and deleting things wouldn't cause these problems. So I'm just trying to save some people some trouble. Finally, love to hear some of them fish puns. Leave them down below. I like play on words are always fun. I think there's something about geek culture and play on words that go hand in hand. So give me your best true NAS scale puns or anything we can come up with around there. I will enjoy reading those. Head over to my forums for more discussion on this or any other topics I talk about on my channel or head over to the IAC systems forums to engage with the developers there and tell them what you love and what you love and maybe a little bit of what you may not love about to NAS scale and thank you 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. 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