 Tom here from Orange Systems. On October 24th of 2023, Chunascale 23.10 was released. Then there was some bugs that I found, as many other people did. And then they had a point release to address those bugs. They were some minor ones, but nonetheless needed to be fixed. And on October 31st, right in time for Halloween, the point release was released. So it's 23.10.01, which fixes those minor bugs. I've been using this for a little while. I wanted to follow up on my review of Chunascale Cobia and the too long didn't watch this. Yes, it's time to upgrade, but we need to talk about those deprecated apps and some of the path forward if you are affected by it before you upgrade. So let's dive into this. Now let's talk about some of the new features. I'm not gonna go into depth on all the ones listed here, but you'll find this linked down below. Couple of the big things and the things I wanted to highlight are going to be the app redesign. They've added a lot to the app market and even more so since even they first published this because the app market will dynamically update as new updates for the apps or new apps become available. Now another thing that will be a completely dedicated video now is storage pool creation redesign. The reason for this is they've completely redone how this works. So any of my previous videos aren't going to reflect exactly how this looks. So there's an opportunity for me to create a new video and related to this, if you have a very large layout, this is a very specific type of layout is derayed. This is not a answer for everybody's problems but it is an answer for people with large numbers of disks. So this enhancement is actually pretty cool. There's actually a lot that IX systems contributes back to the ZFS upstream which now shows up downstream in here. Now let's actually look at it and talk about some of the things that have been changed especially around the applications. Now the dashboard hasn't changed that much but I do like the layout of Chernaskal. I think I'm used to this dashboard now I should say and it works well for me. One thing I will note is right here you notice I'm using a ZFS cache of 49 gigs which is more than 50%. Yes, that is still a issue. You have to set the arc size to be how much you want. If not, it defaults only to 50% of the available memory leaving the rest for applications. Maybe that's fine but that's the default and if you would like your NAS to use more memory because well, especially in my case the applications aren't really using that much only seven gigs for apps. I still have 5.7 gig free. You can set the arc size. You'll find a video linked to my playlist down below that covers how to do that. Going over here to the storage view I have two different pools here and I think they're giving you a really nice view here so I can quickly see, all right, there's a topology. There's my data VDevs. I happen to have a four wide Ray Z one here. I have an eight wide Ray Z two right here. So Ray Z two allows me for double failure. I don't have to go any deeper to figure out like the basics of the health of the system and an overview of it. So I've got two separate pools. One is called flashy. One is called rusty. You can guess what disks make up each of those pools or you can actually get it in here and manage a disk and see some more information on them. Matter of fact, if we go to manage this you can expand out and see like these are WDC, W10 and have the model number in there. So I can sell that these are 7,200 RPM drives that are part of the rusty pool. Pretty cool. We're gonna go over here to data sets. And for the data sets, it just expands the top one out automatically then I have the bottom one here then when you click on any one data set I think this is something I'm also getting a lot more used to where I can look at it at a glance and see, all right, these are like the LTS video archive and I can see it has three snapshots where I can look at my current one like the Tom computer backup currently has two snapshots on it. From there I can see the share I can manage the SMB share with another click over here brings me to the share page. I think they're doing a good job of putting all the information in a very presentable way so I can get to any particular side of it. For example, as well, if I wanted to look at the Tom computer backup but then manage snapshots when you click the manage snapshots from here it's filtering for the snapshots at the top but I can actually clear this and we can see all the snapshots that are available on this particular system for all the different data sets but being able to add parameters at the top to filter for only the things you're looking for makes it very handy. Now we go down here to data production the cloud sync tasks are pretty much the same the R sync is here so yes they deprecated it but not from pulling or pushing to another server using R sync modules. So you actually have the option to do SSH or R sync modules to have this connect to other systems and use the different paths here but this is not running as a service this is a active it will reach out to one of the other systems and then set parameters for doing R sync this is not like the service that was running before so you actually still have the ability to initiate an R sync task from here maybe you even have an older TrueNAS and you want to somehow R sync data. Obviously if you're doing from TrueNAS to TrueNAS the best way to do it is with replication tasks and this hasn't changed too much but I may do a new video but I've had no problems moving data back and forth between the TrueNAS scale servers and my TrueNAS core servers. I keep both maintained and as long as you're both up to date they seem to be able to talk perfectly fine. Please note, make sure you're on the latest version of TrueNAS core if you're sending things from a scale system to core because that is a problem I've seen people run into is they let their core version get out of date there are some bugs and compatibilities if they're too far behind so you want them both to be as current as possible. Now we'll jump down here to virtualization because this was a nice change they made here but an interesting one. For example, when you're setting it up it still looks the same but now when we go to display they're actually using Spice now and it forces you to put a password. This was the complaint before because I believe passwords were optional which they probably shouldn't be. I like that they actually force you to type a password. I don't like that they put the password in clear text. Now we are able to get to this session for this particular running VM. I just not sure why the password isn't obfuscated but hey, it's here and it seems to work quite well. I'll still comment that the virtualization video I did previously is still gonna be relevant they've just changed from BNC to offering a Spice system and it's still pretty basic but I think it's a nice virtualization system for being in a NAS but there's still the but that I don't like and I disagree with anyone who thinks otherwise the fact that when I choose the NIC I cannot have this NIC talk locally to the same interface. So I have it bound to EN02 I've got this with its own IP address but it does not let me get back to the NAS for the IP address. You have to set up a bridge in order to do that. I don't have a video on that topic Wendell from level one text does but this is a complaint I've had if you have a virtual machine running on a NAS and I want to connect this particular virtual machine to let's say an SMB share on the system they've still made this not available by default. You have to do additional steps to be able to have it talk to it. Now let's talk about the apps. Here's a few of the apps I have running but let's first talk about the discovery of apps. I think they did a nice job as long as you know how they changed it. So we have a search option here so we can search and find things. It just defaults to when you clear things and this found MinIO and MineOS and anything else that had these letters in there the search works really fast to find them but there are a hundred apps, 101 apps in here and you have to then see that they want you to click on the view all updated apps for new and maintained versus just showing them. So you have to switch the views in a couple of different ways. So if we go to discover apps and we can choose the filters here we want to do by category, by app name, catalog name or updated date. So they have a few extra things that'll help you discover them but for sure it is nice that the search works really well it's just sometimes tricky because you might want to look at a specific category name. We'll switch it to that view so we can just look at all the different apps that are on here. Now let's go over here to apps and we'll talk about things that have been deprecated. If you have a need to run R-Sync D I set this up and tested it with my Synology we'll go ahead and hit edit here. It works great. I've had no problems with the R-Sync app. You load it pretty easy to point it at a data set you can add multiple different data sets you can create the module the data set you want it to point to even a host allow or host deny. So you can set up your standard IP restrictions for the R-Sync module set it to be read and write. This works great for devices such as my Synology that don't talk natively to true NAS but I'd like them to talk to something like R-Sync just to synchronize and move some data around and that's what I was using here as some testing. I'll do a dedicated video probably and I'll have to set this up and specifically how to set this up so it talks R-Sync in case you have another NAS but this is where I definitely have a problem and we're gonna go over here to discover apps and we're gonna go to MinIO which is in here as well but the problem I've run into with MinIO is not having a certificate which then someone from True NAS actually reached out to me as I commented on this in another video so that led me to testing it out and I did the testing which led to this forum post I'll find link down below I only posted this the other day on Sunday but I haven't gotten any response from anyone yet basically they have the option to use certificates now but when you do it it just gets stuck I've tried this on several different machines I've tried this with different certificates I don't know because I don't have an error message to work off of but it's still not working right which is kind of annoying I've seen some people and there's a write up that you can find in the True NAS forums of how to self install a certificate in MinIO but since they deprecated it I'm hoping they get this fixed so it can be used as an app. Now the last thing I'm gonna mention here is under settings and if we go under advanced settings no more checking the box for host path matter of fact I have my QT BitTorrent I set up on here we're gonna go ahead and edit and you're able now to point that at a data set and then share out of that data set for example I have all the downloads going to the downloads folder which is exactly where I want them to be actually it's a data set that I've got dedicated for the downloads and then I have a share so if we go over here to the data sets and we expand this out you'll notice the icons here that this data set is in use by QT BitTorrent and has SMB and it works. This is a nice improvement over having to check those errors and warnings that says hey if you have host path this is an unsupported config which doesn't make any sense because that's the only way to config it so I've always been bothered by that so they have now just rest that issue but you do have to be of course aware of the challenges that you may face if you have these permissions get mixed up but I'll be doing some dedicated videos now that that is a little bit more clear how the process is for that and as there are so many apps on here I will be doing some more dedicated videos for some of the apps as I deploy them as I use them and create some work instructions for them but there are different guides that they have done in their documentation to make this a lot easier. Now if you're wondering should you upgrade to scale or should you stay with Core I think both are still really solid NAS platforms. Core keep mine up to date have no problems with it but obviously the apps are pretty much dead in that series so I don't really recommend Core if you need the apps. If you like the apps scales a good choice but as noted some of the apps are still a little rough around the edges and each iteration keeps fixing these and there's constantly updates coming out to address the issues because I'm talking about different issues in this video than it was a year ago with the apps problems from before so they definitely improved dramatically but if you're just wanting to use TrueNAS scale as a NAS and because it has the latest Linux kernel it's gonna have good hardware support as a NAS using SMB, NFS, iSCSI that has been solid in TrueNAS scale it's NAS functionality is definitely there any of the bugs have talked but really focused as you may have noticed around the app structure. There is one bug that I will point out and this is a problem in ZFS now because with the modern version of ZFS although they were able to upgrade some of the feature flags there is a problem if you have a pool that is encrypted and you'd like some unencrypted data sets this is actually core and scale issue but this is exasperated especially for scale because I have the TrueNAS mini series both of those mini XL and the mini R and I have the Intel Atom processors in them which don't do very well with single thread encryption or I should say decryption you can actually encrypt with multi thread but it seems to decrypt single thread I haven't really figured out why I've got a whole post in the forums about that but the bottom line is my video editing needs to go fast so if I put it on an encrypted pool it doesn't go fast so I had to reload the system because the only way to get rid of an encrypted pool is to destroy it hopefully back up your data but then rebuild the pool as unencrypted and then copy all the data back of note you can still have encrypted data sets in your unencrypted pool so they can still be set to encrypted in an individual data set and any data set you encrypt will be a little bit less performant than the unencrypted one but I think some things need to be encrypted but my videos weren't one of them so rebuilding the pool really wasn't that big of a deal other than the time it took that is one other side note I don't see this officially from TrueNAS I know there's scripts to do this I didn't find any way to just move all your apps or reconfigure all your apps so if you wanted to take another TrueNAS and upload like a list of all the apps and all the settings within those apps and I know you can point them a different host path I didn't see anything official from TrueNAS maybe it's on a roadmap in the future which would be great there are some third party scripts to be able to get app data move from one place to another that is something I really hope they address in the future because when you start configuring 10, 20 apps it becomes very tedious even if you have the data for those apps backed up to go to each app, install it point it at the proper host path get things mounted again but hey, I'm hoping that's a more future that though we work on it the team has actually done I think a great job for this tool it's still the best NAS out there in my opinion I really like it there's a reason I'm using it for my video production here and all the apps I've instantly adding and accumulating on there inconveniences aside it's still a really solid product leave your thoughts and comments down and let me know if you're still running core if you're running scale or which one you prefer like I said they're both really good like and subscribe to see more content from the channel and over to laurancesystems.com if you'd like to connect with me and whatever socials are available when you head there all right and thanks