 It is March 10th of 2024 and I've been testing the TrueNAS Scale Dragonfish 24.04 beta and I'm pretty impressed with it. One, it's surprisingly stable even despite being called a beta and two, there's some really cool features such as ZFS arc fixes, SMB and NFS status, easier SMB creation and I wanted to test these out and help debug or hopefully encourage some of you to help debug any of these problems. We're expecting the release candidate on March 19th of 2024 and this fall stable release on April 23rd of 2024. These new changes, especially around ZFS arc, I was a little skeptical of. This is a challenge when the TrueNAS core which is based on BSD has had arc working really well for years and I've got a video on tuning arc which will be obsolete once you start testing Dragonfish or once Dragonfish becomes full production release because it automatically handles it the same way. Now the challenge was does this work in Linux was the question of the way they implemented the arc memory and a lot of people thought it may not but after some testing it turns out well it seems to be quite stable and that's one of the reasons I really wanted to test it but I was surprised how much I like little SMB and NFS status so let's dive into it and show off these new features and hopefully encourage you to maybe test this out on one of your systems as well. So let's get started. Are you an individual or forward thinking company looking for expert assistance with network engineering storage or virtualization projects? Perhaps you're an internal IT team seeking help to proactively manage, monitor, or secure your systems. We offer comprehensive consulting services tailored to meet your specific project needs. Whether you require fully managed or co-managed IT services our experienced team is ready to step in and help. 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But I will be making some new videos which is why I wanted to start early with the testing here and doing the debugging and these new features such as the SMB and NFS status pages are something a lot of people have asked for before you've generally had to go to the command line to look up any of this having it all in the UI I think is really nice so let's just jump in and start showing off the new features and we're going to start with that status page. Now you can see this is the Trunascale 2404 beta 1 and at first glance this looks mostly the same obviously the ZFS cache is automatically dynamically sizing that's awesome and that's working there and there's a backup task that has been added as well you can control that by going to the configure and it's a new option under the system widgets other than that this page is the same but as I said let's jump right over to looking at the shares and we have a couple shares set up one NFS share and one window share if we go here we can actually click on this and see the audit logs of the people who logged in and we see the account Tom that was logged in via SMB and if we go back over to shares click on the SMB sessions you can see these sessions and I have two sessions that are showing up right here you can see file locks now right now it won't tell you the actual file it will just give you the lock I'm hoping maybe they have when it says one open file it will actually show the full path of the file maybe that's coming in the future but hey great that they're able to give you this information here you can also click over in the shares and see the different connections here now let's go back over to the shares again we go here and we click on the NFS shares and we can see the sessions and I have one NFS v3 sessions set up and another one right here which is a v4 session this is great because now I can see both of these in the same ways that I can see the SMBs and I can know which systems are connected at this time to it which is something you may want to know before you restart a server you want to know what all systems might be connected I'll show off the SMB share creation we go over here to add data set hit share creation demo and we're going to go ahead and change this to SMB it's also linked so if we decide we didn't really want to name it this but we're not done creating it we can go here maybe just call it share creation let's call someone test and you can see it's renaming at the same time right here at the bottom and we can go ahead and hit save and you can see our share creation test if we scroll down here you can see it automatically added all the proper permissions for a SMB share and if we look at our shares here it's been added to our SMB share so there's our share creation test and the share creation test demo we can still modify and change it so if we needed to make more advanced changes we can do them afterwards but this is great because now in one step they can create the data set the share and have all the permission set all at once now coming back over to the dashboard and looking here at the top we have this how would you rate this page you can rate the page report a bug or suggest an improvement matter of fact let's go back over to our shares SMB testing and let's go and see those sessions look at the locks and go here suggest improvement if we start typing in here show files we can start seeing if there's other already submitted suggestions for improvements so I'll put show files that are locked not seeing that in here show files that are locked on this page and if I was logged into JIRA I can actually go ahead and do this submission here so I think this is a really nice way to make it easier for people to make suggestions improvements or even report bugs now one more thing I'd like to note if you go over to system settings then boot currently it is on the 23 beta one but if you'd like to switch it back I've had no problem going back and forth switching boot environments but do remember if you switch boot environments and you make changes in the 24 beta those changes may not be reflected in terms of extra shares that you have set up or customizations you've done in the UI and the 23 that you go back to but you can go back so if you just want to give it a test you can and then just activate this one to go back to your stable version in case you find any bugs or maybe you enjoy the 24 beta one now I've been testing this out and trying on all the features as many as I can I have three systems loaded with this I'm replicating data between them the only minor bug I found is when you're doing ZFS replication when you first set up the task and you have it looking at another churnass server it seems to pause and you can just click off and click back on and it will expand the list of datasets available on the other pool of the destination churnass it's a weird little bug and I'm sure they'll have that fixed by the either the release candidate or definitely by the full version that come out but once you have that set up it works perfectly fine I've actually been replicating lots of things back and forth and all the other testing I've done with as an nfs SMB is well worked fine the apps haven't changed any so I've tested the apps as far as functionality I didn't find any problems there but I do think there's so some breaking changes if you're using the true charts app I'm just using the true nas apps the official ones and I haven't had any issues with any of the apps that I've loaded but of course I've not exhaustively tested all of them but they didn't seem to make a lot of changes there now if you want to read through there's a few other things like some developer tools that you can load I didn't really test that as I'm not really a developer I'm just someone who really likes true nas uses it a lot and want to stay up on all the fancy features and report any bugs so I can help be part of the solution to improve it and maybe you want to be that person too seems like there's been a lot of beta testers interested in this and maybe you want to be among them this is how the progress it happens this is how the project moves forward you participate in the community you sign up for free with Jira you report any known bugs that you have and hey the whole system improves and we get a better version of true nas so that's why I'm making this video to show you the new features and encourage some of you maybe to test it out please don't put this in production though don't do this on your production systems I happen to have enough in production and enough other systems to test I actually have quite a few true nas systems because I'm working on a series of upcoming updated 2024 versions of my true nas videos and well they're all going to be based on scale because they really are cutting edge on some of the features are adding it's definitely a few nuanced differences between the UI and well my true nas core videos are still as relevant as ever because they haven't really made any UI changes to that one either way leave your thoughts and comments down below like and subscribe to see more content from my channel head over to the true nas forums over the iac system to participate in the community there or head over to my forums forums.laurancesystems.com in order to have a more engaging discussion on this or other topics you've seen on the channel thanks