 Tommy here from Orange Systems and TrueNAS scale, 22.12 was released on April 11th of 2023. Today is April 18th. I load these updates pretty much immediately when they come out to a few systems I have, which includes the system that is recording this and the videos are edited on because I want to put it to the test. I know a lot of people are hesitant or a little bit more nervous due to their, well, lesser experience of troubleshooting problems with the NAS. I like to confront any issues that may come out head on so I don't mind testing beta software or in this case, this is a full release of the newest version. Now, this is a minor release so there's just lots of bug fixes in it. It's not any major feature changes on there, but hey, bug fixes are always welcome. There's a link down below to the entire list of them. Now, one of the other things that was added was the new community apps train. This kind of just coincided with the release, but these are more apps from IAAC systems directly, which means they're gonna be well integrated and much more well supported. This has been really what TrueNAS scales about being based on Linux and having Docker as an underlying way to get these apps on the system opens the system up to a lot more applications, but this is a long path and a long road because they're using Kubernetes to control it, they're building your own interface for this and it's just a complicated process. Now, everything's time indexed down below because I will talk about something that broke with TrueCharts and my work around for that so that is part of the discussion while I have here is what is TrueCharts but before we get to that, I wanna talk about another issue that hasn't been addressed that does affect TrueNAS scale and that's gonna be the encryption speed issues for single core CPUs. This is a problem I run into directly because I have my computer that I do my editing is connected at 10 gigs and I can't quite get 10 gig performance off of encrypted data sets. I didn't know that was the problem I was having, I assumed it was an editor problem of my editor just stuttering with the larger file sizes, but what it turned out to be was if you happen to have a encrypted data set and no matter how you extract that data from that data set whether it's over R sync, SMB, et cetera, you are limited to the single core performance and this may or may not be a problem for you but this is a problem if you are like myself in using one of these mini X pluses from IX systems. That's actually what I do my editing on and the problem is they shipped an atom CPU in the mini X plus, mini XL plus and mini R. The mini RS or Rekmon I reviewed recently. Now because this has these atom processors are actually quite fast as long as you don't have an encrypted data set. And this is a challenge you may or may not have noticed because if you copy the file it will go slow but you copy the file a second time is in cache and it goes extremely fast. So sometimes my editor would have a problem, sometimes the file would be cached after I had the editor open for a little while and did a little bit of editing and I just thought it was the editing software I used to eventually solve causing me the problem but I've got a forum post about this. I didn't get any clear answers but I do know this seems to be a problem with Linux and ZFS not with BSD and ZFS because when I've tested this on BSD systems it always uses all the cores. Now the odd part is it uses all the cores when writing in Linux. It's only when reading I have a problem. So I actually get better write performance on encrypted data sets than I do read performance but I'll leave a link to that forum post so you can jump in and join the discussion if you understand it better than I do or if I'm wrong about something on there but nonetheless that's the way things are. Now to talk about apps and true charts. Now first I wanna start here with my system specifically. So we go down here to apps and we take a look at the different catalogs that are available in here and if we go to manage catalogs you'll see I have the true charts and I have the official catalogs. So let's talk about the available applications. First we're gonna filter this to only the official apps that come from IAC systems and this is where they're adding more and more of them. They've added more of these community apps. There's a forum post where they're saying hey what else do you want in here? So this is great for them to engage with the community but there's no denying. If we go here to select all or take out the official ones and only look at the true charts apps there are more apps. And let's talk about true charts because they handle things differently and this is what caused some of the breaking problems that occurred in the recent update. Now I have a link below right to truecharts.org their website and they are not affiliated with IAC systems, the producers of TrueNAS and they don't make any other than a similar name any claims to be affiliated with them. Now they have a quick setup for how to get these extra apps in the system and they have a lot of important must reads. One of the things I wanna talk about is first they make their claim right here at the beginning all guides intersection are made for TrueNAS scale. We do not control anything made by IAC systems but they also added this no matter how great or shitty it is. And the reason they put that is because there are different philosophies they have versus IAC system has on how things are done because IAC systems is the one producing the software and they're producing a plugin over here with true charts when design changes are made on the IAC system size that conflict with the way they're doing things to true charts. Well, they have to get updates and it sometimes breaks them the apps in there. One of the things that they talk about here and this is the part I wanna focus on is they talk about using persistent volumes with PVC specific volume which Kubernetes will not delete i.e persists through upgrades, restarts rollbacks of your app and chart. I don't like this as much because there is a trickiness to setting these up that seems a lot more complicated. They have a whole write up on here how to manage them, how to access your PVC data right here, how to mount them and it just becomes a little bit more challenging in my opinion because of the way this works. So what I wanna do is go over how I use it and how I solve my problems where people were, well it broke basically when the update came because you had to reinstall your apps. Now ideally it shouldn't be a problem to reinstall your Docker apps but I think this was even more problems for people with the way the PVC storage worked. For simplicity, my preferred way to handle applications is to put them in a host path, not use PVC. This is the way I systems has you set them up. For example, we have this host path set up for syncing, mount, dozer, syncing data. This is a data set. If I need to replace syncing or move it to another system, I only need this data which I have replicated to another system for backup reasons and that's it. I just point it here, reload my app, no big deal. Let's look at the fresh RSS. This is another tool I'm using. I really like fresh RSS. Leave a comment down below if you'd like to me to do a video on it but we go down here and by default they want you to use PVC storage but I have chose not the PVC but host path again. Once again, I have a data set that I'm pointing to, mount, dozer, true church, fresh RSS. I created data set for each app that I want. That way I can have fine green control over the data within it. And if I were to simply delete fresh RSS I could go here, hit delete. And this is something I had to do was delete it. And why did I have to delete it? That's because when the new version came out there was some breakage because IX systems changed some of the things that went on in the back end. This broke and it was easy because all I had to do is delete the app and reinstall it but my understanding based on some forum posts and I'll leave some links to those but I just haven't really tested much with the PVC storage. This was a bigger deal for people because it broke some of their storage and the reload was harder. For me, I was like, oh, delete app, reinstall app, no problem. So that is my preferred method but before you do that with every app I have complained in the past and it varies from an app by app basis whether or not that host path works. This was even the problem I pointed out early in the IX systems apps when they first released NextCloud on there I had found a bug in there. It's been fixed and that bug was you couldn't reinstall NextCloud because if you just pointed it back at the data app, it wouldn't work. So before you build your reliance on any of these apps my recommendation is that you understand how to re-initialize, reinstall backup restore these apps. For me, it's really easy because they're going to that host path. I just put the same host path in and before I really rely on an app, I test that. I build the host path, I load the app, I then delete the app and point it back at the host path after I reinstall it and go, hey, look, it worked or no, it didn't. And in some cases it wasn't creating databases properly and when you have that many apps to manage that can be a challenge. So that is my word of advice to make that simpler. And let me know if you have a different opinion or if you think I'm doing it in a way that is less efficient or sell me on so to speak, the PVC storage. That's a discussion that is going to be harder to have in YouTube comments, but hey, how do my forums for more in-depth discussion on that topic? I will leave some links to IX systems and people debating that. So I'm welcoming all the apps. I like that TrueCharge is offering a really wide variety of apps on there, but always be careful before you build a dependency on an app that you know how to not only install it, how to repeatedly install it and how to back it up and restore it with these. That way when these type of changes happen, they're not that big of a deal to just delete the app and reload it because ideally you're always separating application versus your data. Anyways, thanks for watching. Leave your thoughts and comments down below or head on my forums as I said for a more in-depth discussion. Thanks.