Special Episode: FOSS NAS Solutions

00:00SPEAKER- Hey Brad, it's a very exciting week this week.

00:02SPEAKER- It is.

00:03SPEAKERI mean, you know, every week has been pretty exciting

00:05SPEAKERaround here lately, I would say.

00:07SPEAKERYes, this is another one.

00:08SPEAKER- Yeah, so this is the second episode.

00:10SPEAKERThis is the week that we released the second episode

00:12SPEAKERof the FOSPOD, which as you may know is our new podcast

00:16SPEAKERabout free and open source software.

00:19SPEAKERIt is about consumer free and open source software though.

00:22SPEAKERSo it's the stuff that we talk about on the tech pod.

00:24SPEAKERWe like that so we realized it was important to us

00:26SPEAKERand we like it and we wanted to do a new podcast.

00:28SPEAKERSo we are doing a new podcast

00:30SPEAKERabout free and open source software.

00:32SPEAKERThis is also the last week that this podcast

00:36SPEAKERis gonna be in the tech pod feed.

00:37SPEAKER- That's right, it's like the Disney vault,

00:39SPEAKERlike it's gonna vanish, right?

00:41SPEAKER- No. - No?

00:42SPEAKER- No, it's not gonna vanish.

00:43SPEAKERIt's gonna go into a different feed.

00:44SPEAKERIt's in its own feed.

00:45SPEAKER- Oh, where would people find that then?

00:48SPEAKER- Well, you know, it's interesting you asked that

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01:09SPEAKER- What, really?

01:09SPEAKER- We tested it, we tried it ourselves, it works.

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01:35SPEAKERAnd there's two things to note.

01:37SPEAKERWe love feedback.

01:39SPEAKERIt's a different format again this week.

01:40SPEAKERWe're trying some stuff.

01:42SPEAKERYou know, the new show's gotta take a little time

01:44SPEAKERto find their legs sometimes, so.

01:46SPEAKER- Yeah, you know, first show was kind of

01:48SPEAKERprimarily an interview episode.

01:49SPEAKERThis one was a little bit more

01:50SPEAKERof a kind of a dense information explainer.

01:52SPEAKERYou know, we'll be doing probably some hands-on stuff

01:54SPEAKERin the coming weeks.

01:55SPEAKERDefinitely more interviews.

01:56SPEAKERWe definitely wanna talk to more developers

01:57SPEAKERand stuff like that, but would love to know

01:59SPEAKERwhat people think about the show week to week

02:01SPEAKERas we figure out what it is.

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02:10SPEAKERWe're on YouTube.

02:12SPEAKERI think I have comments turned off

02:13SPEAKERjust on general principle there,

02:14SPEAKERbut that's a venue for listening to the podcast.

02:17SPEAKERAnd I guess without any further ado,

02:20SPEAKERon with the show.

02:22SPEAKER(upbeat music)

02:25SPEAKER- This week's episode of the FOSPOD

02:26SPEAKERis all about network attached storage.

02:29SPEAKERIt's time to get our NAS on.

02:31SPEAKER- Look, man, I don't know what kind of lifestyle

02:33SPEAKERyou're living, but every week is NAS time around here.

02:35SPEAKER- It's time to get nasty.

02:38SPEAKER- What, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, man.

02:40SPEAKERIt's a new podcast, okay?

02:41SPEAKERWe have to ease them in.

02:42SPEAKER- We're gonna replicate the hell out of all your terabytes.

02:46SPEAKER- Wait, hang on.

02:46SPEAKEROkay, I only have one question here.

02:48SPEAKERAre we doing terabytes or Tebbit bytes?

02:50SPEAKER- Oh, just play the music.

02:51SPEAKER(upbeat music)

02:55SPEAKER(upbeat music continues)

03:11SPEAKER- Welcome to the FOSPOD, I'm Will.

03:13SPEAKER- I am Brad.

03:14SPEAKER- Hey Brad, how you doing?

03:15SPEAKER- I am doing well.

03:16SPEAKERI'm feeling free and open.

03:17SPEAKERHow are you?

03:18SPEAKER- You know, I'm feeling more free and open right now

03:20SPEAKERthan I do any other time during the week.

03:22SPEAKERI'm really excited about this week's topic too.

03:25SPEAKER- Yes, people who know us know this.

03:27SPEAKERThis is a substantial part of our free time.

03:29SPEAKER- Well, it's kind of where we started with the tech pod

03:32SPEAKERand we haven't talked about it much in the last two years.

03:35SPEAKERSo I'm excited to kind of dig back in

03:37SPEAKERand start with the fundamentals

03:39SPEAKERand then build up to where I think people wanna go.

03:41SPEAKERSo we're gonna talk about a couple of different things here.

03:43SPEAKERWe're gonna talk about why you would want a NAS,

03:47SPEAKERwhy you want storage attached to your home network,

03:50SPEAKERthe upsides, the downsides,

03:51SPEAKERthings that are good, things that are bad.

03:53SPEAKERWe're gonna get into the different options

03:55SPEAKERthat are out there from like some closed source stuff

03:57SPEAKERthat you can just buy off the shelf

03:58SPEAKERall the way through your heavy hitters,

03:59SPEAKERlike your true NAS and your open media.

04:02SPEAKER- Open media vault.

04:03SPEAKER- Open, thank you, open media vault.

04:05SPEAKERThe OMV, look, the OMV is nothing's more hardcore

04:09SPEAKERthan the OMV, it turns out.

04:11SPEAKERAnd then we're gonna talk about like the things

04:13SPEAKERyou need to know before you start.

04:14SPEAKERSo kind of where to kick off

04:16SPEAKERand how to avoid making mistakes early on

04:19SPEAKERthat will haunt you down the road.

04:21SPEAKER- You know, I will just say upfront real fast,

04:23SPEAKERlike building my true NAS machine

04:25SPEAKERfor about four years ago is like quite literally

04:27SPEAKERthe gateway drug that got me into the kind of

04:29SPEAKERfalse obsession that I entertained to this day.

04:31SPEAKERLike it's been the thing that got me into the command line,

04:34SPEAKERthat got me looking at all these different open source

04:36SPEAKERprojects that I could be putting to use for myself.

04:38SPEAKERLike it's kind of, it was the thing

04:40SPEAKERthat kicked this whole thing off for me.

04:41SPEAKERSo it feels like to me, a good place to start.

04:44SPEAKER- Yeah, and it's funny,

04:45SPEAKERit's 'cause I hit the similar path, right?

04:47SPEAKERLike I learned, I had run Linux and stuff before.

04:50SPEAKERI built my first NAS machine,

04:52SPEAKERbut I hadn't really engaged with command line stuff

04:55SPEAKERall that much, with the command line software all that much.

04:57SPEAKERAnd it turned out to be really,

04:58SPEAKERreally important to me personally and professionally.

05:00SPEAKERSo here we are, as always,

05:04SPEAKERthe FOSS pod is brought to you by Google open source,

05:06SPEAKERbringing all the value of open source to Google

05:08SPEAKERand all the resources of Google to open source.

05:11SPEAKERYou can find out more at opensource.google.

05:14SPEAKER- Dot.

05:15SPEAKER- Dot Google.

05:16SPEAKER- Dot, dot what?

05:17SPEAKER- No, it's just dot Google.

05:18SPEAKERWe're gonna do this every week.

05:19SPEAKERAlso a bit of housekeeping, we are hiring.

05:22SPEAKERSo we have an editor position

05:25SPEAKERthat we're looking to fill on a contract basis.

05:27SPEAKERIt's a biweekly, one show every other week,

05:29SPEAKER'cause that's how often we do the show.

05:30SPEAKERAnd we also are looking for a host slash producer,

05:33SPEAKERsomebody who can join us on the microphone

05:35SPEAKERand talk about topics of interest

05:37SPEAKERto the open source community.

05:39SPEAKERThe email address for both of those CVs

05:41SPEAKERis fosspod@content.town.

05:43SPEAKERSo send them in, we're talking to people now.

05:45SPEAKERSo we're reaching out to people and talking to people

05:48SPEAKERand we're excited to meet new people

05:50SPEAKERas a result of doing this show.

05:51SPEAKERSo please, again, it's fosspod@content.town

05:53SPEAKERto send your CVs.

05:55SPEAKERI think without any further ado,

05:56SPEAKERwe should get into why people would want a NAS, Brad.

06:00SPEAKER- 'Cause it's rad.

06:02SPEAKERSo it's because it's a lot of fun.

06:03SPEAKERI mean, that's not the best reason,

06:05SPEAKERlike genuinely enjoy tinkering with it like nothing else,

06:08SPEAKERbut like, yeah, we should start with practical benefits

06:10SPEAKERfor people who aren't lunatics like us.

06:12SPEAKERSo, okay, let me step back.

06:13SPEAKERThe basic definition of a NAS,

06:15SPEAKERa network attached storage device

06:17SPEAKERfor people who don't know exactly what the name sounds like.

06:19SPEAKERIt is just a storage volume sitting on your network

06:22SPEAKERthat any other device on your network

06:23SPEAKERthat's on your wifi, on your wired ethernet can access.

06:27SPEAKERSo it's storage independent of a kind of end user device

06:30SPEAKERlike a laptop or a phone or a desktop PC

06:33SPEAKERthat can just be shared by everybody in the house.

06:35SPEAKER- So the classic example I always give

06:37SPEAKERis that when I worked my first IT job working in an office,

06:41SPEAKERthere was a person who had shared their hard drive

06:46SPEAKERwith the Windows hard drive sharing thing.

06:48SPEAKERAnd everybody else in the department needed a file

06:50SPEAKERthat was on that hard drive.

06:52SPEAKERSo when she went on vacation one week,

06:54SPEAKEReverybody's like, "Hey, I can't get to this drive."

06:55SPEAKERAnd we had to, it took us ages to track down

06:58SPEAKERwhich machine was the one

07:00SPEAKERthat somebody was hosting their own files on.

07:01SPEAKERWhen you have a NAS server set up in your house

07:04SPEAKERor in your small business, whatever,

07:05SPEAKERyou avoid this problem

07:06SPEAKER'cause that machine's designed to be always on

07:08SPEAKERand it's designed to just basically serve files

07:10SPEAKERand do other things.

07:11SPEAKERThe other kind of secret cool thing

07:14SPEAKERthat having an always on machine in your house gives you

07:18SPEAKERis the ability to have software that runs all the time

07:21SPEAKERand do things like host a media server

07:24SPEAKERso you can share ripped DVDs or ripped Blu-rays,

07:27SPEAKERrun a VPN so you can get into your house from outside

07:30SPEAKERwherever you are and wherever you happen to be,

07:32SPEAKERrun game servers or things like internet of things server,

07:37SPEAKERlike Home Assistant, which is an open source project

07:39SPEAKERwe'll talk about later that you can use to control lights

07:42SPEAKERand smart internet of things stuff around your house.

07:45SPEAKER- There are considerations to doing this.

07:47SPEAKEROne of them is electricity,

07:49SPEAKERleaving something on all the time.

07:51SPEAKERI know people who just run their Windows machine 24/7

07:53SPEAKERso that it can serve files to the rest of their house.

07:56SPEAKERAnd I'm like, "What are you doing?"

07:57SPEAKER- My Windows machine has a giant video card and a huge CPU

08:00SPEAKERand it's kind of expensive, it turns out.

08:02SPEAKER- Right, so there are options all the way

08:04SPEAKERfrom a literal hard drive with an Ethernet port in it

08:06SPEAKERon up to a Raspberry Pi or an Intel NUC.

08:09SPEAKERAre we a NUC or a NUC podcast?

08:11SPEAKER- I think we're a NUC as the official pronunciation

08:13SPEAKERas I understand it.

08:14SPEAKER- NUC is where I like to land on that one.

08:15SPEAKERYou know, but yeah, like small, cheap

08:17SPEAKERand like low power compute devices like those

08:19SPEAKERthat you can hook up to one or more hard drives

08:21SPEAKERon up to like much bigger, like full ATX PCs

08:25SPEAKERrunning pretty heavy duty kind of NAS operating systems.

08:27SPEAKERLike there's a pretty big spectrum there

08:29SPEAKERof hardware and software solutions that we'll get to.

08:31SPEAKERBut you know, there are considerations

08:32SPEAKERlike how much electricity is this gonna use

08:34SPEAKERif I leave it on 24/7.

08:35SPEAKERSo you need to think about like what your needs are,

08:37SPEAKERwhat you're willing to bear there

08:38SPEAKERin terms of resource consumption and stuff like that.

08:40SPEAKERI'm kind of a lot to dig into there.

08:42SPEAKER- Well, also with a 24/7 machine,

08:45SPEAKERa machine that's gonna be running 24/7, 365 days a year,

08:49SPEAKERlike the spinning drives last a finite time.

08:52SPEAKERAnd you're looking, in my experience,

08:53SPEAKERbetween three and five years,

08:54SPEAKERyou need to think about replacing all of those disks.

08:57SPEAKERIn one way, this is kind of nice

08:58SPEAKER'cause it means that you know you buy disks

09:00SPEAKERand you look at the amount of space you're using

09:02SPEAKERand you're like, okay, this is gonna last me

09:03SPEAKERfor the next three years.

09:04SPEAKERAnd then you know that you're gonna upgrade

09:06SPEAKERand there will be theoretically larger disks available

09:08SPEAKERat that time at the same or less cost.

09:11SPEAKERAnd then something like a pandemic happens

09:12SPEAKERand the cost of disks go way up

09:13SPEAKERand you're sitting here thinking, oh,

09:15SPEAKERwell, I could just buy replacement disks

09:17SPEAKERthat are exactly the same size as what I have.

09:19SPEAKERWhy am I spending $1,000 every three years on disks?

09:22SPEAKERIt gets kind of expensive pretty quickly.

09:24SPEAKERSo it's something to consider before you jump into this.

09:27SPEAKERAnd there are, I think when we did this two years ago,

09:30SPEAKERtwo and a half years ago with the first TechPod episodes,

09:33SPEAKERwe had kind of jumped into the deep end

09:35SPEAKERbecause there weren't a lot of other options available

09:37SPEAKERat the time that were compelling

09:39SPEAKERor they were limited in some important way.

09:42SPEAKERAnd now it's a little bit of a different story.

09:44SPEAKER- Yeah, like the spread and product availability

09:46SPEAKERhas gotten much better.

09:47SPEAKERThere are a lot more inexpensive

09:48SPEAKERand simpler options out there.

09:50SPEAKERAlso, before we get into that stuff,

09:51SPEAKERlike I also feel like it's kind of interesting

09:53SPEAKERthere is a philosophical split, a schism, if you will,

09:57SPEAKERwhere I feel like one group of people

09:58SPEAKERis very much moving back toward local data storage,

10:01SPEAKERwanting their own media, like music and movie library,

10:04SPEAKERwanting to manage everything on site again.

10:06SPEAKERAnd there's a whole other category of people

10:08SPEAKERwho are like, get hard drives out of my house.

10:11SPEAKERI'm just going to use cloud storage for everything now.

10:13SPEAKERI don't wanna think about this anymore.

10:14SPEAKERSo like there is something to think about there

10:16SPEAKERabout whether you want to get into this.

10:17SPEAKER'Cause I think it's a lot of fun

10:18SPEAKERand it empowers you in a lot of cool ways.

10:20SPEAKERBut if you're the type of person

10:21SPEAKERwho wants fewer boxes around the house,

10:24SPEAKERthere are online options that can do some similar stuff,

10:26SPEAKERbut it's a very different use case and philosophy,

10:29SPEAKERdepending on what you're looking for.

10:30SPEAKER- But if you're looking for backups

10:32SPEAKERand like photo backup, photo sharing services,

10:35SPEAKERthose things are available.

10:37SPEAKERWhether it's Google photos or the iCloud photos

10:39SPEAKERor whatever your phone provides,

10:42SPEAKERor for cloud backup solutions like Backblaze

10:45SPEAKERis a great service that will keep your data safe online

10:49SPEAKERwithout you having to have a bunch of external drives

10:51SPEAKERaround the house.

10:52SPEAKERIf you're looking to serve media, it's a little harder

10:55SPEAKER'cause like the cost per terabyte is really, really high

10:58SPEAKERonce you get above about two terabytes

11:00SPEAKERon most of the cloud storage providers.

11:02SPEAKERAnd they can't interface directly with most media server

11:06SPEAKERsoftware, like your Plexus or your Codys or whatever.

11:09SPEAKERSo it's an interesting balance.

11:11SPEAKERI think for our purposes, I think there's two kind of people

11:16SPEAKERthat we're doing this episode for.

11:17SPEAKEROne is somebody who's curious about a NAS

11:18SPEAKERand wants to kind of dip their toes in,

11:21SPEAKERbut maybe not spend a whole bunch of money,

11:23SPEAKERmaybe even use hardware that's around.

11:24SPEAKERAnd one of the things that's interesting about that

11:25SPEAKERis the Raspberry Pi, the rise of the powerful Raspberry Pi

11:29SPEAKERover the last five years means that you can get

11:31SPEAKERa multi-core Raspberry Pi 4 with what?

11:34SPEAKERLike four gigs of memory theoretically for under $100.

11:37SPEAKER- Theoretically, yes.

11:39SPEAKER- Prices are a little bit jacked.

11:40SPEAKERLike you have to pre-order them right now

11:41SPEAKERjust because they're in such high demand.

11:43SPEAKER- The current situation, this has been pretty much

11:45SPEAKERthe worst possible time to be building something like this,

11:47SPEAKERbut in an ideal world, yes.

11:48SPEAKERSBCs, I guess is the generic term,

11:50SPEAKERsmall board computers for things like Pis.

11:52SPEAKERI mean, that's the most popular, obviously.

11:54SPEAKERLike very inexpensive.

11:55SPEAKER- Yeah.

11:56SPEAKER- Like you can get a $35 Raspberry Pi 4 theoretically

11:59SPEAKERwhen the price is normalized again.

12:01SPEAKERIt'll do everything basic that you could want a NAS to do.

12:04SPEAKER- Well, and I was able to find places to pre-order Pi 4s

12:07SPEAKERthat would deliver them in two to four weeks.

12:10SPEAKERSo like they're not impossible to get.

12:11SPEAKERYou just have to wait a little bit at that retail price.

12:14SPEAKERDon't go to Amazon or Newegg and buy them

12:16SPEAKER'cause the prices are marked up incredibly right now

12:18SPEAKERon Pi 4s especially.

12:22SPEAKERBut yeah, if you put one of our options

12:24SPEAKERthat we'll talk about in a little bit is Open Media Vault.

12:27SPEAKERAnd it runs really well on a Pi 4,

12:31SPEAKEReven with like Docker containers running underneath it

12:34SPEAKERwith different services running.

12:35SPEAKERSo there's a bunch of interesting options

12:37SPEAKERand you don't have to like take your old gaming computer

12:40SPEAKERand strip out the video card to build a NAS

12:43SPEAKERon your network these days.

12:44SPEAKER- That's sad if you want to do that, you certainly can.

12:47SPEAKER- Yeah, it's definitely a viable path.

12:49SPEAKERAnd it's like, it's one of the things we like to do

12:51SPEAKERrather than throw old hardware in the landfill

12:54SPEAKERis to figure out ways to kind of recycle it

12:56SPEAKERor upcycle it or whatever your term of choice is.

12:58SPEAKERAnd then that's definitely one of them.

13:00SPEAKERSo let's see, downsides, power consumption.

13:03SPEAKERDepending on where you live

13:04SPEAKERand what your per kilowatt hour rate is,

13:07SPEAKERyou know, a NAS, a heavyweight NAS box

13:10SPEAKERrunning the wrong software can cost $20 or $30 a month

13:12SPEAKERto run in power.

13:14SPEAKERThe drives have a finite lifespan, we talked about that.

13:16SPEAKERPlan to replace them every three to five years.

13:18SPEAKER- Yeah, I want to jump back in about the power usage.

13:20SPEAKERI mean, you're not wrong, like that's substantial.

13:22SPEAKERBut something hit me when you were talking

13:23SPEAKERabout backblaze earlier,

13:24SPEAKERwhich is that for small amounts of data,

13:26SPEAKERstuff like backblaze is great.

13:27SPEAKERBut yes, once you get up into the pricing tiers

13:29SPEAKERwhere you'd be storing the same amount of data

13:31SPEAKERthat you might put on a local NAS,

13:33SPEAKERthe monthly cost of doing that on a service like backblaze,

13:35SPEAKERI think probably far exceeds

13:37SPEAKERwhat your electricity is going to run.

13:38SPEAKER- Well, the backblaze backup service

13:40SPEAKERis infinite for storage, for backup.

13:44SPEAKER- That's for desktops. - For desktops.

13:46SPEAKERIf you're using their data container services,

13:48SPEAKERit gets really expensive of about two terabytes, yeah.

13:51SPEAKERAnd if you've taken efforts to reduce your power usage

13:56SPEAKERfrom the grid, if you have solar panels

13:57SPEAKERor wind generation or something like that,

13:59SPEAKERthe cost of running the NAS,

14:01SPEAKERyou take that off the top, I think, probably.

14:04SPEAKERThere's a lot of time.

14:06SPEAKERLike it takes a fair amount of time to get up and running,

14:09SPEAKERand then a little bit of time regularly for maintenance.

14:12SPEAKEROne of the things about putting an always-on machine,

14:15SPEAKERespecially if you choose to make it accessible

14:17SPEAKERoutside the network, the outside of your LAN,

14:20SPEAKERis that you're adding a massive amount of threat profile

14:23SPEAKERto your home network.

14:24SPEAKERAnd as a result, you need to run software updates

14:27SPEAKERand you need to run security patches

14:29SPEAKERand you need to update the services that you use

14:30SPEAKERand all of the things that Windows takes care of for you.

14:34SPEAKERYou might have to do that yourself on a NAS box.

14:37SPEAKER- Which I personally find to be kind of relaxing.

14:39SPEAKERI mean, that's upkeep

14:41SPEAKERthat some people might not want to deal with.

14:42SPEAKERLike it's kind of a once a month,

14:44SPEAKERonce every two months, depending on the cadence,

14:46SPEAKERjust kind of a cup of coffee on a Saturday morning,

14:49SPEAKERand SSH into three or four Raspberry Pis

14:51SPEAKERand just run some updates.

14:52SPEAKERYou know, it's not huge, but it is something to consider.

14:54SPEAKER- It's kind of analogous to changing your oil in a car,

14:57SPEAKERright? - Sure.

14:58SPEAKER- You get up in the morning, you grab your cup of coffee,

15:00SPEAKERyou sit down at the chair, you shell into the NAS,

15:03SPEAKERand then you apt-get update all and, you know.

15:07SPEAKER- You got to stick the dipstick into the package manager,

15:09SPEAKERsee what comes out.

15:11SPEAKERThe way I would phrase it is,

15:12SPEAKERthere is a little bit of a hobbyist element

15:14SPEAKERto this stuff for me.

15:15SPEAKERLike I think you do kind of need to enjoy it a little bit

15:18SPEAKERto truly dig into the stuff and keep up with it.

15:20SPEAKER- And it's also a vector to learn about things

15:23SPEAKERyou might not learn about otherwise.

15:24SPEAKERLike I learned more about configuring file sharing

15:27SPEAKERfor Windows machines by figuring out how to get that running

15:31SPEAKERin FreeNAS 10 years ago than anything else I've done

15:34SPEAKERas running Windows machines professionally even.

15:37SPEAKERSo yeah, it's an opportunity for you to learn

15:39SPEAKERhow to do shell scripts, how to do all sorts of other

15:43SPEAKERkind of stuff that's like, it's an entry point

15:45SPEAKERinto the world of IT administration,

15:46SPEAKERif that's a place you want to go with your career even.

15:48SPEAKER- Or even just stuff you want to know about on the back end,

15:50SPEAKEReven if you don't want to work in that field necessarily.

15:52SPEAKERLike I've learned so much about just basic networking

15:54SPEAKERand file sharing, like file systems,

15:56SPEAKERdifferent backup methods, you know.

15:58SPEAKERI've kind of gained a better understanding of like

16:00SPEAKERwhat GitHub best practices are, you know,

16:02SPEAKERlike how are repos managed?

16:04SPEAKERYou know, what is a pull request?

16:05SPEAKERLike I didn't know what any of that stuff was

16:06SPEAKERbefore I got into this and I'm no programmer,

16:08SPEAKERbut all of those things are so adjacent

16:10SPEAKERto this type of project that like you just kind of,

16:13SPEAKERthe osmosis sets in and you just start learning

16:15SPEAKERand it's a great feeling.

16:16SPEAKER- So the interesting thing is we both kind of started

16:20SPEAKERin the same place with the NAS as a media server slash,

16:23SPEAKERlike file depository for the house.

16:26SPEAKERYou know, I used to back up my laptops to my NAS,

16:29SPEAKERstuff like that.

16:30SPEAKER- If you've ever suffered catastrophic data loss

16:32SPEAKERin your life, you know how terrible it is.

16:33SPEAKERAnd that's happened to me a couple of times.

16:35SPEAKERAnd finally, I was just like, you know what?

16:37SPEAKERI'm going to build a thing that's got some redundancy

16:38SPEAKERbuilt into it where a single hard drive failing

16:41SPEAKERcan't hose years worth of data,

16:43SPEAKERas has happened to me in the past.

16:44SPEAKERAnd so like, that's kind of how I got there.

16:46SPEAKERLike that is actually a pretty significant use case

16:49SPEAKERor justification for doing something like this

16:51SPEAKERis like, it's some resilience to data

16:53SPEAKERthat might actually be like very important to you.

16:55SPEAKER- That is the right reason to start, right?

16:57SPEAKERIs, hey, I use a laptop as my main computer.

16:59SPEAKERI carry it out of my house every single day.

17:01SPEAKERThe data on that laptop is incredibly,

17:04SPEAKERat incredibly high risk.

17:05SPEAKERLike you leave the laptop on the bus,

17:06SPEAKERsomebody steals it, you drop it,

17:08SPEAKERthe SSD is soldered to the motherboard now.

17:11SPEAKERLike there's no data recovery for a broken laptop.

17:14SPEAKERIf you don't have it backed up.

17:15SPEAKERSo the interesting thing is you've taken,

17:18SPEAKERyou and I have taken kind of different paths with our NAS.

17:21SPEAKERMine is pretty much a straight media box.

17:22SPEAKERI store old photos.

17:24SPEAKERI have like my music collection.

17:26SPEAKERI have ripped Blu-rays and DVDs.

17:28SPEAKERI have stuff that I pulled off of the DVR.

17:32SPEAKERBut other than that, it's pretty much,

17:34SPEAKERit's pretty low traffic.

17:35SPEAKERIt's pretty much me putting files on there occasionally

17:37SPEAKERand then small amounts of data being pulled off

17:39SPEAKERand backups running every night

17:41SPEAKERfrom the other local machines.

17:43SPEAKERYou've gotten a little heavier than I have.

17:45SPEAKER- Yes, and kind of other occupations that I have,

17:48SPEAKERaudio and video stuff is a pretty big deal.

17:50SPEAKERSo having a place to put large media files

17:52SPEAKERthat are recordings, you know,

17:53SPEAKERlike they are source files of audio and video stuff

17:56SPEAKERthat need to be available at all times and accessed quickly.

17:58SPEAKERSo, you know, there are, yeah, there are ways,

18:00SPEAKERthere are ways to build a NAS for capacity

18:03SPEAKERor for performance or for redundancy.

18:05SPEAKERThose things to a large degree are kind of mutually

18:07SPEAKERexclusive.

18:08SPEAKERYou kind of have to make trade-offs there about like,

18:09SPEAKERdo I want more storage space?

18:10SPEAKERDo I want it to be able to survive more drive failures?

18:13SPEAKERDo I want it to serve media faster?

18:15SPEAKERYou know, there are a lot of considerations there.

18:17SPEAKER- The interesting thing for me is that I'm getting ready

18:19SPEAKERto upgrade my NAS or upgrade my NAS hardware.

18:22SPEAKERAnd I want to go a little bit lighter.

18:23SPEAKERI want to use a little bit less power.

18:25SPEAKERI want to have something that's a little bit easier

18:26SPEAKERto manage.

18:27SPEAKERI want to have something that I spend generally speaking,

18:29SPEAKERless time fooling with and more time just using.

18:32SPEAKERAnd I'm okay, I'm willing to sacrifice some power to do that.

18:34SPEAKERWhereas you're in a situation where you're actually using

18:36SPEAKERa lot of compute on your NAS

18:39SPEAKERand you also have a high throughput needs

18:41SPEAKERand other like a kind of a complicated workflow

18:44SPEAKERat this point.

18:45SPEAKER- You know, Will, if I didn't know better,

18:46SPEAKERI would say this sounds like what we in the business call

18:48SPEAKERa segue into our next section about different NAS options.

18:54SPEAKER- Okay, there are a bunch of different options here.

18:57SPEAKER- Boy, howdy are there.

18:58SPEAKER- Yeah, like you can install Ubuntu or Debian on a computer

19:03SPEAKERof some kind and just turn on SMB and SIFs,

19:07SPEAKERthe file sharing formats for windows and bam,

19:10SPEAKERyou have a NAS server right there.

19:12SPEAKER- Yeah, although everything you described takes a certain

19:14SPEAKERamount of foreknowledge, let's be clear.

19:16SPEAKER- It's not an easy path.

19:17SPEAKER- Those are Linux, this is something I'd love to hear

19:20SPEAKERfrom people about like what level of sort of Linux

19:22SPEAKERand kind of FOSS proficiency people are working with.

19:25SPEAKERThose are Ubuntu and Debian are two of the more popular

19:28SPEAKERLinux distros out there, but that is just installing flat,

19:31SPEAKERjust a full on Linux distro with no usability tools

19:35SPEAKERon top of it is what you're describing.

19:36SPEAKERSo like you absolutely can do that, but that is a rabbit hole

19:39SPEAKERif you don't have a lot of command line

19:41SPEAKERand Linux experience.

19:42SPEAKER- It's both hard to set up and difficult to maintain,

19:45SPEAKERwhich is kind of two disqualifying things for me.

19:47SPEAKERSo I'm gonna say, let's not talk about like,

19:50SPEAKERwhile you can absolutely install Linux on any computer

19:52SPEAKERand turn it into a server with like a few shell scripts

19:55SPEAKERand a little bit of foreknowledge, we're gonna assume

19:57SPEAKERthat people want something that's a little bit more managed

19:59SPEAKERfor our purposes.

20:01SPEAKERTrueNAS is the classic example used to be known as FreeNAS

20:05SPEAKERis a BSD based ZFS file system, massive.

20:11SPEAKERIt's kind of the grandfather of this entire,

20:14SPEAKERof like the home NAS enthusiast community.

20:17SPEAKER- It's been around forever.

20:18SPEAKERZFS is an incredibly resilience

20:20SPEAKERand like full featured file system,

20:22SPEAKERbut it came out of the server world.

20:23SPEAKERAnd so it comes with some pretty hefty hardware requirements,

20:26SPEAKERparticularly in terms of how much memory it needs.

20:29SPEAKERSo for basic home needs for say,

20:32SPEAKERbacking up a photo library, or just even a Plex library,

20:35SPEAKERlike just the standard home use cases.

20:38SPEAKERTrueNAS and ZFS maybe can be a little heavy

20:40SPEAKERand a little bit much.

20:41SPEAKERIf you're doing stuff where resilience really matters,

20:43SPEAKERwhere say transferring massive terabytes of data around

20:47SPEAKERwith a single command is important,

20:48SPEAKERthen it's much more appropriate in that context.

20:51SPEAKERBut it's kind of like, it's the thing I started with,

20:53SPEAKERbut it's the thing that I would probably recommend

20:55SPEAKERpeople get to last in their sort of,

20:57SPEAKERas they climb the ladder of NAS options.

21:00SPEAKERIt's like, it's the deepest rabbit hole

21:02SPEAKERand like one of the more fully featured options,

21:03SPEAKERbut it is quite a lot to get into.

21:05SPEAKER- Well, I was gonna say,

21:06SPEAKERI have a friend who's a professional nature photographer

21:08SPEAKERand he goes on trips around the world,

21:12SPEAKERgenerates terabytes and terabytes

21:13SPEAKERand terabytes of raw photos.

21:15SPEAKERAnd he has both a portable NAS

21:18SPEAKERthat he backs up the files to at the end of the day.

21:21SPEAKERAnd then that syncs across the internet to his NAS at home.

21:25SPEAKERAnd he has 50 terabytes of storage in that NAS at home.

21:29SPEAKERLike he's a perfect use case for TrueNAS.

21:31SPEAKER- Absolutely.

21:32SPEAKER- Right, it's a thing where redundancy is important.

21:35SPEAKERThe things that he's backing up are irreplaceable

21:38SPEAKERand he's interested in both redundancy and security

21:42SPEAKERand performance, all three of those.

21:44SPEAKER'Cause he works off of the actual NAS.

21:46SPEAKERI don't have that level of data security

21:48SPEAKERor speed required to stream the Lion King

21:52SPEAKERinto my living room.

21:54SPEAKER- Well, Will, you're in luck.

21:55SPEAKERWe have some lighter weight options for you.

21:57SPEAKER- That sounds fantastic.

21:58SPEAKER- I think we said it, but just to be clear,

22:00SPEAKERyou also are running a TrueNAS machine as of now,

22:02SPEAKERbut you're looking to scale down because like you said,

22:04SPEAKERyour needs are lighter and you can save on electricity.

22:06SPEAKERYou can save on complexity by moving to...

22:09SPEAKER- I think Open Media Vault is...

22:11SPEAKERSo Open Media Vault is kind of the...

22:13SPEAKERIt's a Linux-based distro based on Debian

22:17SPEAKERthat basically is like a managed application

22:20SPEAKERthat lives on top of the Linux OS.

22:23SPEAKERAnd you can install it any number of different ways.

22:25SPEAKERYou can install Raspberry Pi OS onto a Raspberry Pi

22:28SPEAKERand then pull down the packages

22:30SPEAKERfor the Open Media Vault software on top of that.

22:33SPEAKERBasically what it does is gives you a web-based UI

22:36SPEAKERthat you can use to control the guts of the NAS,

22:39SPEAKERthe NAS parts of the system.

22:42SPEAKERAnd also it will handle like the things

22:43SPEAKERlike the upgrading Debian for you.

22:45SPEAKERSo you get security patches and stuff like that.

22:47SPEAKERTrueNAS has a similar web-based UI for the front end.

22:52SPEAKERI think that's, for me,

22:54SPEAKERthat web component is actually really important

22:56SPEAKERbecause it means that people who aren't proficient

22:58SPEAKERor comfortable working in the shell

23:00SPEAKERcan do all the things that they need to do

23:02SPEAKERto set up the machine, keep it running,

23:04SPEAKERadd new functionality.

23:05SPEAKERAnd like that adding new functionality part

23:07SPEAKERis the exciting part about doing an open source NAS to me.

23:11SPEAKERYou can go out, you can buy a Synology box

23:14SPEAKERfor a few hundred bucks, slam some hard drives in there

23:16SPEAKERand install a Plex plugin and three other things.

23:19SPEAKERBut when you get to the point, you're like,

23:20SPEAKERman, I'd really love to run a Quake server on this, right?

23:23SPEAKERMy kid's gotten into Minecraft

23:24SPEAKERand I wanna run a Minecraft server at home.

23:26SPEAKERYour options are a little bit more limited

23:28SPEAKERon the closed source solutions.

23:31SPEAKER- Yeah, there are those term key boxes out there,

23:32SPEAKERSynology and QNAP.

23:34SPEAKER- There's a bunch others, yeah.

23:35SPEAKER- They are a lot more just ready to go out of the box,

23:38SPEAKERto be clear.

23:39SPEAKERI mean, those are basically little enclosures

23:40SPEAKERthat you just plug some hard drives into

23:42SPEAKERand they've got their own proprietary operating systems

23:44SPEAKERthat you also access over a web interface.

23:46SPEAKERAnd it's that classic trade-off, right?

23:49SPEAKERThey're a lot easier to just unbox and get going,

23:51SPEAKERbut also you're gonna pay a little bit more

23:53SPEAKERfor the amount of compute power you're getting in them

23:55SPEAKERthan you would building an open box.

23:57SPEAKERAlso, you're subject to the decisions and the policies

24:00SPEAKERthat are set by those companies.

24:02SPEAKERFor feature support and that kind of thing,

24:05SPEAKERthe software that they provide is very much designed

24:07SPEAKERby them, not sort of designed by committee and more open,

24:10SPEAKERlike you get in the open source world.

24:12SPEAKER- And also if you're buying something

24:14SPEAKERthat is a very common piece of hardware,

24:17SPEAKERthen the threat profile for that gets higher,

24:20SPEAKERthe more popular the hardware gets.

24:22SPEAKERSo we've seen some NAS specific malware out there

24:25SPEAKERthat's like ransomware that encrypts your NAS drives

24:29SPEAKERand requires you to pay some Bitcoin

24:33SPEAKERto unlock your business,

24:34SPEAKERwhich is never what you want, right?

24:36SPEAKERIt's never a good outcome.

24:37SPEAKERSo we're gonna talk about mostly TrueNAS

24:41SPEAKERand Open Media Vault today, I think.

24:43SPEAKERThey're both extensible.

24:44SPEAKERYou can both add plugins in the form of either plugins

24:47SPEAKERin TrueNAS's case or Docker containers

24:49SPEAKERin Open Media Vault's case that add functionality

24:53SPEAKERand other types of servers underneath your server.

24:57SPEAKERThey handle the maintenance for you.

24:58SPEAKERThey handle a lot of the maintenance for you.

25:00SPEAKERSo you don't have to worry as much about updating

25:02SPEAKERand things like that.

25:03SPEAKERYou can hit a button in a web interface

25:05SPEAKERinstead of having to run command line

25:07SPEAKERand update stuff manually.

25:09SPEAKERAnd like we said, there are a bunch of alternatives.

25:11SPEAKERIf you just want backup,

25:12SPEAKERa cloud-based backup is probably better for you

25:15SPEAKERor an external hard drive might be better for you

25:17SPEAKERthan a NAS if you only have one computer.

25:19SPEAKERIf you have a bunch of computers and a bunch of phones

25:21SPEAKERand stuff that you wanna back up,

25:22SPEAKERthen that's when you start thinking about the NAS.

25:24SPEAKERFor file sharing, the cloud services

25:27SPEAKERlike Google Drive and Dropbox and OneDrive

25:29SPEAKERare really competitive up until you get beyond

25:33SPEAKERabout two terabytes, it seems like.

25:34SPEAKERAnd then the cost per terabyte goes way, way up

25:37SPEAKERcompared to what you can get in a box

25:39SPEAKERthat lives inside your network.

25:41SPEAKERAnd the other nice thing about the internal network

25:43SPEAKERis if you are on a provider, internet provider

25:46SPEAKERthat provides limited upstream,

25:48SPEAKERthen you're not gated by the upstream performance

25:50SPEAKERof your home internet connection.

25:52SPEAKER- That's a good point.

25:52SPEAKERI mean, that is like, that problem is endemic,

25:54SPEAKERespecially in the United States.

25:55SPEAKERI don't know if it's as bad elsewhere,

25:57SPEAKERbut upstream speeds are,

25:59SPEAKERI have to assume, artificially suppressed.

26:01SPEAKERI mean, maybe there are legitimate reasons

26:03SPEAKERthat are not business reasons,

26:04SPEAKERbut like it's in a lot of localities,

26:06SPEAKERit is very hard to get very fast upstream for fast uploads

26:09SPEAKERto something like a cloud storage bucket of sorts, right?

26:12SPEAKERYou know, you might have downstream

26:13SPEAKERthat's like tens of times faster than your upstream.

26:16SPEAKERAnd so at that point, uploads of backups

26:18SPEAKERof terabytes of data just aren't even practical

26:20SPEAKERfrom a time standpoint.

26:21SPEAKER- 200 megabits per second down

26:23SPEAKERand 10 megabits per second up

26:24SPEAKERis a really common internet speed in the US.

26:28SPEAKERSo those are kind of the options.

26:30SPEAKERThat's kind of what's out there.

26:32SPEAKERWe're gonna talk about TrueNAS and Open Media Vault.

26:34SPEAKERYou can get real complicated and hybridize

26:37SPEAKERand do things like run your software on a small Nuke machine

26:41SPEAKERand run the storage in a Synology NAS.

26:44SPEAKERAnd you can kind of jam these things together

26:48SPEAKERin all sorts of different ways.

26:49SPEAKERWe're gonna hit kind of the more common approaches.

26:52SPEAKEROkay, so we've decided we wanna do a managed install.

26:56SPEAKERSome sort of operating system,

26:58SPEAKEReither TrueNAS or Open Media Vault.

27:00SPEAKERI think we should start with Open Media Vault

27:01SPEAKERbecause it's kind of the slightly less deep entry point.

27:05SPEAKER- Also it's Linux based,

27:06SPEAKERwhich has a lot of advantages we'll get into.

27:07SPEAKER- It's a little bit easier to set up and install.

27:09SPEAKERIf you have a Raspberry Pi laying around,

27:11SPEAKERyou can hook that up to an external hard drive

27:13SPEAKERand have like a tester.

27:15SPEAKERHey, do I really need a NAS for probably stuff

27:18SPEAKERthat you have in your house already would be my guess.

27:20SPEAKERThe installation process is very straightforward.

27:23SPEAKERYou can download an ISO from their website.

27:26SPEAKERYou either burn it onto a USB thumb drive

27:29SPEAKERor burn it onto a CD if you still have a CD burner.

27:32SPEAKERAnd then you just boot off of the,

27:34SPEAKERboot the machine off of that thumb drive and go from there.

27:38SPEAKER- So you've gotten hands-on with Open Media Vault.

27:40SPEAKERI mean, I'm way down the TrueNAS rabbit hole,

27:41SPEAKERbut like you've kind of gone through this process.

27:43SPEAKERWould you describe it as pretty user-friendly

27:45SPEAKERto go through that installation setup?

27:47SPEAKER- I thought I had a Raspberry Pi 4 laying around

27:49SPEAKERthat I could use to do this and I actually didn't,

27:52SPEAKERbut I did set it up on a VM inside my Windows machine

27:55SPEAKERjust to kind of test everything.

27:56SPEAKER- Not to derail the conversation.

27:58SPEAKERYou've just given me an idea of which is maybe,

28:00SPEAKERmaybe it's worth having a cold spare Raspberry Pi

28:03SPEAKERaround at all times.

28:04SPEAKER- I literally have one on order that'll be here in March.

28:07SPEAKERSo yeah.

28:08SPEAKER- I'm starting to feel like maybe

28:09SPEAKERa plus one Raspberry Pi strategy might be good to have

28:11SPEAKERjust like, 'cause you know,

28:13SPEAKERin normal non-price inflation times,

28:15SPEAKERlike there are like what, the basic model is 35 bucks, right?

28:18SPEAKER- The two gig memory one is $35, yeah.

28:20SPEAKER- Having one around not doing anything at all times

28:22SPEAKERis pretty handy just in case you have an idea

28:24SPEAKERand wanna try something like this.

28:26SPEAKER- And it's not like they'll conk out over time.

28:28SPEAKER- Right.

28:29SPEAKER- If it's sitting in the box.

28:30SPEAKERSo the things I really like about Open Media Vault

28:32SPEAKERis it's pretty lightweight.

28:33SPEAKERIt's Linux-based, so you get your power management

28:36SPEAKERand the kind of things you expect

28:39SPEAKERfrom a modern operating system.

28:41SPEAKERThe web interface is really robust

28:43SPEAKERand I was able to do everything I needed to do

28:45SPEAKERto maintain the system from inside that web interface

28:48SPEAKERusing their OS installer ISO,

28:51SPEAKERnot doing the install Debian first,

28:54SPEAKERthen upgrade the Debian to have Open Media Vault

28:56SPEAKERon top using apt-get.

28:58SPEAKERThe plugin infrastructure,

28:59SPEAKERbecause you can just download Docker images

29:01SPEAKERand run Docker images, it's incredibly,

29:03SPEAKERlike there are so many options out there.

29:05SPEAKERWe'll talk about TrueNAS' plugins in a little bit,

29:08SPEAKERbut the Docker images gives you a much easier path

29:12SPEAKERto building your own.

29:14SPEAKERIf the default Docker images don't do what you want

29:16SPEAKERor don't behave in a way you want,

29:18SPEAKERit's pretty straightforward for you to set one up yourself

29:20SPEAKERif you're so inclined.

29:21SPEAKER- Yeah, I don't think I can overstate

29:23SPEAKERhow much more robust the Linux ecosystem is at this point.

29:27SPEAKERNo matter your level of experience as a listener

29:30SPEAKERwith the free and open source world,

29:32SPEAKERyou know exactly how big Linux is

29:34SPEAKER'cause it basically rules the world.

29:35SPEAKERI mean, it runs the world at this point.

29:37SPEAKERThere is just tremendously more stuff available to run on it

29:41SPEAKERand getting that stuff working is tremendously more,

29:44SPEAKERI guess, compatible is the way I would put it.

29:45SPEAKERA lot of the projects that we'll talk about

29:47SPEAKERlike in this episode or even going forward

29:48SPEAKERin future episodes are also available for FreeBSD,

29:52SPEAKERwhich TrueNAS is based on,

29:53SPEAKERbut like, you know, there's always gonna be the risk

29:55SPEAKERthat like, oh, some library is not quite compatible

29:57SPEAKERand it's like you're gonna run into some esoteric problem

29:59SPEAKERor you might not be able to get it to run at all,

30:02SPEAKERor a lot of projects just are not available

30:04SPEAKERon the FreeBSD side.

30:05SPEAKERSo having a NAS that runs Linux and has Docker support

30:09SPEAKERand uses the most common tools and platforms

30:12SPEAKERthat the most people are using

30:13SPEAKERis gonna guarantee way more software availability.

30:16SPEAKER- And in a more timely manner too.

30:17SPEAKERLike often I noticed that things on the TrueNAS side

30:20SPEAKERwould lag behind a release or two sometimes,

30:23SPEAKERwhich is usually fine.

30:24SPEAKER- My Plex client is constantly saying,

30:26SPEAKERhey, there's a server update, you should go get it.

30:28SPEAKERAnd I'm like, no, it hasn't been added

30:29SPEAKERto the FreeBSD package manager yet,

30:31SPEAKERI can't actually do that.

30:33SPEAKER- Well, so we'll talk about that more in the TrueNAS side,

30:35SPEAKERbut I found that the plugin infrastructure on TrueNAS

30:38SPEAKERwas frustrating enough and limited enough

30:41SPEAKERthat I often would just rebuild plugin functionality

30:44SPEAKERin jails on my own.

30:45SPEAKER- Yes.

30:46SPEAKER- But yeah, on the Open Media Vault side,

30:48SPEAKERthe web interface is great.

30:49SPEAKERYou can set up new shares, you can combine drives,

30:52SPEAKERyou can turn on RAID,

30:53SPEAKERyou can do all the things you would expect to

30:55SPEAKERwithout having to touch a shell at all

30:57SPEAKERonce you get the OS installed.

30:59SPEAKERAnd the OS install process was answering,

31:01SPEAKERI think, seven questions, booting off of a thumb drive,

31:04SPEAKERanswering seven or eight questions, and then moving forward.

31:07SPEAKERNow, the hardware best practices for,

31:11SPEAKERwell, we'll get into the best practices

31:13SPEAKERfor where to install this stuff,

31:14SPEAKER'cause the weird thing about a lot of these NAS OSs

31:17SPEAKERis you install them from a thumb drive,

31:19SPEAKERbut you also are often recommended

31:21SPEAKERto install them to a thumb drive.

31:24SPEAKERThere's pros and cons to that,

31:26SPEAKERthe number of write cycles that most SD memory,

31:30SPEAKERflash memory, can handle is fairly limited.

31:33SPEAKERAnd if you're writing, say, log files to those thumb drives,

31:37SPEAKERyou'll burn out the drives in a year or two

31:40SPEAKERif you're not careful.

31:40SPEAKER- Or even faster, depending on what you're doing.

31:42SPEAKERI would say, so yes, the running true NAS

31:45SPEAKERoff of USB thumb drives was the kind of best practice

31:49SPEAKERfor years and years.

31:50SPEAKERI'd say that's kind of finally sort of been deprecated.

31:52SPEAKERLike SSDs, like legit SSDs,

31:54SPEAKERare getting cheap enough at this point

31:56SPEAKERthat you can actually just get a couple of SSDs

31:58SPEAKERfor this purpose for not that much more.

32:00SPEAKERI bought a couple of 120 gig SSDs for like 20 bucks a piece

32:04SPEAKERthat I run my true NAS install off of now.

32:06SPEAKERSo SD cards and USB thumb drives generally

32:09SPEAKERare just pretty poor at resilience over time.

32:12SPEAKER- The SSD solution is good.

32:15SPEAKER'Cause the thing to remember about these OSs

32:16SPEAKERis they're small.

32:19SPEAKERThe true NAS install is I think 18 gigs

32:21SPEAKERor something like that.

32:22SPEAKERIt's negligible.

32:25SPEAKERThe Open Media Vault install was very small too.

32:27SPEAKERI think it was two gigs total or something.

32:29SPEAKERBut yeah, I haven't run it on production hardware yet.

32:32SPEAKERThat's my next step for the Open Media Vault.

32:34SPEAKERBut I'm really excited.

32:37SPEAKERGetting the Docker images up and running

32:39SPEAKERtook about five minutes.

32:41SPEAKERAnd I can grab the images, upload them to the machine

32:44SPEAKERand set them to run.

32:46SPEAKERAnd then they just run, which is amazing.

32:48SPEAKER- So does OMV have any kind of central repository

32:51SPEAKERof its own kind of one click install,

32:52SPEAKERlike click here to install the Plex Docker image?

32:54SPEAKEROr do you have to go out

32:55SPEAKERand do you have to get the images yourself?

32:57SPEAKERI mean, it sounds like even if that's the case,

32:59SPEAKERthat's not that difficult, but.

33:00SPEAKER- The repository that it has built in

33:03SPEAKERis a little more limited.

33:05SPEAKERIt's like things you would use to manage the server maybe,

33:07SPEAKERrather than necessarily like your full fledged,

33:11SPEAKERhey, here are all the applications you might wanna run.

33:14SPEAKERBut one of the things you can add

33:16SPEAKERis a third party repository that adds Docker support

33:19SPEAKERand then adds a handful of other utilities on top of that.

33:23SPEAKERSo there's a plugin that backups,

33:25SPEAKERbacks up all of the conflict files for the entire thing.

33:27SPEAKERAnd we'll let you share that, save that wherever you want.

33:30SPEAKERHere's a SCSI over ethernet plugin, if you wanna do that.

33:35SPEAKER- You know, everybody's most common use case.

33:37SPEAKER- You can remote mount remote.

33:39SPEAKERHere's a plugin that lets you mount remote shares.

33:41SPEAKERSo if you wanted to do the thing like I was talking about

33:43SPEAKERand have a dedicated NAS box with hard drives in it

33:46SPEAKERand mount the shares from that as file system here,

33:49SPEAKERthere's a plugin for that.

33:50SPEAKERSo you don't have to fool with Fstab files

33:52SPEAKERand stuff like that.

33:53SPEAKER- Right, but you know,

33:54SPEAKERlike there are a bajillion Docker resources

33:56SPEAKERout there at this point.

33:57SPEAKERLike, if you just want to go see like,

33:59SPEAKERhey, what are some containers I can run here

34:01SPEAKERon this new thing I've set up?

34:02SPEAKERAnd like, you wanna run a Minecraft server for people

34:04SPEAKERor like, you know, plex or whatever kind of thing

34:07SPEAKERyou're looking for.

34:07SPEAKER- It's nigh infinite.

34:09SPEAKER- I think, yes, going to Google and typing kind of Docker

34:12SPEAKERand whatever you're looking for

34:13SPEAKERis probably enough to get you started.

34:14SPEAKERThere's a lot out there.

34:15SPEAKER- And the nice thing about the way Docker works

34:17SPEAKERis you can actually, like, if you have say,

34:20SPEAKERa home assistant plugin that you need to connect

34:23SPEAKERto like a Z-Wave radio so that it can control

34:26SPEAKERyour light bulbs, that's an option too.

34:28SPEAKERLike you have access to those resources,

34:30SPEAKERthose hardware resources from inside the Docker containers.

34:33SPEAKERSo that's kind of the high level on Open Media Vault.

34:36SPEAKERI think really, if people wanna start out,

34:39SPEAKERthe best thing to do is to order a Raspberry Pi 4,

34:43SPEAKERwait three weeks or a month for it to get here,

34:46SPEAKERput it on the, plug an external hard drive into this

34:49SPEAKERand set it up.

34:50SPEAKERNow it will, you'll lose whatever is currently

34:53SPEAKERon that external hard drive.

34:54SPEAKERSo you wanna either start with a fresh external hard drive

34:56SPEAKERor backup whatever's on the external hard drive

34:57SPEAKERbefore you turn it into the NAS box,

35:00SPEAKERbecause Open Media Vault will reformat it

35:01SPEAKERwhen you plug it in and set up the new drive.

35:04SPEAKERBut it's a good way to get your feet wet

35:08SPEAKERbefore you get into the deep end with TrueNAS.

35:12SPEAKER(dramatic music)

35:14SPEAKER- Are we doing it?

35:15SPEAKER- Is it time?

35:16SPEAKER- Are we descending the rabbit hole?

35:17SPEAKER- Yeah, so let's go one layer deeper.

35:19SPEAKERLet's peel the onion one more time

35:20SPEAKERand see what's going on with TrueNAS these days, Brad.

35:23SPEAKER- Yeah, so TrueNAS, well, so there's been some rebranding

35:26SPEAKERthere, I mean, some of the information,

35:27SPEAKERif you start Googling is gonna maybe be a little confusing

35:29SPEAKERbecause they rebranded from FreeNAS to TrueNAS

35:32SPEAKERabout a year ago, I wanna say at this point, maybe.

35:35SPEAKER- Maybe a little more than that, yeah.

35:37SPEAKER- Year and a half, something like that.

35:38SPEAKERThe current consumer product is currently

35:40SPEAKERcalled TrueNAS Core.

35:41SPEAKERThey do have like a TrueNAS enterprise that is

35:43SPEAKERfor straight up large corporations,

35:45SPEAKERbut the free open source downloadable,

35:48SPEAKERjust anybody can get it and run it,

35:49SPEAKERversion that is based on FreeBSD is TrueNAS Core.

35:52SPEAKER- And the install process is similar to Open Media Vault,

35:55SPEAKERright, you download it, burn it to a thumb drive,

35:57SPEAKERput it in a machine and install the NAS software

36:01SPEAKERon the machine, on whatever machine.

36:03SPEAKER- So the single biggest selling point of using TrueNAS

36:05SPEAKERis that it allows you to use ZFS,

36:07SPEAKERwhich is a really advanced file system

36:08SPEAKERthat came out of the server world that, like I said,

36:11SPEAKERit's got pretty heavy memory requirements.

36:12SPEAKERYou're gonna need like a bare minimum of eight gigabytes

36:15SPEAKERof memory for any heavy duty storage you're doing.

36:17SPEAKER- Well, and the memory requirements go up

36:19SPEAKERthe more storage space you add to your drive pool, right?

36:22SPEAKER- To a degree for a home NAS, you're probably gonna be

36:24SPEAKERlooking at maybe 16 gigabytes at least

36:26SPEAKERif you really want good performance there.

36:29SPEAKERAlso, I should just go ahead and mention here

36:30SPEAKERfor the sake of clarity that TrueNAS is meant to be run

36:33SPEAKERon a full-size x86 computer, you know,

36:35SPEAKERthat's an Intel Core i5 or a Ryzen of some sort,

36:39SPEAKERbut it is not lightweight like Open Media Vault

36:42SPEAKERor other kind of Linux-based solutions.

36:45SPEAKERIt will not run on a Raspberry Pi.

36:47SPEAKERYou can technically run it on a small x86 box,

36:50SPEAKERlike an Intel NUC, but even that is maybe a little dicey

36:53SPEAKERin terms of how many hard drives you can hook up

36:55SPEAKERand the kind of horsepower you're gonna be working with.

36:57SPEAKERIt's, TrueNAS really is meant to be put

36:59SPEAKERon a full-size computer, and that's part of where those

37:02SPEAKERkind of hefty electricity requirements come in.

37:04SPEAKERAnd so, as we've said, the biggest reason to use TrueNAS

37:07SPEAKERis as a vehicle for using ZFS as your file system.

37:11SPEAKERThe single biggest advantage of ZFS

37:13SPEAKERis that it really emphasizes resilience.

37:15SPEAKERIt allows you to snapshot entire file systems

37:18SPEAKERand essentially keep a copy of them in the background

37:20SPEAKERas they change, and you can roll back to previous snapshots.

37:22SPEAKERIt makes it real easy to send snapshots to other drives

37:24SPEAKERor other storage pools or devices on your network.

37:27SPEAKER- Does that also let you go back,

37:29SPEAKERlike if you wanna find the version of a file

37:30SPEAKERfrom like three weeks ago, you can go back in time

37:32SPEAKERand get the version of that file from three weeks ago?

37:34SPEAKER- Absolutely, and like I ended up, like when I,

37:36SPEAKERlike I said, it's been a teeth rabbit hole.

37:37SPEAKERLike I've learned how to do all that stuff

37:38SPEAKERfrom the command line in FreeBSD originally,

37:40SPEAKERbut they have since rolled out the option to merge that

37:44SPEAKERwith, for example, if you're sharing over SMB

37:47SPEAKERfrom a TrueNAS machine to Windows.

37:48SPEAKER- CIFS, yeah.

37:49SPEAKER- Standard Windows file sharing stuff, right.

37:51SPEAKERIn File Explorer, the CFS snapshots now show up as the,

37:56SPEAKERI think in Windows it's called shadow copies,

37:58SPEAKERis that right?

37:59SPEAKER- Shadow copies is the Windows feature, yeah.

38:00SPEAKER- You can get properties on a folder in Windows

38:03SPEAKERand just hit the previous versions tab

38:04SPEAKERand it will just list out every snapshot

38:06SPEAKERof that folder you have as previous dates.

38:09SPEAKERYou can literally just open one of those

38:10SPEAKERas another File Explorer window

38:12SPEAKERthat has those previous versions of the files.

38:14SPEAKERIf you've deleted something, you can go back and get it.

38:16SPEAKERSnapshots also make it real easy to back up, kinda en masse.

38:20SPEAKERIt's a very powerful system if you really want

38:22SPEAKERto make sure you're not gonna lose any data.

38:24SPEAKERIt is a lot to learn now.

38:25SPEAKER- Well, and it's a lot of overhead.

38:27SPEAKERLike you need a real computer, you're not gonna run this

38:30SPEAKERon a lightweight embedded NAS box.

38:33SPEAKERYou wanna have multiple cores and a bunch of memory.

38:36SPEAKEROne of the other things that drew me to TrueNAS early on

38:39SPEAKERwere jails.

38:40SPEAKERWell, jails and plugins, kind of two sides of the same coin.

38:43SPEAKER- I think in the TrueNAS parlance,

38:45SPEAKERa plugin really is just a jail underneath.

38:48SPEAKERSo a jail is a form of container that is native to FreeBSD.

38:51SPEAKERI think most people know

38:53SPEAKERabout virtual machines at this point.

38:54SPEAKERDocker is another example of containerization.

38:56SPEAKERSo basically the key difference between virtual machines

38:59SPEAKERor virtualization and containerization

39:01SPEAKERis that VMs replicate an entire hardware stack

39:03SPEAKERfrom the very basic level up, right?

39:05SPEAKERVMs run their own kernel.

39:07SPEAKERThey are a fully self-contained sandboxed virtual computer.

39:11SPEAKERContainers run on the system host,

39:13SPEAKERlike they run on the kernel of the host.

39:15SPEAKERThey share resources, they're much lower overhead

39:17SPEAKERand more performant,

39:18SPEAKERalthough not that VMs are like not performant,

39:20SPEAKERbut containers are more lightweight in terms of resources,

39:22SPEAKERbut they do exist within the kind of ecosystem

39:25SPEAKERof the host that they run on.

39:26SPEAKERThey just use kind of name spacing

39:28SPEAKERand other sorts of sandboxing features

39:30SPEAKERto kind of make them discrete from the host.

39:33SPEAKER- When you run PSA UX on a FreeBSD machine

39:37SPEAKERthat has jails running,

39:38SPEAKERyou see the processes that are running inside those jails

39:40SPEAKERif you're on the root machine.

39:42SPEAKER- Yes, but if you go inside the jail,

39:43SPEAKERinside the jail, the jail thinks it's just a computer

39:46SPEAKERunto itself with nothing happening outside of it.

39:47SPEAKERIt's kind of a fascinating model, but yes,

39:50SPEAKERat the host level, you'll see everything

39:51SPEAKERthat's running on every jail and machine.

39:53SPEAKER- Well, but the, so the upshot is you can set up,

39:55SPEAKERif you have say five applications

39:57SPEAKERthat you want to run on your NAS machine,

39:59SPEAKERlike a game server, a media server, a print server,

40:04SPEAKERstuff like that, then you set up a jail for each one

40:06SPEAKERand then each of those is maintained independently

40:08SPEAKERand you can turn them on and off as needed.

40:10SPEAKER- Right, yes.

40:11SPEAKERSo in FreeBSD/TrueNAS land,

40:13SPEAKERthat's how you would approach kind of discrete system services

40:16SPEAKERlike that, you know, Docker does replicate

40:18SPEAKERthat kind of same functionality

40:19SPEAKERwith a slightly different paradigm

40:21SPEAKERin something like Open Media Vault.

40:22SPEAKERYou can do other cool stuff with containers,

40:24SPEAKERlike you can assign them their own network IPs

40:26SPEAKERand then, you know, you can even map their names

40:29SPEAKERto a local domain on your, on your network.

40:32SPEAKERYou can do like .lan for stuff.

40:33SPEAKERSo you could go to like plex.lan

40:35SPEAKERcould be the address for your plex.

40:37SPEAKER- Wait, wait, wait, you're a .lan?

40:39SPEAKER- Yeah.

40:40SPEAKER- I'm a .local.

40:40SPEAKER- Well, .local is kind of the industry standard,

40:42SPEAKERbut that's two syllables.

40:43SPEAKERThat's two more pairs.

40:45SPEAKER- Fair, look, you make a good point.

40:47SPEAKERDo you wanna type five characters or do you wanna type three?

40:49SPEAKER- Fair, now I'm gonna have to change everything.

40:51SPEAKER- But yeah, like, you know, abstracting services out

40:53SPEAKERto little containers has a lot of cool advantages like that.

40:56SPEAKERYou know, like they exist as like separate machines

40:58SPEAKERon your network as well as separate little virtual computers

41:02SPEAKERon the host.

41:03SPEAKER- Yeah.

41:03SPEAKER- On top of all those benefits,

41:04SPEAKERI mean, the actual secret real reason

41:07SPEAKERto prefer using containers

41:09SPEAKERfor putting all your little services in containers

41:11SPEAKERis that it protects you from screwing anything up

41:13SPEAKERbecause each container

41:15SPEAKERis its own little self-contained computer.

41:16SPEAKERAnd like, you know, you can spin a new one up

41:18SPEAKERwhenever you feel like it.

41:19SPEAKERIf you mess something up in there,

41:21SPEAKERyou can kind of just delete it and start over.

41:23SPEAKERYou can clone them if you wanna try something

41:26SPEAKERand that may not work.

41:27SPEAKERAnd then you can just delete that clone

41:28SPEAKERand go back to where you were.

41:30SPEAKERThey are just a sandbox way,

41:32SPEAKERespecially when you're starting out.

41:33SPEAKERAnd I cannot stress this enough.

41:35SPEAKERIf you don't have a lot of experience, you know,

41:37SPEAKERat a bash prompt or with open source stuff in general,

41:39SPEAKERlike it's just the best safety net you can have really

41:41SPEAKERto be able to create a fake computer

41:44SPEAKERthat you can then dive into and just tinker around with

41:46SPEAKERand not worry too much about messing up the host

41:48SPEAKERbecause you can just, you know, hose that container

41:50SPEAKERand make a new one whenever you feel like it.

41:52SPEAKERIt's, I highly recommend it,

41:53SPEAKERwhatever kind of paradigm you're working with,

41:55SPEAKERwhether it's jails or Docker

41:56SPEAKERor there are plenty of other container solutions

41:59SPEAKERin Linux as well.

42:01SPEAKERBut if you're really trying to get your feet wet

42:02SPEAKERwith this stuff, it's just, it's a fantastic way

42:05SPEAKERto have some peace of mind as you poke at stuff

42:07SPEAKERand sort of figure out how everything works

42:09SPEAKERwithout worrying that you're going to, you know,

42:11SPEAKERcreate a lot of work for yourself by ending up

42:12SPEAKERin a situation where you have to say,

42:14SPEAKERwipe the entire TrueNAS install or Open Media Vault

42:17SPEAKERor whatever your OS is, you know, from the ground up

42:20SPEAKERbecause you did something on the host

42:22SPEAKERthat you can't recover from.

42:23SPEAKERJails and TrueNAS are one way to do that.

42:25SPEAKERDocker and Linux based solutions are another.

42:27SPEAKERThere are a bunch of different container solutions out there

42:29SPEAKERand jails are basically full FreeBSD machines.

42:33SPEAKERSo like you kind of do need to know what you're doing

42:35SPEAKERat the command line for the most part

42:36SPEAKERto take advantage of that stuff.

42:38SPEAKERBut once you do, you can follow basic

42:40SPEAKERhow to install processes for whatever service

42:42SPEAKERyou want to add and run through the shell scripts

42:45SPEAKERpretty easily is my experience.

42:47SPEAKERLike just generally speaking, the kind of pros

42:50SPEAKERof TrueNAS are that it's incredibly powerful.

42:52SPEAKERYou could do a lot with it.

42:54SPEAKERIt is a real performance hog.

42:57SPEAKERIt's kind of bad on power management.

43:00SPEAKERFreeBS, the current version of TrueNAS is better

43:01SPEAKERthan the previous ones have been,

43:03SPEAKERbut it does have a tendency to run your CPU

43:06SPEAKERat basically full speed all the time

43:08SPEAKER'cause it doesn't use the internal power.

43:10SPEAKERBSD is not as good at internal power management

43:12SPEAKERas Linux and Windows are.

43:14SPEAKERGenerally speaking, if you know how to set it up

43:17SPEAKERand do a good job setting up,

43:18SPEAKERyou can get unbelievable performance out of it.

43:21SPEAKERIf you do not, you can really, really hamper your ability

43:25SPEAKERto get good performance out of the machine.

43:27SPEAKERAnd you may find yourself rebuilding this a couple of times

43:29SPEAKERbefore you get it right in my experience.

43:31SPEAKER- Yes, like it's very easy to make mistakes,

43:32SPEAKERlike laying out your drive arrangement

43:34SPEAKERas like when you make a ZFS volume for the first time.

43:36SPEAKERThere are a ton of considerations there about like,

43:39SPEAKERdo I wanna make this a RAID-Z situation

43:41SPEAKERwhere I can lose one or two or even three drives

43:43SPEAKERand not lose my data?

43:45SPEAKERBut there are parity requirements there.

43:46SPEAKERDo I wanna do mirrors?

43:47SPEAKERThere's a lot there that you really need to be ready

43:49SPEAKERto kind of educate yourself on

43:51SPEAKERto try to not to make too many mistakes upfront.

43:53SPEAKER- There's a couple of things to think about,

43:54SPEAKERand this is a good place to talk about this.

43:56SPEAKERThere's the idea of data redundancy,

43:58SPEAKERwhich means that a drive can fail

44:00SPEAKERand your system stays up.

44:02SPEAKERYou don't lose any data when one drive fails.

44:05SPEAKERThere's backing up, which is often the better choice.

44:08SPEAKERLike doing an offsite backup

44:09SPEAKERfor your network attached storage

44:12SPEAKERtakes two times the number of drives

44:14SPEAKERor two times the total amount of storage.

44:17SPEAKERBut if you're not writing to the NAS

44:18SPEAKERconstantly losing a day's worth of data

44:21SPEAKERis not that big a deal for most people,

44:24SPEAKER'cause usually in that one day

44:25SPEAKERit'll still be saved someplace else.

44:27SPEAKERThe thing to remember always

44:31SPEAKERis that data redundancy is not equal to backup.

44:34SPEAKER- Right, yes, that is a mantra you will hear all the time

44:37SPEAKERif you get deep into the kind of NAS world

44:39SPEAKERis RAID is not backup.

44:41SPEAKER- Yeah, and what that means is if, for example,

44:44SPEAKERyou have a virus on your computer at home

44:47SPEAKERand that virus hits your NAS

44:49SPEAKERand deletes all the files on your NAS,

44:51SPEAKERhaving redundant storage on the NAS

44:55SPEAKERwon't necessarily prevent you from losing data in that case.

44:57SPEAKERNow with TrueNAS and ZFS,

44:59SPEAKERif you have the snapshot set up right,

45:00SPEAKERyou'll just roll back to a previous snapshot.

45:01SPEAKERIt's not a big deal, but don't treat a NAS as backup

45:06SPEAKERunless it is actually backup,

45:08SPEAKERunless you're keeping copies of data

45:09SPEAKERon your local machines and the NAS.

45:11SPEAKERAt that point, it is backup.

45:12SPEAKER- Right, RAID is, to a degree, resilient to hardware failure.

45:15SPEAKERLike I said, there are arrangements

45:17SPEAKERthat will allow you to lose one or more drives

45:18SPEAKERand keep your data, but then you're in a degraded state

45:21SPEAKERwhere you've gotta add a new drive

45:22SPEAKERand there are increased stresses

45:24SPEAKERon the remaining drives as you rebuild.

45:26SPEAKERSomething else can go wrong there.

45:28SPEAKERIt's still a single point of failure.

45:29SPEAKERThat's really what it is, is having one,

45:31SPEAKEReven if it's a bunch of drives,

45:33SPEAKERit's one entity that is a single point of failure

45:35SPEAKERand just having a second copy

45:36SPEAKERof any important data backed up is still critical

45:39SPEAKER'cause things can still go wrong.

45:41SPEAKER- Okay, so now I think is a good time to talk about

45:44SPEAKERwhat's going on in the TrueNAS world.

45:46SPEAKERThere's TrueNAS Core, which is BSD-based.

45:49SPEAKER- So this is why I stress the TrueNAS Core name

45:52SPEAKERbecause they are actually,

45:53SPEAKERIX Systems is the company that primarily runs TrueNAS,

45:57SPEAKERalthough it is open source, anybody can contribute to it.

45:59SPEAKERSo there is a Linux-based version of TrueNAS forthcoming

46:03SPEAKERcalled TrueNAS Scale.

46:04SPEAKERI haven't tried it yet because it's still

46:06SPEAKERin release candidate phase.

46:07SPEAKERIt's not quite ready to go yet

46:09SPEAKERand I'm not quite ready to run pre-release software

46:13SPEAKERon a crucial storage box right now.

46:15SPEAKER- Yeah, just to be clear, when you're setting up your NAS,

46:17SPEAKERyou usually go for the stable long-term version,

46:20SPEAKERnot the cutting edge version is my advice.

46:23SPEAKER- Building a NAS is when I started learning

46:25SPEAKERto value the uptime number over the version number.

46:28SPEAKER- Yes. - You know,

46:29SPEAKERI'm gonna resist updating every single time

46:32SPEAKERa new version or feature comes out.

46:33SPEAKER- You update when needed, not when not available.

46:37SPEAKER- So ZFS has been essentially available

46:40SPEAKERand production ready in the FreeBSD world for years.

46:43SPEAKERIt is built into the kernel.

46:44SPEAKERIt's like ready to go, it's considered rock solid.

46:47SPEAKERThat has not been the case in the Linux world

46:49SPEAKERwhere there are license incompatibilities

46:51SPEAKERbetween the Linux kernel and ZFS

46:53SPEAKERthat prevent it from becoming part of the kernel tree.

46:55SPEAKERAnd so ZFS is incredibly fully featured

46:58SPEAKERand mature now on Linux, but it's still kind of this like,

47:02SPEAKERit does not enjoy a most favored nation status

47:04SPEAKERas a file system, let's say, where it is an add-on.

47:07SPEAKERIt is something you have to add.

47:08SPEAKERSo it's basically something that IX is doing themselves.

47:10SPEAKERThey're integrating ZFS for Linux

47:12SPEAKERinto the TrueNAS framework.

47:14SPEAKERSo essentially the upshot is it's going to be

47:16SPEAKERa Linux-based version of TrueNAS.

47:17SPEAKERAnd so you're gonna get Kubernetes

47:18SPEAKERand Docker support with that.

47:20SPEAKER- Which aren't available on the BSD side.

47:21SPEAKER- Right, yeah, so that goes back

47:23SPEAKERto that software compatibility thing I was talking about

47:25SPEAKERis that there's just the ease of finding services

47:28SPEAKERand applications that you wanna run

47:30SPEAKERis so much greater on Linux

47:32SPEAKERthat I think this is probably gonna be a pretty big boon

47:34SPEAKERto the TrueNAS world.

47:36SPEAKERJust to give a super quick example,

47:37SPEAKERjust to illustrate the point, back early in the pandemic,

47:39SPEAKERI wanted to run a Terraria server

47:41SPEAKERfor some friends on my TrueNAS machine.

47:43SPEAKERTerraria, if you're not familiar with it,

47:44SPEAKERis basically 2D Minecraft.

47:47SPEAKERBut I went to see if I could set that Terraria server up

47:50SPEAKERon the TrueNAS box, which is FreeBSD.

47:52SPEAKERAnd it turned out that Mono,

47:54SPEAKERthe framework that Terraria is built on

47:56SPEAKERdoes not exist for FreeBSD,

47:58SPEAKERat least not a current version

48:00SPEAKERthat's required to run a Terraria server.

48:03SPEAKEROn Linux, that's just trivial.

48:04SPEAKERLike that's essentially the platform

48:06SPEAKERwhere that is probably the best supported or it's one of.

48:09SPEAKERSo just one example out of probably many

48:12SPEAKERwhere it's just like, oh, this is dead simple

48:14SPEAKERto set up in Linux because of the support is there,

48:16SPEAKERthe development resources are there,

48:17SPEAKERand it just doesn't exist for FreeBSD.

48:19SPEAKERSo that's one of the big reasons

48:21SPEAKERthat I think TrueNAS scale is pretty exciting.

48:24SPEAKERBut for the time being, they're saying

48:25SPEAKERthat both versions are going to coexist side by side,

48:27SPEAKERdepending on what your needs are.

48:29SPEAKER- Okay.

48:29SPEAKER- But if you do end up tumbling down this rabbit hole,

48:31SPEAKERa TrueNAS scale is something that's worth keeping an eye on

48:34SPEAKERas it matures over the coming months.

48:36SPEAKER- I'm really, like TrueNAS scale is kind of the,

48:38SPEAKERmaybe the best of both worlds for somebody in my position

48:42SPEAKERwhere I want something that's a little bit lighter weight,

48:43SPEAKERbut also I do like having the snapshots on ZFS

48:46SPEAKERand I do like the ability to roll back old files

48:49SPEAKERas it turns out really convenient.

48:49SPEAKER- Yeah, being able to roll back and grab a file

48:51SPEAKERthat I shouldn't have deleted

48:52SPEAKERthat I just got a little too antsy and was like,

48:53SPEAKERI'm not going to need this anymore and tossed it.

48:55SPEAKERAnd six hours later it was like,

48:56SPEAKERboy, I wish I still had that file.

48:57SPEAKERLike that's a great feeling to know like,

48:59SPEAKERoh, I can still go get that.

49:01SPEAKER- Okay, so Brad, if you want to get started with TrueNAS,

49:03SPEAKERwhat do you do?

49:03SPEAKERJust download the latest version from their website?

49:05SPEAKERWould you start with the Linux version now

49:07SPEAKERor would you go stick with core for the time being?

49:09SPEAKER- If you want to get started with TrueNAS,

49:11SPEAKERstep one, take a deep breath.

49:14SPEAKERStep two, I would absolutely not start with TrueNAS scale

49:18SPEAKERunless you're just incredibly brave.

49:19SPEAKERI mean, like I said,

49:20SPEAKERit is a pre-release version of the software

49:22SPEAKERthat they have not put out

49:23SPEAKERa full production ready version yet.

49:25SPEAKERTrueNAS core is still the place to start

49:27SPEAKERif you want to give it a try.

49:28SPEAKERHead to the TrueNAS site,

49:29SPEAKERdownload the install image of the latest version

49:31SPEAKERand give it a shot.

49:32SPEAKER- Grab your Balina Etcher and burn it to a USB thumb drive.

49:36SPEAKER- Yeah, and they've got, you know,

49:37SPEAKERthere are blogs and stuff out there you can Google up

49:38SPEAKERthat have pretty good recommendations

49:40SPEAKERfor hardware configurations, specs and stuff like that.

49:43SPEAKERAnd like it's, I would say, if you're looking at TrueNAS,

49:45SPEAKERyou know, give some of that stuff a read

49:46SPEAKERbefore you do get into it,

49:48SPEAKERbecause you will get some insight into like,

49:50SPEAKERhow big of a, you know, how much CPU do I need?

49:52SPEAKERHow much memory do I need?

49:53SPEAKERAnd like that might be a decision-making factor.

49:55SPEAKER- Well, and the other thing I would say is with TrueNAS,

49:57SPEAKERespecially since it's been around for a really long time,

49:59SPEAKERwhen you Google, when you're Googling

50:01SPEAKERto find answers about TrueNAS,

50:03SPEAKERmake sure you include the current version,

50:04SPEAKERthe version number you're using,

50:06SPEAKERbecause you will find answers to questions

50:11SPEAKERfrom 10 or 12 years ago in some cases with TrueNAS.

50:16SPEAKERSo there is one more higher degree of difficulty mode.

50:20SPEAKER- There is another.

50:22SPEAKER- Proxmox is a hypervisor.

50:23SPEAKERSo it's basically an operating system

50:26SPEAKERthat runs other operating systems underneath it.

50:29SPEAKER- It's also Debian-based, Debian Linux.

50:32SPEAKERI mean, you can run VMs in TrueNAS as well,

50:34SPEAKERbut then you're using the BSD hypervisor, which, you know.

50:36SPEAKER- It's not super performant, it turns out.

50:38SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, people typically,

50:39SPEAKERfrom what I've seen about Proxmox,

50:41SPEAKERI have not used it myself,

50:42SPEAKERbut people tend to do the opposite

50:43SPEAKERwhere they run Proxmox as the host.

50:45SPEAKERLike they'll frequently run TrueNAS

50:46SPEAKERin a virtual machine inside of Proxmox.

50:48SPEAKERThey might also run like another Linux in there

50:51SPEAKERor something, you know, like you can spin up VMs

50:53SPEAKERand containers, like I was saying before,

50:55SPEAKERthey have slightly different use cases,

50:56SPEAKERbut Proxmox lets you kind of build

50:59SPEAKERa really multifaceted system of computers virtually

51:03SPEAKERthat are all talking to each other

51:04SPEAKERand all performing different functions independently.

51:07SPEAKERIt's a lot.

51:08SPEAKER- It's a lot, it's complicated,

51:10SPEAKERespecially if you're gonna try to run TrueNAS,

51:12SPEAKERwhich ZFS requires low level access to the drives.

51:15SPEAKERThe setup for that is complicated as a result of that.

51:18SPEAKERSo it's definitely a, hey, I know what I'm doing

51:21SPEAKERand I wanna, I'm gonna do something that's gonna be a pain.

51:24SPEAKERBut if you are doing, if you're running,

51:27SPEAKERfor example, if you wanna run Docker containers

51:28SPEAKERwhere performance really matters,

51:30SPEAKERyou can run a Docker host inside Proxmox

51:33SPEAKERand get probably a much better outcome

51:34SPEAKERthan you would running inside of Open Media Vault

51:36SPEAKERor definitely within TrueNAS,

51:37SPEAKER'cause Docker support and BSD is thin to non-existent.

51:42SPEAKER(upbeat music)

51:44SPEAKERSo one of the things that's important

51:45SPEAKERabout this whole thing,

51:46SPEAKERand this is something that most people I know

51:48SPEAKERthat have built their own TrueNAS machine

51:50SPEAKERfind out the hard way,

51:51SPEAKERis you wanna know exactly what you're doing before you start.

51:55SPEAKERThis isn't a place to just jump in with two feet

51:57SPEAKERand start installing stuff

51:57SPEAKERand expect it to work out for you.

52:00SPEAKER- I mean, you could.

52:00SPEAKERI'm not speaking from experience or anything,

52:03SPEAKERbut you could give it a shot,

52:05SPEAKERjust prepare to make a lot of mistakes.

52:06SPEAKERWhen you, the problem with that approach

52:10SPEAKERis when you make mistakes,

52:11SPEAKERyou typically end up having to do re-installs.

52:13SPEAKERSo you wanna make sure you're doing that

52:15SPEAKERbefore you have data.

52:16SPEAKERThe thing that I've found that helps more than anything,

52:19SPEAKER'cause the other big challenge with this

52:20SPEAKERis you'll set something up

52:21SPEAKERand then it runs perfectly for two years

52:23SPEAKERand then something breaks

52:24SPEAKERand you have to figure out what went wrong,

52:26SPEAKERis that if you document your install process

52:28SPEAKERas you're doing the install.

52:29SPEAKERSo here's the link to the how-to that I use

52:31SPEAKERto figure out how to do this.

52:33SPEAKERHere's the version of the software that I installed.

52:35SPEAKERHere's the dependencies I had to install.

52:37SPEAKERAnd I just copy and paste that stuff out of the terminal

52:39SPEAKERor out of the plugin infrastructure or whatever I'm using

52:42SPEAKERas I'm doing it and put into a Google doc.

52:44SPEAKERAnd then I have that tree full of Google docs

52:47SPEAKERfor all the different things that are running on my NAS.

52:50SPEAKERAnd when something inevitably does break,

52:52SPEAKERI can open up the folder,

52:54SPEAKERsearch for the thing that I'm looking for

52:55SPEAKERand I get all the information about it

52:58SPEAKERwithout having to remember what I did two years ago.

53:00SPEAKER- I have saved PDF versions of some old blogs here and there

53:03SPEAKERthat seemed like they might go offline at some point

53:05SPEAKERto make sure, absolutely sure.

53:06SPEAKER'Cause I was the only place on the internet

53:08SPEAKERI could find an answer to the thing I was looking to do.

53:10SPEAKER- Well, yeah, and a lot of the information

53:12SPEAKERabout how to do this stuff, especially on the TrueNAS side,

53:14SPEAKERbecause the Linux installs

53:17SPEAKERare typically pretty well documented.

53:18SPEAKERThe BSD installs are a little, sometimes a little kludgy.

53:23SPEAKERI found that the way I would get something to install

53:26SPEAKERwas by following a path that somebody started

53:29SPEAKERon a message board that linked to three different how-tos.

53:33SPEAKERAnd it's like a data archeologist at that point,

53:37SPEAKERtrying to find the one truth

53:39SPEAKERof how to install whatever weird library it is you need

53:42SPEAKERfor the thing that you're looking for.

53:44SPEAKERSo yeah, document the main install,

53:46SPEAKERdocument the secondary install.

53:47SPEAKERSo if you're setting up custom containers,

53:49SPEAKERif you're downloading Docker images,

53:50SPEAKERsave links to those Docker images,

53:52SPEAKERor maybe just save the Docker images,

53:53SPEAKER'cause usually they're not that big.

53:55SPEAKER- Actually, that's something I was gonna say here

53:56SPEAKERis you can really avail yourself of a lot of the tools

53:58SPEAKERthat these NAS systems provide

54:00SPEAKERto back up the actual work you've done.

54:02SPEAKERSo I assume Open Media Vault has similar equivalents.

54:05SPEAKERLike TrueNAS, you can download a single file

54:07SPEAKERthat is just all of the settings

54:08SPEAKERfor your entire TrueNAS install.

54:10SPEAKERSo if you lose your TrueNAS boot volume,

54:13SPEAKERall you have to do is install it fresh on another drive,

54:16SPEAKERupload that file,

54:17SPEAKERand it just restores literally everything you had.

54:19SPEAKER- I was looking at a plugin

54:20SPEAKERthat saves the configuration stuff to Google Drive,

54:22SPEAKERso it's just there, and you pull it down for the next one.

54:24SPEAKERYeah. - That's very cool.

54:26SPEAKER- So documenting this stuff, hugely important.

54:29SPEAKERAlso, especially if you're installing on a thumb drive

54:32SPEAKERor an SD card instead of an SSD,

54:35SPEAKERpicking the right SD card is, well, first off,

54:39SPEAKERI generally advise against installing on thumb drives.

54:41SPEAKER- Yes, if you can avoid it,

54:42SPEAKERif you have the option to use like a real SSD,

54:44SPEAKERI would say absolutely do that in a full-size machine.

54:46SPEAKERBut obviously, unlike Raspberry Pi,

54:48SPEAKERgenerally, I mean, there are ways,

54:50SPEAKERif you really wanna get into it, there are other ways,

54:52SPEAKERbut generally, you're limited to SD cards

54:54SPEAKERor USB thumb drives,

54:55SPEAKERand both of those are, as we've said, a little flaky.

54:58SPEAKER- Well, the one exception, you can get SD cards now

55:01SPEAKERthat are rated for application use,

55:03SPEAKERwhich means they're tuned for both performance

55:06SPEAKERand wear leveling across the whole flash for writes.

55:11SPEAKERGenerally speaking, the SD cards

55:13SPEAKERthat are good for application use will have an A1 on them,

55:17SPEAKERand they'll be class 10 writables,

55:20SPEAKERwhich means that they run at a certain speed,

55:21SPEAKERand they're tuned for wear leveling.

55:24SPEAKEROften, they're like the ones that you buy for a Switch

55:27SPEAKERor for a handheld device or something like that.

55:31SPEAKERThey don't cost a whole lot more than regular SD cards.

55:34SPEAKERThis seems like one of those things that,

55:36SPEAKERI had never had flash devices fail

55:38SPEAKERuntil I started using a thumb drive

55:39SPEAKERas the boot drive for my free NAS box.

55:43SPEAKER- Yeah, Raspberry Pis are also notorious

55:45SPEAKERfor killing SD cards.

55:46SPEAKER- Yeah, if you are gonna use SD cards,

55:48SPEAKERthere will almost always be a point

55:50SPEAKERalong the installation of how to say,

55:53SPEAKERhey, if you're doing this on SD cards,

55:54SPEAKERturn off write log writing to the SD card

55:58SPEAKERand write them onto your storage pool

55:59SPEAKERor data drive or whatever.

56:01SPEAKERInstead, 100% do that, or you'll be buying a new SD card

56:04SPEAKERin six months or a year.

56:06SPEAKER- Yes, Google something called log2ram

56:08SPEAKERand follow the instructions.

56:09SPEAKER- So yeah, and then the other thing

56:10SPEAKERto always, always, always remember

56:13SPEAKERis to think about your backup strategy,

56:15SPEAKER'cause you're saving important data in another place.

56:19SPEAKERYou wanna back up the stuff that isn't saved elsewhere.

56:22SPEAKERIf you're doing big media,

56:23SPEAKERif you're ripping your Blu-ray collection

56:25SPEAKERor something like that,

56:26SPEAKERyou're gonna spend an amount of energy,

56:27SPEAKERboth human energy and electricity doing that math

56:31SPEAKERto shrink those files down.

56:33SPEAKERYou don't wanna waste that and have to do it again.

56:35SPEAKERSo think about your backup strategy for that stuff.

56:38SPEAKER- Blu-rays can be re-ripped,

56:39SPEAKERlike that's just more of your time.

56:41SPEAKERBut if you're like me,

56:42SPEAKERI've got some priceless family photos

56:45SPEAKERand home movies backed up on my NAS

56:47SPEAKERand stuff like that, you do not wanna lose that stuff.

56:50SPEAKERAnd so just, I'll go through the catastrophic data loss

56:53SPEAKERsituations that I have that are very painful

56:56SPEAKERand just make sure you always have a second copy,

56:58SPEAKERphysically distinct from even something like a NAS

57:02SPEAKERthat does have some resilience built into it.

57:04SPEAKER- Well, and it's, you know,

57:05SPEAKERjust because you have the file stored on a NAS

57:07SPEAKERdoesn't mean you can't plug in a big, giant external drive

57:10SPEAKERto that NAS and, you know,

57:12SPEAKERcreate a snapshot that backs up to that

57:14SPEAKERevery once in a while or whatever

57:15SPEAKERfor your different data pools.

57:16SPEAKER- That's a good point about backups.

57:18SPEAKERThey don't have to be as complex and reliable

57:20SPEAKERas your main NAS, your main RAID, whatever.

57:22SPEAKERLike they can be simpler or cheaper

57:24SPEAKERbecause they themselves do not have to hold up.

57:26SPEAKERIt's just one of the two has to hold up, right?

57:28SPEAKER- For me personally,

57:29SPEAKERI'm much more interested in the backup

57:31SPEAKERthan I am in the redundancy.

57:32SPEAKERIf my server is down for a few days

57:35SPEAKERbecause drive conks out and I don't have the Plex server up,

57:38SPEAKERit's not that big a deal as long as I have a good backup.

57:41SPEAKERIf I don't have a good backup, then that's bad.

57:42SPEAKERThe other thing about backups is they don't count

57:44SPEAKERuntil you test them and you know that they work.

57:46SPEAKERSo make sure that you're actually checking

57:49SPEAKERto see that your data is backed up.

57:50SPEAKERDon't just trust that the process is working.

57:53SPEAKER- And that's the end of this episode, I guess, Brad.

57:55SPEAKER- Yeah, we made it.

57:56SPEAKER- Hey, congratulations.

57:57SPEAKERAs always, if you want to listen to this podcast,

58:00SPEAKERyou can find it at phosphod.content.town.

58:02SPEAKERThis is the last week it's gonna be in the TechPod feed.

58:04SPEAKERSo if you're listening to it in the TechPod feed

58:06SPEAKERand you wanna hear it in two more weeks

58:07SPEAKERwhen there's another episode,

58:08SPEAKERyou gotta go to the new URL and hit the subscribe button

58:11SPEAKERor add us in your favorite podcast client.

58:13SPEAKERWe should be everywhere now in terms of podcast clients.

58:16SPEAKERIf you use a podcast client

58:18SPEAKERand you don't find us when you search, please let us know.

58:20SPEAKERAnd we will figure out what's going on.

58:23SPEAKERBut again, it's phosphod.content.town.

58:26SPEAKERWe're hiring, we're looking for both an editor

58:28SPEAKERand a host/producer.

58:30SPEAKERIf you have either of those skillsets

58:32SPEAKERand would like to talk about open source software

58:34SPEAKERwith Brad and me, the email address to send your CV to

58:37SPEAKERis phosphod@content.town.

58:40SPEAKERAnd as always, the phosphod is brought to you

58:43SPEAKERby Google Open Source,

58:45SPEAKERbringing all the value of open source to Google

58:47SPEAKERand all the resources of Google to open source.

58:50SPEAKERIt's at opensource.google

58:51SPEAKERif you wanna find out more information.

58:54SPEAKERThat'll do it for us this week, Brad.

58:55SPEAKERAs always, a pleasure.

58:56SPEAKER- Thank you.

58:57SPEAKER- We will be back next week or week after next.

59:00SPEAKER- That's right.

59:01SPEAKER- With more phosphod.

59:01SPEAKER- Bi-weekly podcast.

59:03SPEAKERDid you know that it can mean ether now?

59:05SPEAKER- It's look, it's like irregardlessly.

59:08SPEAKERNow that's actually a word, even though it's not a word.

59:10SPEAKER- It's like right there in the dictionary.

59:12SPEAKERYou look up bi-weekly and it says twice a week

59:14SPEAKERor every other week.

59:15SPEAKER- Which one was it originally?

59:16SPEAKERAre we using it badly?

59:17SPEAKER- No, we're on it.

59:19SPEAKER- Okay, phew.

59:20SPEAKER(upbeat music)

59:24SPEAKER- Well, that sure was a podcast.

59:26SPEAKER- It was, I mean, there was intro music

59:28SPEAKERand then outro music.

59:29SPEAKERIt's like bookends on your show.

59:30SPEAKER- I like to think that we went on a little bit

59:32SPEAKERof a journey together.

59:33SPEAKER- We did.

59:34SPEAKER- Yeah, we learned about electricity and replication.

59:38SPEAKERWe talked about jails.

59:41SPEAKER- I have to tell you.

59:42SPEAKER- Yeah.

59:43SPEAKER- I had a bit of a heart-stopping moment when you said,

59:46SPEAKERyour NAS might be costing you $20 to $30 a month to run.

59:50SPEAKER- Yeah.

59:51SPEAKER- And I went, hmm, I mean, I knew it was probably bad,

59:53SPEAKERbut ouch.

59:54SPEAKER- I mean, did you, have you done the math yet?

59:56SPEAKERSo it's, no. - No.

59:58SPEAKER- You know what, the less I know, the better.

1:00:00SPEAKER- You should get a volt, a power meter and plug it in.

1:00:03SPEAKER- A kilowatt.

1:00:04SPEAKER- Yeah, a kilowatt and plug it in between the NAS

1:00:06SPEAKERand the wall.

1:00:07SPEAKERAnd then you can, then that unknown entity

1:00:10SPEAKERcan become a known entity

1:00:11SPEAKERand you can decide what to do about it.

1:00:13SPEAKER- What if I just continued on in blissful ignorance?

1:00:15SPEAKER- I mean, you could hang a solar panel

1:00:16SPEAKERout of your back window.

1:00:17SPEAKERIt faces kind of the right direction.

1:00:19SPEAKERSo that'll do it for us this week.

1:00:21SPEAKERAs we said at the top of the show,

1:00:22SPEAKERthis is the last week that the FOSPOD

1:00:24SPEAKERwill be in your tech pod feed,

1:00:25SPEAKERat least unless we do some sort of special crossover episode

1:00:28SPEAKERor something like that.

1:00:29SPEAKERBut thank you all for bearing with us

1:00:31SPEAKERas we launch the new show.

1:00:31SPEAKERWe hope you like it and please let us know what you think.

1:00:34SPEAKEROne way or the other, like positive and negative feedback,

1:00:36SPEAKERboth are great.

1:00:38SPEAKEROur, yeah, ultimately we're making the show for you all.

1:00:41SPEAKERSo if people don't like it, then we like to know.

1:00:46SPEAKERBut now, Brad, we've reached the point in the show

1:00:48SPEAKERwhere we thank our patrons.

1:00:49SPEAKER- It's my favorite part of the show.

1:00:50SPEAKER- It is a good part of the show.

1:00:52SPEAKERSo thank you, patrons.

1:00:53SPEAKER- Thank you.

1:00:54SPEAKER- And if you wanna find out how you can support the tech pod,

1:00:56SPEAKERyou can do that by going to tech pod,

1:00:58SPEAKERsorry, patreon.com/techpod,

1:01:01SPEAKERwhere you can join the ranks of our wonderful producers,

1:01:03SPEAKERincluding our executive producer gear producers,

1:01:05SPEAKERwhich who are Paddle Creek Games makers of Fractured Veil,

1:01:09SPEAKERAndrew Slawski, Octo Thorpe, Bunny Crimes, Jacob Chappell,

1:01:13SPEAKERJoel Krauska.

1:01:14SPEAKEROkay, now this is getting out of hand.

1:01:16SPEAKER- Uh-oh.

1:01:17SPEAKER- Twinkle Twinkie has renamed themselves Bears Bears Bears.

1:01:21SPEAKER- Oh boy.

1:01:22SPEAKER- Bears.

1:01:23SPEAKER- Bears is going to be very excited about this.

1:01:25SPEAKER- Bears, look, bears are always excited.

1:01:27SPEAKERBut the person bears, who presumably is not an actual bear,

1:01:31SPEAKERbut maybe is, I don't know.

1:01:32SPEAKER- I mean, you know, it's hard to say.

1:01:34SPEAKER- David Allen and James Kamik,

1:01:35SPEAKERthank you all to all, everybody who supports the podcast.

1:01:38SPEAKERAnd as always, if you can't or don't want

1:01:42SPEAKERto support the podcast, that's cool too.

1:01:43SPEAKERJust leave a review or let people know about the show,

1:01:46SPEAKER'cause that's how we,

1:01:47SPEAKERturns out that's how new podcasts find their audience, so.

1:01:51SPEAKER- Word of mouth, they call it.

1:01:53SPEAKER- Yes, it's the best way.

1:01:54SPEAKERIf somebody says, "Hey man, I really like this podcast,"

1:01:56SPEAKERthat is, turns out, is a really good way

1:01:58SPEAKERto find out about podcasts that you might like,

1:01:59SPEAKER'cause presumably that person has good taste,

1:02:01SPEAKER'cause they're your friend, so there you go.

1:02:03SPEAKERScience.

1:02:04SPEAKER- All of the things and people that I like are good,

1:02:06SPEAKERit turns out.

1:02:07SPEAKER- Yeah, and none of the, I don't,

1:02:08SPEAKERyou know what I don't like about people that are bad?

1:02:10SPEAKEREverything.

1:02:11SPEAKERI don't know where we're going with this bit,

1:02:12SPEAKERbut that'll do it for us this week.

1:02:14SPEAKERBack next week is a Q&A episode of the TechPod,

1:02:17SPEAKERso if you have Qs, questions that you would like

1:02:20SPEAKERto have turned into As, answers,

1:02:22SPEAKERyou can send them to techpod@content.town,

1:02:25SPEAKERor you can post them in the Discord if you are a patron,

1:02:28SPEAKERyou have access to that thing.

1:02:30SPEAKERYou can get it in there and you can go

1:02:31SPEAKERinto the questions seeking answers channel

1:02:32SPEAKERand you can just write something,

1:02:34SPEAKERit will disappear into the ether and Brad and I will see it

1:02:37SPEAKERand potentially turn it into an A next week.

1:02:39SPEAKERSee y'all then, thanks for listening everybody.