In the last part of this series, I talked about the hardware I’m working with, and briefly described the start of my journey into self-hosting.

This second section talks a bit about my impression and usage of TrueNAS SCALE, which is what i actually ended up setting on after some experimenting.

I chose TrueNAS SCALE for a couple of reasons:

  1. It is based on Debian, as opposed to BSD.
  2. it is free and open source, unlike Unraid, and it runs on commodity hardware.
  3. It uses ZFS as a storage solution, which is the technology i was going to use anyway.
  4. it uses K3s as the main way it delivers application, which is also another thing i was planning on using anyway.

Early impressions

Setup was pretty painless and easy, but i had already run into some… oddities let’s say:

For one, the system lacked a built-in firewall; this was not a big issue, as i hadn’t yet planned how i was going to access the system from outside the LAN, but this fact pretty much rules out any kind of direct port-forwarding as too risky.

Another thing that struck me as quite odd is that apt was disabled by default: i later learned this is because updates get shipped as a system image, much like in an immutable distro e.g SteamOS.

Another aspect that made me uncomfortable, especially in conjunction with the aforementioned lack of a firewall, was the fact that the only available user account to manage the system is root; Creating new administrator accounts via the Web UI did not do anything, and i had found many forum post in which users, and even members of iX Systems (the developer of TrueNAS) told people that only the root account should be used.

For something that is allegedly marketed as an enterprise product, this is the first of many moves by iX Systems that betrayed a stark lack of professionalism (in my opinion).

As it turns out, making additional admin accounts is possible, but you need to add said users in the builtin_administrators group instead. This was a relatively recent addition however, i believe it was introduced in TrueNAS SCALE 23.04.

Initial issues aside, i started experimenting with the software available in the TrueCharts catalogue: i didn’t have a precise goal in mind, but i ended up with a pretty neat media stack running in TrueNAS SCALE.

My (mis)adventures with Sonarr and Jellyfin are detailed in a different blog post.

TrueNAS SCALE made for a pretty nice media platform, and i got a whole spread of apps running, but there were still some things i would have liked to run, but was unable to:

  • ps3netsrv: A program to stream PS3 games over the local network to a real (modded) PS3, so i can play my dumps without having to worry about data integrity.
  • gpodder-server: The name is pretty self explanatory, it syncs podcasts and playback status across a handful of support apps.
  • StableDiffusion: Self-hosted generative AI for images.

ps3netsrv used to be in the TrueCharts catalogue, but the chart was removed due to lack of maintenance, so i decided to “adopt” it so i could use it myself.

Falling out of love with TrueNAS

Unfortunately around that same time, iX System announced that they were dropping support for K3s in TrueNAS SCALE, and there was a whole bunch of drama: the TrueCharts team suddenly decided to drop SCALE as a supported platform, you can read more about it in my little rant on the subject

This sequence of events really snuffed any interest i had in the project, alongside the last big blunder on iX Systems’ part:

In the process of figuring out how long i could hold out on an older version of TrueNAS SCALE that supports K3s, i discovered every version of the OS is on a six-months release cycle. I don’t mean you stop getting feature updates once the new version comes out, you don’t get any updates after six months (!!).
This is, to put it mildly, absolutely baffling: For something that is advertised as an enterprise product, having such short support cycles realistically give admins no time to manage upgrades, and even for hobbyists like us it is quite annoying. Versions of ZFS and Nvidia drivers are baked into releases (apt is locked, as you’d recall), and iX regularly introduces breaking changes to app management and storage in between releases.

These upgrades are not something that can be done lightly, especially given apps from the TrueCharts catalogue will likely stop working with each major version thus requiring a lot of manual intervention.

I am growing increasingly convinced TrueNAS SCALE is not fit for purpose, and frankly i do not trust this company to keep my data safe.

The deprecation of K3s just adds further fuel onto the fire, if i don’t want to loose one of the main features i adopted TrueNAS for, I’d be stuck on an outdated platform, with no firewall and no security updates.

Its time to move onto something else, something that is more of an industry standard, but i do not yet know what that is.

Update (20-07-24): I decided that the next platform i should settle on might be ProxmoxVE, but the whole ordeal made me take quite a long break from self-hosting. I foresee i will need to get some new hardware before continuing on this journey.