The first one was a DIY fully 3d printed case before I understood what all of this home lab stuff even was. I tried to connect several SSDs and an HDD to a raspberry pi via a USB hub. Surprisingly, it worked, but very badly. Open Media Vault didn't quite like this setup.

The next attempt was a mini NAS based on axzez's Interceptor board crammed into a Sony DVD RW drive enclosure. 

It was actually decent! But too little space for upgrades. I initially ran OMV on it, but after a while HexOS came out, and that was my first HexOS NAS.

That's when I began getting a grip on how a NAS actually works, what HexOS is for, and how to get the most out of it. So the next interim solution was a spare converted Mac Pro case with some custom 3d printed HDD holder bars, but still based on the aforementioned Interceptor board. This worked ok for files but lacked versatility for any other home lab use cases.

I later upgraded this setup to a normal PC motherboard and relocated the HDDs to the top shelf. That was way better and that's when I got into all of the side apps that HexOS/TrueNAS could run like local AI, Immich, Plex, Jellyfin, etc.

Finally, I shelled out for a case designed for a NAS. And what a difference that made! Building a NAS in a case designed for one is night and day compared to building in a hacked together Mac case.

Just took some pics so I can get it on eBay, thought I'd share the build with you before it goes.

Hardware:
Asus Pro H410T Motherboard
Intel i5-10400F (6-Core / 12-Thread) with new Intel cooler
32 GB (2x16GB) DDR4 2666 (Crucial CT2K16G4SFRA266)
2 x 32GB SATA SSDs (redundant boot drives)
4 x 256GB WD SN740 NVME SSDs
PCIe to NVME card with ASM2806 Packet Switch
m.2 to PCIEx4 Riser for NVME card
2.5 GbE PCIe Network card (RTL8125)
A/E to PCIEx1 Riser cable for Network card
Chieftec SFX-250VS power supply
Dreamcase D19 Pro (V2.1) Mini ITX PC Case

I wanted to setup a secondary server - one for testing to break things and one for a more stable NAS environment that I will wait for HexOS to support updates and etc. To do this I needed to get some things off of my test server - primarily my VMs that I had created. Here is how I setup replication and moved the VMs. Hope you find this useful!

1. Find the VM you would like to move. 
2. TrueNAS should be able to make the connection to the other server but it sometimes (frequently) fails to do so, so I will dive into how to do it manually. 
3. Setup the backup credentials on the server you are transferring from. In my case this is my 01 server.
    1. Navigate to Credentials > Backup credentials on the left side:
    
    2. In SSH Keypairs section click the Add button
  
    3. Give your keypair a name and click the Generate Keypair button:
    
    4. Copy your Public Key. You will need this on your new server. 
4. Setup the keypair on your new server.
    1. Navigate to your new server and Credentials > Users
    
    2. Select the user you will be using to do your ZFS replication task and click Edit
   
    3. In the Authentication section of the edit dialog for the user you should see "Authorized Keys". This is where you will paste your public key that you generated. 
    
    4. Scroll down and check the box that says "Allow all sudo commands" and "Allow all sudo commands with no password".
    
    5. Time to setup the SSH link on your primary server. Navigate back to it. 
5. On the primary server navigate back to Credentials > Backup Credentials and click Add on SSH Connections

6. In the new dialog give it a name, change the Setup Method to Manual, and fill out the rest of this information (including selecting the Private Key you generated):

7. Once you select your Private Key you can click the Discover Remote Host Key button. 
8. Click Save. Now it is time to generate a replication task. 
9. Navigate to Data Protection on the left side and click Add on Replication Task:


10. Fill out this information and click Next:

11. When you select your SSH credentials this dialog opens. Select "Use Sudo for ZFS Commands" or check the box with the arrow above.

12. If you have snapshots for VMs you can select "Recursive" to copy those snapshots over. 
13. Keep your name that TrueNAS generates for you or rename it to something else and click Next. 
14. In the When section I selected "Run Once".
15. Save it and the replication will start. If on the same network it is incredibly fast - Moved two VMs roughly 120 GB in less than 5 minutes. 
16. Verify on your new server the zVOL disks you copied over are present and recreate your virtual machines as you would setting up a new VM, linking the VirtIO disks you just replicated. 

Prepare TrueNAS for reinstall:

1.        Login to TrueNAS web interface – go to deck.hexos.com and click Settings:

Then click the TrueNAS icon:

2.        Once logged into TrueNAS, go to System > General Settings > Manage Configuration > Download File:

3.        Read the note presented when you click Download File:

4.        Click Save:

5.        If you have encrypted datasets, go to Datasets > select the encrypted dataset > Export Key:

6.        Now it is time to shutdown the server. In the top right of the TrueNAS web UI click the power icon and click shutdown:

7.        Make your changes to the hardware that you would like – for me I added a 10 GB network card to run off fiber.

8.        Prepare the HexOS installation drive by following these steps: https://hub.hexos.com/topic/103-illustrated-installation-guide-start-here/

9.        In your router settings, give the new hardware the same IP as your old one, then restart TrueNAS to grab the correct IP.

10.  Once rebooted you can confirm on the server the IP address is correct:

11.   Login to the TrueNAS web interface with the username and password you set during install (username should be truenas_admin).

12.  Confirm your version on the dashboard – if needed, apply the update to the server:

a.        To confirm what version you need check the filename of the .tar file you downloaded from your configuration. It will have the version number on the end of it.

b.        Select the same version from the upgrade screen and confirm you want to switch to that upgrade train.

c.        Apply the pending updates and the system will reboot.

13.  Go to Storage > Import Pool > find your zpool:

14.  I have two pools so I will import them both.

15.  Go into System > General Settings > Manage Configuration > Upload file:

16.  The server will reboot after the configuration is applied. Log back into the TrueNAS server once the reboot is finalized.

17.  If, like me, you replaced the network cards you will need to login directly to the server and adjust the IP settings:

18.  Setup your new interface with the primary IP in CIDR notation, then you can log back into the TrueNAS server.

19.  To setup apps, you need to go to Apps > Configuration > Unset Pool:

20.  Restart your TrueNAS server then go back into Apps > Configuration > Choose Pool:

21.  Once the pool is set you will see your apps again and be able to start them.

22.  Navigate to the HexOS Interface (http://deck.hexos.com), unclaim your old server and claim your new one:

23.  I ran into an issue where no matter what password I input it would not take it:

24.  Currently troubleshooting that to be able to claim my HexOS server in the deck. All of my apps and storage are up and running so I will report back here when I fix this issue.

1  Ryzen 9 9900X (12C/24T) and 1 Ryzen 7 9700X (8C/16T)

1 RTX 4070 TI and 1 RTX 3070

For both: 

MSI Mag X870E Tomahawk

96GB DDR5

Boot - Crucial P310 1TB in Raid 1.

Storage - 4 x Seagate Ironwolf Pro 4TB RaidZ1

1000w Modular PSU

PCIE X8 SAS card and onboard to connect all 12 bays in the N5

Intel X550T2 Dual 10GbE NIC

Full case fan replacement with Nocuta fans and a NH D15 cooler.

Mirrored backups between the system over Tailscale and one machine moved from my house to the workshop 30mins away for offsite actual a backup backup.

Too much?

ETA- I built them in August last year, before things got...too crazy

I decided to take HexOS for a spin. I've got a couple of TrueNAS servers and know full well how challenging it can be. I was curious to see if HexOS is something I could setup for someone else w/o needing to be their forever tech support.

I put together this CWWK S11 NAS quickly when the sale went live.
It has an Intel N100, 32GB of DDR4, and an SK Hynix OEM 256GB OS drive.
For storage there are 4x Seagate Ironwolf Pros from a retired Plex NAS.

Installation was quite simple and went quickly. I did run into a hiccup with deck.hexos.com taking about 20 mins to see my NAS, but I just kinda went off to do something else and it was detected by the time I got back.
The promise of an offline interface is definitely the only reason I tried it. As long as that is 100% going to happen, I like what I see. It's pretty keen of the devs to make Immich first app they had ready in the beta. If you can make that painless, you've won. And it was painless. I was up and running and dumping images into it within minutes. Very much akin to grabbing an app from the QNAP or Synology store. Keep up the good work!

the specs: 

CPU: 2 x Intel Xeon Silver 4210 (total of 40 cores)

RAM: 64 GB of DDR4

Has a total of 12 3.5 inch bays, 2 2.5 inch bays and at least 1 m.2 slot. I currently have 6 x 4 TB drives for 1 pool, 3 x 6 TB drives for a second pool, and 2 x 1 TB SSDs for another pool and the boot drive is on an 500 GB m.2 SSD. I plan on adding at least 2 more 4 TB drives to increase the pool size to 28 TB and 1 more 6 TB drive to increase the other pool to 18 TB. Eventually, I would love to use much larger drives, but gotta wait for the price of drives to come down. 

I feel like this system is a bit overkill for home use, but I plan on running some VMs off of it as well. What do you guys think?

This was done after I figured out a process for doing this so sorry if I missed any steps.

Step 1. Remove the bad boot drive.
Step 2: Disconnect the Raid drives.
Step 3: Install your new boot drive and usb HexOS install media.
Step 4: Follow the standard install process, including setting your admin account and claiming your server. When you finish the setup you will not have any disks so you will name your server and just continue.
Step 5: Shutdown the system.
Step 6: Reconnect your raid drives and boot up.

Step 7: Log in to the TrueNAS gui by going to the IP address of your server in the browser and using the credentials you set up during install Username: truenas_admin Password: <whatever you entered at install>.

Step 8: Go to Storage Tab and select Import Pool.

9: Select your pool from the drop down it should be named 'HDDs' and select Import. It will take a few minutes to import and complete.


At this point the storage should be detected in HexOS and you should be able to start creating shares, but your existing folders and shares will not have returned. To get your shares back you must recreate them by renaming your datasets and naming them back as follows:

Step 1: Under Datasets you can find all of your existing data on the RAID. Find the Dataset you want to restore in HEXOS and note the name.

Step 2: Back in HexOS go to the Folder tab and select 'New Folder'
Note: you may want to recreate your old users manually or create your folders with public access and recreate the users and add permissions later.
Step 3: Create a new folder with the same name as the Dataset but add a 1 (In this case 'Plex1'). Make sure to keep the array the same 'HDDs; and give it the permissions you want (this can be adjusted later).

Step 4: Back in TrueNAS go to Shares and select the edit button on the  'Plex1' share, depending on screen resolution you may need to scroll the horizontal scroll bar to the right.

Step 5: In the side bar remove the '1' from the Path or use the drop down to select the original shared folder, then click into the Name field which should auto update and remove the 1.
Step 6 Scroll down and click 'Save' and you will be prompted to restart the SMB service, do this and your share should be updated.

Step 7: Navigate to the dataset tab select the 'Plex1' dataset and click delete on the right side. It will make you confirm by typing the whole dataset path.

Step 8: When this is done you should be able to refresh the folders tab on the HexOS page and see the updated folder name (it took a minute to refresh for me).

Redo this for each share that you wish to recreate.

Once I did this and set up the users and permissions correctly, other servers I used to connect to my shares started working seamlessly.

I didn't experience this but I can imagine you may run into some permissions issues since the new users in HexOS could have different IDs than before. Unfortunately you would need to manually adjust permissions on the files and folders.

P.S. I imagine minutes after posting this someone will tell me I am dumb and should have done it this way, or someone else posted better over here. If that's the case let me know and Ill point to a better example, but when I needed help I couldn't find it.

 

Hi Gang!! I've been a bit quiet over the summer as I went backpacking with my little kids in Europe. We had an amazing time but I was totally exhausted after. The above is my latest blog. 

the tldr is I nearly halved my running costs with a change to hardware that wasn't expensive. Honestly the kit is about the same price as what I had already paid for to begin with.

Next I will finally get to running this update and be back soon with that story 🙂

Hope you're all having fun!!

Anna x

Should I add rails?
Remove shelves?
Remove the shelves and just stack em? haha

I'm storing my personal and professional audio and video project files here for long term storage and backup. I often need to access and reuse old projects. So I'm accessing this server from work too. The 3Gbps Internet here rocks!  I've also got a media server here too.

- Dell Precision 5810 (Running HexOS)
- Bell Modem
- 5 Port 10G Switch
- 24 Port 1G Switch
- Mediasonic eSata 4-Drive Bay (16TB HexOS HDD Pool)
- 24TB Backup Drive (with snapshots)
- Livingroom Gaming PC
- Dust

Thanks!

I am sorry if this is a silly topic but I have been having issues with my installation for a bit now and after messing about a bit I think a made things worse.

I now want to try and perform a clean install of HexOS but I am not sure how to do that. I have a usb with the OS on it from when I first installed it but I don't know how to to a clean install and start all over.

If anyone can help I would really appeciate it, thank you.

CPU:   Intel 14500 I5
RAM:  128GB DDR4 (ouch!!!!)
Mobo: ASUS B760M-A D4-CSM
Supermicro 2U chassis

7x12TB (will be a RAIDZ2) with an HBA card and SAS extender in case I want to add more than the 8 drives the chassis supports

1TB Samsung 990 Pro NVME (boot drive, and planning on putting my VMs there, or at least the fast ones  I need, w/backup to the big vdev)

Intel A380 (hoping it'll work) for transcoding

dual 10GBps NIC for connecting to my backbone 

I'll be reading a ton in the next week here 🙂   

~Horist

The osd is attached below but i can't really make sense of what it is telling me.  Thank you in advance for any help you can provide. 

CPU - Intel Core i9-12900K

Mobo - ASUS Z790 Prime Gaming

Mem - 64gb DDR5 (16x4)

Boot Storage - 1tb nvme Teamgroup

Mass Storage - WD Red 12tb NAS HDD's x5

SAS - SVNXINGTII SAS9305-16i

PSU - NZXT C1000 ATX 3.1

Case - RackOwl 4U Server Chassis

N100 Industrial Motherboard NAS 4 Cores 4 Threads Low Power Processor

4x2.5G i226 Network

M.2 Slot   10Gtek M.2 to SATA Adapter, M Key to SATA3.0 Card, ASMedia ASM1166 Chip  6 x sata   -  3  X  BX500 480GB SSD Micron  

6xSATA  3 x  Seagate 40 TB  

DP HDMI

2.0 PCIE ×1 .1*

M2_ SSD NVME/NGFF+ 1*M.2_ NVME   TN320 256GB SSD NVMe PCIe Gen 3.0x4 M.2 2280 3D NAND

any thaughts

Main issues right now decommissioning the 2019 server is....I can't install all the drivers on the Framework Desktop w/ 2025 (pro AMD drivers don't support the hard ware, normal drivers don't support the OS).  Ah the joys of poking a new server OS.  Once this is sorted, I will be taking all but the NAS roles from the 2019.  Once the N5 gets here, the 2019 losses its NAS roll and I start my HexOS journey.

Oh and main reason I built a 2019 server for my home and 4 users?  Group policy to force windows to behave like your domain account is local admin, like you don't bounce from the performance to balanced power profile randomly, to kill one drive, and more recently to send CoPilot to sleep with the fishes.

https://www.theserverstore.com/supermicro-12x-bay-2u-plex-media-server-sas3
https://serverpartdeals.com/products/western-digital-ultrastar-dc-hc530-wuh721414al4204-0f31002-14tb-7-2k-rpm-sas-12gb-s-512e-3-5-recertified-hard-drive

I had bought HexOs lifetime license back when LTT talked about it.  So first things first, I needed to install the OS in the server.  At first I was going to mount a SSD in the case and just run a SATA cable to it.  First off, server has no SSD mounts inside that I can find, or SATA power connectors for that matter.  Never dealt with a sata dom before and didn't feel like buying a relatively expensive 32 gig drive for this project.  So after poking around I found that I can just plug my SSD into one of the bays on the front since they can do both SAS and SATA so that problem was solved.  (I originally was going to run the entire OS off of a 64 USB stick but during the install HexOS pleaded with me to not do that.  Oh, also while I was in the chassis I found out that the server store installed the network card (dual SFP+) just floating in the bottom slot not actually in a pci slot.  Not a huge thing, easy to fix, but glad I noticed it, added an image for the fun of it.  So after removing that internal USB so that I can install HexOS onto my SSD loaded into the front, I restarted and found out that according to HexOS installer I don't have a single drive.  After going back to bios and changing settings a few times I finally saw that when it was booting after it got past some of the bios it would show a raid screen and I had to hit a key combo to go into the RAID card's bios screen and then tell it to go into JBOD mode so that it would make the drives transparent.  (I had paid for the card not knowing if I needed it, I think I probably would of been better without it, I think I would of still got full 12 GBs speed without it and not had to deal with it).  Finally I was able to install HexOS for the first time and go to the Deck for the first time.

So good things first, using the deck to set it up was pretty straight forward and I got it up and running relatively quickly.  I will say I would of liked more options, I don't know if this is a HexOS thing or TrueNAS thing but only letting me have 1 redundancy was kind of annoying.  I wanted to have options to change that if I wanted but maybe that is a limitation based on how many drives I had, I don't know.  The folder setup is odd and the deck doesn't really tell you too much between the "system" folders and the "my" folders (which does come up later).  The first hurdle I ran into was wanting to transfer my files from the old drives to the new dataset.  The old drives were just NTFS drives that were in my windows media machine.  So looking up online I saw someone say you can just hook it into TrueNAS and it will allow you to import the data in.  So at first I looked at doing that in the deck, but it looked like the deck wanted to wipe the drives so I backed out of it.  Then I went into TrueNAS and started poking around in there, and it also looked to want to format it.  So then I did more google searching and tried ChatGPT, which of course had confident advice.  There went a day of me trying thing after thing it was suggesting, some issues came up from TrueNAS blocking me installing the ntfs drivers I apparently needed in order to access the drives, I don't know.  After going over all the failures with it, it finally said my best bet was just to throw it in another machine and transfer over the network.  So that was 2 days ago and I am still transferring over the network as we speak (it was a decent amount of data between 2 14 TB drives I had mostly full).  I don't know if it is possible, but having the option in the UI to intake content from NTFS drives into the pool or something would be nice.

On said media pc I also had Jellyfin running to categorize my media and then used Kodi to consume it (a bit odd I know, but hey it works).  So I decided to use HexOS deck to install Jellyfin, along with a couple other apps.  So here is where I run into another issue I have with deck, the different between system folders and my folders.  Jellyfin created a shows and movies folder.  I wanted more (I have like 6 folders I use with Jellyfin), and I ran into an issue where Jellyfin only saw the folders it was setup to see.  So I had to dive back into truenas ui and set up what folders Jellyfin could see and then also change those datasets to have user->apps permission added so Jellyfin could interact with the folders.  It would of been nice since Hex sees that these folders are different from the other ones have the option to migrate the folders over.

Another issue I ran into, before installing Jellyfin I created a TV Shows folder and then Jellyfin created a Shows folder.  I didn't realize this until I had already started moving over data.  So I also had to jump back into the TrueNAS ui to get to the shell and run:

sudo rsync -ah --progress --inplace --remove-source-files "/mnt/HDDs/TV Shows/" "/mnt/HDDs/Shows/"

in case anyone ever needs to do this, it moves the files over from one dataset to another, you apparently need the inplace or truenas will block the action. Also ran into an issue where if this is running and the truenas web portal times out, it kills the action.  I think my timeout for truenas web portal is now 2 hours.  I could of hooked a monitor and keyboard back up to the server and ran it there, but I really didn't want to, and 2 hours was enough to get it all after 2 or 3 tries.

In the end, I am logging into TrueNAS UI more than I am ever bothering to look at Deck. I am just not finding it useful for when I need to do something.  Maybe that is just because of my use cases or maybe it is something that can be addressed in future updates as more content is added to it.

You could use the size of the ethernet ports and USB ports in the attached picture, to appreciate how small this one is.                                                                                       Amazon is a reseller of this brand in the US:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DG8LX6M6?ref=nav_custrec_signin&ref_=cm_sw_r_cso_cp_apin_dp_ARXRNNSBNATMWSN38KC2&social_share=cm_sw_r_cso_cp_apin_dp_ARXRNNSBNATMWSN38KC2&peakEvent=4&starsLeft=1&skipTwisterOG=1&th=1                       

For me amazon. com didn’t work since they do not ship to Sweden, where I’m from. I got it here instead:

https://ipc.net/products/4-bay-nas-pocket-pc-dual-2-5gbe-i226-v-lan-ports-12th-gen-n100-n305-with-ddr5-max-48gb-4-m-2-nvme-2280-dual-4k-display-2-usb3-2-10gbps-for-micro-firewall-router-nas-mini-computer?variant=44328463630494

Shipping worked perfectly. Delivered by FedEx in about a week, or so.

 Now it’s time to take the lid off, as in the second picture. There are two notches for your fingers, and the lid just snaps out. Of course ”snaps” in my country, here in the vodka belt, means something totally different.             On the underside of the lid, you can see that it’s used as a heat sink, with four contact points for the NVMe drives. The case is totally made of aluminum, which makes it very solid., and heavy. No plastic here…                                                           More will come when I’m ready.

Just a comment: I happened to press the Quote button above without meaning to, and repeated it to see if that helped in removing it. So, it didn’t 😉 

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This was mostly a lot of fun and has got me super excited about NAS stuff in general, I didn't realise how much of "uploading" and "downloading" difficulties just go away when it's on the same network etc. I was expecting something a bit like an external hard drive or a maybe like OwnCloud/NexCloud. The speed just blew my mind!

Part List:
Operating System
 * HexOS Lifetime Key: $144.88
Core Components
 * CPU: Ryzen 7 1700 (8C/16T) - $45 (Facebook Marketplace)
 * CPU Cooler: Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 SE - $48.90 (Amazon Marketplace Canada)
 * Motherboard: ASRock B450M PRO4 R2.0 - $114.96 (Newegg Canada)
 * Power Supply: MSI A850GL - $183.95 (Best Buy)
 * RAM: CORSAIR Vengeance LPX 32GB (2x16GB) DDR4 3200MHz - $67.99 (Canada Computers)
 * Boot Drive: WD Black SN770 500GB - $79.99 (Canada Computers)
 * Zotac 2060 8GB - $180 (Facebook Marketplace)
Storage Drives
 * Storage Drives (x2): Seagate BarraCuda 8TB 7200 RPM - $224.19 each (Best Buy)

Current Case
 * Thermaltake S200 TG ARGB Plus: $114.96 (Best Buy)
This case isn't the final home for the server. Once I acquire the additional HDDs, the server will be migrated to my larger main rig case. The Thermaltake S200 TG ARGB Plus will then be repurposed as the first component for a new gaming rig for my special lady!

Future Plans
My intention is to add two additional HDDs down the road. I'll need a SATA controller for this, as my boot drive uses one of the available SATA ports. On the bright side, my special lady gave me a "free PC part" coupon worth up to $100, which I plan to use for one of those future HDDs!