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Hey all! We've published a new blog post sharing some of the development work happening behind the scenes at HexOS. This time, we're highlighting our new end-to-end testing suite which is going to drastically help our development moving forward. Checkout the new blog post for more details! The docsite has also been updated to include two awesome user created guides regarding Immich. To be fully transparent, we are still figuring out what exactly the HexOS official solution looks like, but want to provide you with as much support as possible in the meantime. docs link: guide by @Forsaken (hub link) docs link: guide by @G-M0N3Y-2503 (hub link) Here is also a guide directly from the Immich community. If you have more specific questions/issues with Immich please put them in the Immich support section. You may have also seen that we are hiring! This role (along with our end-to-end testing) will be crucial for keeping up with apps and staying ahead of issues like the one we saw with Immich. Thank you to everyone who applied! We’ll be conducting interviews soon and are looking forward to chatting with you all.

Looks like we have 25.10 in the wild (https://forums.truenas.com/t/truenas-25-10-0-is-now-available/57343), hope we can see a HexOS update based on this soon...

here are some low power server builds (not necessarily on hexos/truenas) https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LHvT2fRp7I6Hf18LcSzsNnjp10VI-odvwZpQZKv_NCI/edit?gid=0#gid=0 These are just some general things to keep in mind you can can expect each hdd and ssd to add 2-7w at idle. not using a discrete gpu will save you 10-20w at idle keeping peripherals unplugged (monitor, keyboard, mouse) help a bit old amd cpus have trouble if c states are enabled. (c states are kinda sorta low power modes) fan power draw ads up skip the rgb

Might want to have https://hexos.com/blog/ redirect there also. Navigating directly still goes to the old blog.

HexOS is looking to add an App Support & Curation Specialist to the team! Position is Full-time, Remote You will: • Help users with app issues • Approve and maintain our one-click app installs • Write clear announcements and docs • Work with developers and communities on solutions • Report and help fix issues across HexOS Read the full description: https://docs.hexos.com/careers/app-curator/ Apply by sending your experience to join-apps@hexos.com

In addition to what M said, low idle power draw doesn't necessarily mean, low performance hardware, modern high performance HW also has amazing power savings potential & idle power draw, so you don't need to go low performance, or old HW. Some easy wins are disabling unused HW/parts in the BIOS (Audio, onboard NIC if a dedicated NIC is used, Wifi etc...)

Thank you to you and everyone that put together these tutorials. I was excited to give this a try, but even with the tutorials, this seems to be a less than straightforward process. On the first guide linked, I immediately encountered discrepancies between how my Truenas was configured/behaved and how the guide assumed your Truenas would function. First, the dataset I created did not seem to have the same "strip ACLs" button shown. My permissions section looked a little different as a result, but I feel comfortable tweaking the list manually to make it match the guide. The bigger issue for me was that I couldn't get my computer (MacOS via terminal) to SSH into the Truenas server. I kept getting a permissions denied error. I tried a small amount of googling, but I'm not sure I have the time or patience to try to attempt this. The second tutorial seems a little less beginner friendly. I thiiiink I could try to figure it out, but immediately after my first attempt of tweaking the permissions, I'm getting endless "operation not permitted" errors in the terminal. This is clearly user error on my end, but I wanted to post this for other HexOS users here - I definitely feel like I am the target audience of introductory homelabber that doesn't care to tinker with these things and I wanted to share my experience for other's visibility before they invest the time themselves. Unfortunately, I think it will be a better use of my time to wipe and start over on my immich backup. Hopefully they stay true to their word and this is the last time they make this sort of change, or I will probably look elsewhere for backing up my photos in the future. Thank you again to those that took the time to try to document guides on this process!

Down the Road, it would be really awesome if we would get a curated installation for Paperless-NGX! https://docs.paperless-ngx.com/ Paperless is a really awesome Document Management System for all sorts of things. Paperless have lots of Small Features like full OCR and full in document text search. With a Duplex scanner, you can easly backup ALL of your paper documents and have them automatically sorted - a perfect companion for HexOS that aims to make digital backups a breeze! With a Curated and easy install, it could also help to backup analog paper 🙂

We moved the blog to the docs site. I'll chat with @csmanel about getting RSS support for it.

I fixed it that night. We migrated all the previous blog posts to the doc site as well as updated the link to it from the home page.

since you are just replacing 2 drives, have you considered just plugging your 2 2tb drives and 2 8tb drives at the same time, copying over your data then removing your 2tb drives?

Could we get a forum section for install scripts? That way as a community we can post a thread for a specific app and people can share their scripts and ask for feedback? I think that'd be handy, but I don't think it needs to go in the normal Applications support forum because that might confuse people as it's definitely a more advanced thing at the moment! Thanks

Welcome Capox! HexOS license are easily transferred, so you need not worry! Many of us do have multiple licenses however, as we have multiple machines we are running at once. A local backup server, and a physically remote one for off site backups, for example.

Shott answer yes. Long answer is when you swap hardware you'll need to make sure that when you do swap you'll need to make sure that you reconfigure the new bios to point to your boot drive and turn off secure boot. I have done alot with swapping hardware in testing since the first drop of hexOs and it is still running with out any issues

Hi, i don't really know if it's possible or if it has been discussed earlier but is it possible for HexOS to display differents pcie cards information (like what card is in what slot) or direcly display the GPU informations like the usage the drivers etc a little like it is done with the cpu informations? I think it could be a great options for those who use gpu for transcoding or in VM... thank you all 😁

I think high on the list of features for HexOS would be to make recovering from something going wrong easier. Easy configuration backups and recovery, helping with snapshot stuff, importing existing pools after reinstall, etc.

I hope that one day we'll see GPU virtualisation not relegated to datacenters, maybe if Intel makes a card worth splitting up. I've looked into the software side and there are too many competing ideas that all require a lot of maintainers by the looks of it so I'm doubtful of long-term support.

yes you can install hexos on mirrored drives on the installer they give you the option

??? What future do you crazy dreamers live in? 🤪

One interesting thing is I was actually his software support contact behind the scenes (previous job) and helped him a lot with the multi seat gaming videos starting with 2 gamers 1 cpu but especially the 7 gamers one with the custom water block for the AMD cards. I had him setup remote access including a webcam that was pointed at all the monitors on the ground so I could see them light up for gpu pass through. Was a helluva project!!

Title says it all. Thanks.

https://www.gingerling.co.uk/how-i-moved-my-google-photos-to-my-hexos-nas-and-why-it-was-awesome/ 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!

Having AMP (https://cubecoders.com/AMP) supported would allow users to get game servers up and running super fast and easy! I know my primary use cases for hexos is media streaming, image backups, and gaming servers. The first two are already covered with plex and immich. Just need a game server app for hexos and therefore recommend AMP!

Saw your post and I’ll add this to the list for us to curate. Seems like a good one!!

Yeah....reading rainbow obviously did nothing for me. But i started the app and tried again, it wont upgrade. Now im getting the storage upgrade issue [EFAULT] Failed to execute 'remove_old_storage_migration' migration: Traceback (most recent call last): File "/mnt/.ix-apps/app_configs/immich/versions/1.10.8/migrations/remove_old_storage_migration", line 26, in <module> print(yaml.dump(migrate(yaml.safe_load(f.read())))) ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ File "/mnt/.ix-apps/app_configs/immich/versions/1.10.8/migrations/remove_old_storage_migration", line 10, in migrate raise Exception( Exception: Cannot remove old storage config while it is still in use. Please migrate to the new storage config first before upgrading. I see a button in TrueNAS app manager "Use old storage configuration" im going to download all my stuff, uncheck this option and then see if i can upgrade

apple silicon seems amazing and sometimes i can't shut up about how it would be amazing if i could run a home lab on apple silicon or apple comes out with a gaming handheld. looking forward to hearing what hardware you end up on. most important piece of advice is before you commit to your parts list, you should post it here and see if anyone has any recommendations. so many little things to keep in mind that are non factors when building say a gaming pc.

its been a while since i created an installer to check whats on it and i can't find mind at this moment but its normal for os installer usbs to have multiple partitions

At some point, it would be nice with a native mobile app for setting up things like smb shares, start/stop, looking at stats and etc.

Is there a way to cancel the task so it isn't stuck? Or so that I can try and re-install it? Edit: I had to manually install it from the TrueNAS UI, then uninstall it from HexOS to get it unstuck.

Kudos to the entire team for their hard work on this. Proper testing is a key component of our focus on delivering an excellent user experience and will continue to be integral to our mission. Great work to all involved!

I think if we are honest almost everyone would say they were disappointed in how this startup has gone including Eshtek. I don't think all of our disappointment is justified because it has nothing to actually do with HexOS. However, you have hit on two points that are hard to argue with. Why are we paying up to $200 to test this application? And TrueNAS what? As for the paying to test question, I guess I am starting to do the same (well kind of) as you because I have set it aside to wait for go live. Plex and Immich are the only current curated apps I would ever use and until the serious discussions on how to secure the NAS start my machine is just a giant backup drive. And as for the current absolute requirement to use TrueNAS to do ALMOST anything including troubleshooting curated app failures. Well, if I am going to have to hire TrueNAS support to properly setup all non curated and some curated apps, I'm probably better off buying beer for my current Unraid support buddy. Like many others, I saw the LTT video and thought "Holly crap, someone finally built a system I can manage myself. I got in at the Black Friday price so HexOS on a mostly recycles server is still cheaper that a Synology or Ugreen prebuilt server. Storage seems to be the biggest cost but I have to pay that either way. I'm sure I will keep checking in and looking at the officially curated apps to see if anything looks interesting but unless there is a solid security option, it's all pretty irrelevant to me. My problem is that if I had to pay $299 what would I need to pull the trigger? That may be a tough uphill struggle for Eshtek if they want to attract people who are not at least serviceable in TrueNAS. So instead of looking at an the app we have today and deciding what it must be going to look like in 1, 2 and 5 years, we can wait and see what 1.0 looks like. I doubt though it will ever just be point and click.

godspeed

i would say if you don't intend to do ai workloads, skip the gpu and get one of the few xeons with an igpu. just by existing a dgpu like your 1660 super will be using like 10-20w at idle. intel quick sync transcoding is actually really good and nothing to scoff at. I think even now it is considered the gold standard for low power transcoding

it is going to be very similar to this guide

Would be great if it would be like Truenas, you just export your config and during (or after) installation you just reload this config and it's all back and configured to how it was before. Maybe even give an advanced tab where you can select which categories/settings/apps you want to restore and which not. This backup could even be done automagically upon a settings change and keep a couple of versions, and be stored on one of the pools and Hexos might be looking for it during or after the setup and give you a choice of which version (automatic or manual backup and from which date/time) to use. Pool import is already working now, you don't have to create a new pool anymore during the setup, you import them afterwards.

This is not foreseen to be done in Truenas and therefor Hexos. Hexos is an appliance and you are not installing anything on the OS. The drivers are in the kernel and you cannot easily update them. Newer Versions might support your NIC in the future though.

truly wild times i look forward to the inevitable 100 gamers 1 cpu video

Sept 29th or 30th the person who really administers my Unraid setup stopped over and we looked at HexOS. He said in his professional opinion, he could see what HexOS was trying to do but was surprised how much I needed to do in TrueNAS. To be clear, he says he has a functional knowledge in TrueNAS but is not an expert. I mentioned my security issues because I didn't think any apps but the ones I forced to use a certificate of any kind. We he asked for an example I chose Nextcloud. He timed how log in to to start the stopped app, how long it took to launch the app, and a couple of the addons. He mentioned the launch was slow especially since I logged in as me, not administrator. He questioned my Microsoft Office and the Talk app as they could slow things down. After removing those addons we did it again from server bootup and it wasn't any faster. He looked at cpu and memory numbers and said it was way more this server should need or use. I showed him that I had increased the CPU count and available memory Thinking that would help but not really. His general assessment was it was very slow for only two users and no internet intensive addons because copying/moving files was lightning fast. After a few more app demos he said I was right in worrying about security and when HexOS was live I need to secure every app to HTTPS at a minimum if I intended to continue running this NAS. But he also said the apps that were slowest were the ones I installed myself from TrueNAS so if HexOS gets a curated version it may noticeably improve performance. As an example he gave me what the company he was currently working with (that I retired from) launch and addon startup numbers were. They wouldn't accept an app that didn't start in half the time and while that is a full production tuned app, it has +200,000 users in the USA and another +50,000 worldwide.

Agreed. Thread has run it's course.

Thank you. It worked 🙂

Would be happy to read more updates. The last blog post is from May. An update every 4-8 weeks would help maintain belief in this project. Actually, it looks dead.

I know that Immich is already a Curated app, but for me, it has the big downside that Users have no e2ee and as an Admin of the Server ill be able to all Files/Photos/Videos a user has uploaded to the NAS. ENTE has e2ee and allows any file uploaded to be encrypted and not be readable by the Admin of the NAS - which is a huge selling point if I want to convince my Family and Friends to finally quit buying iCloud Storage and switch to a home hosted NAS solution. I would like to hear if the Community would be interested if ENTE gets a curated installation, and if the HEXos team maybe already has a plan to add it to the list.

I would really like to see folding at home for HexOS

Hi Folks, This post will go over the basic requirements for running HexOS, then cover a few frequently asked questions. If you come across frequently asked questions that are not included in the main post please comment below! NOTE: Please keep comments here directly related to the post/FAQ itself. and create separate topics to discuss specific use cases and issues. Thanks! Updated 12/4/24 ---------------------------------------------------- Minimum Hardware Requirements: x86 compatible hardware (Intel or AMD) (HexOS is NOT ARM or RISC-V compatible) 64 bit Processor with 2+ cores 8GB or more of system memory 16GB boot SSD Larger is OK, but not necessary. 3+ storage drives recommended 2 storage drives is the current minimum. (Pools created with 2 drives are not expandable. See details below.) Single drive configurations are not supported at this time. Please visit https://hexos.com/early-access-faq for more info Also, please check out the roadmap web page for info on upcoming features; https://hexos.com/blog/the-road-to-10 ------------------------------------------------------- FAQ: Q: Can I install HexOS on a virtual machine? A: Yes. While HexOS is meant to be installed on physical hardware, it can be ran as a VM. Please see TrueNAS SCALE documentation for details on running TrueNAS as a VM. Q: can I install HexOS on a UGREEN or ASUSTOR NAS? A: Yes. To the best of my knowledge, UGREEN and ASUSTOR NAS devices all support installing 3rd party operating systems. Google "Installing TrueNAS on [insert brand name here] NAS" to find guides and forum posts with other users experiences. Q: Can I install HexOS on my old Synology NAS or Netgear Ready NAS? A: No. Unfortunately many consumer NAS solutions do not support installation of 3rd party operating systems. NOTE: It appears that some Ready NAS devices are capable of using 3rd party operating systems through advanced techniques, but the jury is out currently on exactly which models, and whether or not the hardware is performant enough for a good user experience. Q: Can I run HexOS on a Raspberry Pi or equivalent? A: No. Raspberry Pi devices are built using ARM processors. HexOS requires x86 hardware. Q: Can I start with only a few (3+) drives and expand later? A: Yes.You can add more drives of the same capacity to a pool to increase its available space. Q: Can I expand my storage pool if I started with only 2 drives? A: No. While OpenZFS has support for expanding a 2-device RAIDz1, that capability has not been enabled in TrueNAS SCALE. Q: Can I set up a storage pool using a single hard drive? A: No. Single drive configurations are not supported at this time This may change in the future, but either way it is discouraged due to single drive configurations being susceptible to data loss from hardware failure. Q: Can storage pools use drives with different capacities without loosing space? A: No. While mismatched drives can be used, in any one pool the maximum usable capacity per drive is limited by the size of the smallest drive in that pool. Example: A storage pool with 5x 256GB SSDs and 1x 250GB SSD will have the same usable capacity as a pool with 6x 250GB drives. Q: Can I change small drives our for larger ones to increase my storage pool's capacity? A: Yes. Drives can be exchanged one at a time to gradually copy all the data onto larger drives, Once all drives have been exchanged the pool's capacity will grow all at once. Example: Lets say we have a pool with 6x10TB drives in RAIDz1, and we swap those out one by one for six 20TB units. When the last 20 TB drive has been installed, and the pool has finished re-silvering (copying data to a drive to re-construct the pool) then the pool's total capacity will jump from ~50TB usable to ~100TB usable!

2 options Im using on my Dell T430 currently... 1. IPMI Tools 2. Noctua NA-FC1, 4-Pin PWM Fan Controller (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B072M2HKSN?ref_=ppx_hzsearch_conn_dt_b_fed_asin_title_2&th=1)

Could be me but I do this at a router / switch / vlan level. It also allows for monitoring and delegation a bit easier

If there's an iOS app, there needs to be an Android app too.

I have tried several NAS Systems before, none of them had a official good functioning mobile app, where i could quickly check basic stuff on the fly. Stuff like Updating Apps, restarting containers / VMs, restarting the entire Server, only basic things like this would be awesome. With the Management being Cloud based right now, it should not even be that big of an issue i think.

TrueNAS has drivers for UPS (particularly from APC) built-in, if I'm not mistaken?

Nextcloud would be great to have. I’m looking for an alternative to Google Workspace and it seems like Nextcloud might be a good option.