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This is a good background artikel. Thanks! It’s always good that you really understand the stuff you working with. In my opinion this is also the reason why TrueNas has a pretty steep learning curve. You have to understand the basics of ZFS and the authorization model, before you can configure the right options. To be honest, I am still not really comfortable in TrueNas. With a few guides from the internet I got my TrueNas setup up and running. But after that I change as less as possible 😀 This is exactly the reason I like the concept of HexOs. Rock solid TrueNas / ZFS in the background and easy config in the front end

Laughs in Darkness.. All jokes aside Ill put it in to look at this issue.

I was reading THIS arsTECHNICA article on ZFS (as one usually does) and was so impressed that I started looking at other stuff the author has worked on. Turns out THIS guy created a ZFS snapshot application that looks really promising. I've not done anything other than look through the repo but I like what I see so far and wanted to share. Tagging @Sonic @Theo and @PsychoWards because of the thread comments in THIS post. While not totally on topic to that thread, it made me remember that I should share this content.

Look's nice, be curious to see what chipsets it comes with though + how it'll compare to the Ugreen DXP6800 or DXP8800.

https://www.gingerling.co.uk/playing-with-hexos-part-1-losing-my-mind-and-my-pool/ Enjoy x

Hello, not sure if it was requested already, but a curation for the "Actual Budget" app would be greatly appreciated. I found it by looking at the apps tab, and did some more research on it and i would love to switch to it instead of my current app of Quicken since I pay yearly to use it. I think it would help many nowadays due to inflation. Thanks!

Hi @freid, almost $900,- for motherboard / CPU combo is a lot of money. I am wondering what the main purpose will be for your NAS setup? It seems a little top heavy to me. But don't get me wrong. You probably have good reasons for the choice of this combo. I only like to learn from your choices.

I assume you are using the password you setup in the install? if that is still not working you will need to plug in a monitor, keyboard and mouse to the NAS and you will have the ability to change the truenas_admin password

Hey all, as the name implies I would like to see a simple checkbox to make folders available via nfs. As a bonus a list of IP ranges that are allowed to access the share would be perfect. The user mapping to the user owning the folder so that I do not need to care about permissions and just access the data via NFS could be handled automatically as a default. Please feel free to ask for clarification and to add your ideas below!

Well there IS a fan inside, and an optional external fan you could mount on the top cover. I got it with my Pocket NAS, even though on their website they say it’s an optional thing. I would need to have it all ready before I can tell you more about it. The four screw holes on the top are meant for the external one. Best thing is, I’ve never heard the internal fan, and the external one seems very quiet also, when I tested it. When I’ve built computers I’ve used Noctua fans, so I’m quite spoiled, in this regard. By the way, all the metal of the box itself seems aimed at dissipating heat. I will be back.

Nice journey! Looking forward to see HexOs on your mini NAS. Can you share your experiences with the temperature? I'm really curious about the cooling system in this NAS mini PC.

A last picture from today. This is how it looks inside under the layer I lifted out.

Sorry for my confusing quote; No 2 is the appropriate one in this case. Today I found the time to do this. But I would need some help from @Dylan or @DomSmith with the interpretation of the shown result when using the lspci command. If only you can read it, A little blurry…

Just a point about dealing with electronic parts like this. I always hold them by the edges. Very often on videos you see the person putting fingers all over it. Before I start I try to get rid of static electricity, by putting my hands on a heating radiator. I’ve built five or six computers since 2008, and never had a problem with static charge buildup.

I just had a brief look, but this looks to be very interesting, both the article and the tool. This will definitely help with understanding ZFS better! Thanks for posting it.

@PsychoWards, you are more then welcome to copy some parts of my setup! That's also how I started with my setup. Always learning a lot of other homelabbers. And still learning every day. Do you have specific part where you are interested in? We can eleborate on that. And yes, perhaps you are right. I should create my own topic 🙂

You absolutely need to create your own topic. From your posts in the forum it sounds like you have a some things which I will shamelessly copy from your setup =D

Etcher solved the issue. Source:

https://aoostar.com/blogs/news/the-aoostar-wtr-max11bay-is-about-to-meet-you-all This looks like it could be really fun. It's more than what I need but I bet this things sells really well. BTW - who uses SFP at home?

Let's keep in touch! Already some inspiration and scripts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5KAt76Bg3w https://www.apalrd.net/posts/2024/pbs_hibernate/ I need to find some time to start experimenting.

Dude, you just noodled through an installation via TrueNAS, which is non-trivial, and ended up with a working configuration - congrats! Thank you for your thorough follow up. I am going to add your post as a place holder in our Directory of Guides until or unless a more complete installation write up is submitted - which I totally hope you contribute towards! Thanks again!!

Thanks for the diagram, I was roughly aware the relationship but I wasn't sure if it was more a master+slave, with HexOS fully controlling TrueNAS (with the option for users to manually control TrueNAS), but the sibling relationship structure sounds good. I was thinking it might be the former becuase I've heard HexOS adviise users against performing certain actions via the TrueNAS UI as HexOS might not support those same actions and that could lead to HexOS breaking.

I don't know if I have the budget for 2 HexOS licenses (it'd be nice if there was a discount for buying multiple licenses at once). I guess I could always swap TNS01 on to TNS02's (much older) hardware and then prep the second NAS (with the newer hardware) for HexOS Yeah I think I heard that somewhere, Is that on the roadmap for the 1.0 release later this year? Or is that (roughly) planned to happen following the 1.0 release?

Regarding point 1; I was thinking of comparing the permission types between HexOS's TrueNAS UI, and then implementing those types on that second TrueNAS systems. I'm talking about the UID, GID, Mask types. Probarbly "Advanced" stuff for HexOS's target userbase but stuff TrueNAS users need to know.

@Dylan Thank you for your help! It really helped me get a better understanding of the bigger picture in regards to all this, and it helped me kinda jerryrig my own solution to it. Thing is, shortly after installing the OS I had also decided to update truenas scale, which I found out later that it isn't recommended to do so. It didn't break anything for me at least, so I just figured it's all good. But after having wrestled with the guides you sent me, and stumbling upon a random reddit thread, I ended up finding out that the issue causing this whole mess was that I had basically done a "default installation" of pretty much everything in Handbrake when doing it via truenas scale. So part of what the latest version of electric eel (truenas) did, was change how the apps are handled - and how they are placed, which is more relevant for this - which messed with how handbrake sets up storage paths to "watch" and output from how it's installed. The people in the reddit thread were talking about how it's essentially a "1-click solution" to change the already-existing apps to fit that update, but they didn't really talk much about when installing from scratch. Which is where that guide by Theo about radarr and sonarr really helped out, because it made me familiar with the finnicky nature of the storage options and premade datasets when installing something. So this is what solved it: (I had already deleted handbrake quite a while ago, so at this point it's without the app installed) I made a dataset for handbrake, in /mnt/HDDs/Applications/ with permissions set to user, group, and other, with root and read/write/execute (I figured why not, I didn't really feel like taking it one permission at a time and I'm fine with leaving it as it is now, but up to you (the reader) if you want to be more cautious about it). I did not make a config sub-dataset like the sonarr/radarr guide suggests for sonarr/radarr. I then installed handbrake with mostly the default options still as they are. However, I left the config storage to iXVolume because I figured it's not something I need to be messing with anywhere other than in the UI for the app and there it was already working fine previously - and then I changed all of the other storage options to Host paths with a folder I've set up myself. (I should've made more folders for it in order to separate the pre-encoded from the re-encoded video files, but I just wanted to get it over with to see how it goes.) So I gave it a shot, and it works fine now. Well, kind of. I still can't see the HDDs folder, although I could at one point during my trials and errors but then it wouldn't give me access so I decided to try something else. But now the built-in view of "storage" in the app's UI can see the video files just fine, in a place where I can place them; because Applications isn't accessible (nor viewable) to place files in, which is where I'm guessing Handbrake had assigned as its "storage" pathway before. Anyway, lesson learned without too much harm done, that I'm gonna have to mix things up a bit to work with the updated electric eel version of truenas scale, since HexOS is still meant to be used with the version it came with during its installation. Thank you for the help! It did push me in the right direction.

I agree that this would be a nice feature. You can do this now via the TrueNAS UI by going to Datasets, which will show you the amount occupied by each folder (Movies, Shows etc.)

@jonp recently confirmed recently that there are plans to be able to adopt existing TrueNAS systems into HexOS for management, but that's not something that is likely to be implemented soon. If I were in your shoes and I wanted to make things happen quickly I would build your second server and install HexOS on it, copy all your files and such, and then convert TNS01 to HexOS as well. As far as how it all works, HexOS exists on an equal level as TrueNAS' GUI interface, and both of those talk to the TrueNAS API which is a layer down, and is what actually does the work. Both interfaces work side by side. They're like siblings in the way that they relate to the TrueNAS API. You could think of it as having two options for your user interface for TrueNAS. Here is a diagram to illustrate: On the left is a normal TrueNAS install, and on the right is HexOS. The HexOS installer has the HexOS command deck web connector added, and that's about the only difference as far as the actual installer goes. The rest of the interface is handled from the Command Deck web app, which is cloud based. A fully local HexOS UI option will be coming before full release. It's unlikely to be at full feature parity with deck.hexos.com. Details are TBA though.

i would probably use the TN scale guide. you can connect to it with tailscale. im not to familiar with reverse proxies myself so maybe someone else can better inform you.

Still no update at this time but an updated roadmap should be coming out soon

Can you tell us a little more of what's going on as well as what hardware and network you are using?

So I decided to throw together a quick video for thoes that are questioning hardware when it comes to building their HexOs build. This is something i put together in a short time with my 20+ years in the used parts game. Feel free to give me pointers or opinions on things i may have missed and if there is a need ill create a part 2 with used enterprise gear..

It is a must these days to have TailScale support, especially for secure remote access. It is far too easy to mess up a WireGaurd/OpenVPN Config, if the goal is security and simplicity, Tailscale VPN access should be a high priority.

The deck shows my hexOS server as unavailable and won't connect. I can see the server is online, shares are up and running, and I can log into the trueNAS web ui directly. I did have tailscale on at first, but I have turned that off and tried everything short of restarting hexOS.

I would like to see first party support for placing any app behind some of the most popular VPNs (PIA, Nord, Express, Proton, Tailscale, etc), as well as custom VPNs (WireGuard, OpenVPN, etc). For example, you may install “The Lounge” IRC client and have all internet communication pass through a PIA VPN so that your home IP is not exposed while chatting. Traditional methods of doing this involve painful configuration of iptables or other firewall rules. I believe this is an area where HexOS could really simplify things: Install a VPN plugin, authenticate with it, and then simply assign an app to a VPN plugin via the app’s settings if desired. It would be fully accessible from the home network without going through the VPN, but all internet traffic would go through the VPN with a kill switch in case the VPN goes down. Thoughts?

Need 2 storage drives minimum

Yeah, the price per port/speed is a HUGE differential. The goal, once both nodes are wired, not only will backhauling become way more efficient but I'll likely take the 2nd 2.5G port of the 2nd node and split that off to a small switch. From there attach whatever I want, keeping the primary router/node in my bedroom. You can see 4 of 8 antenna from the top of the chassis...not too shabby to look at....and you can turn the light off.

I believe integrating Home Assistant with HexOS could be a game-changer for the operating system, offering functionality that is sorely lacking in almost all other OS platforms today. A Home Assistant integration would allow users to monitor and manage their NAS more effectively. Imagine being able to track critical metrics such as system uptime, array health, disk health checks, and the overall status of your storage systems — all from within Home Assistant. Furthermore, adding control features would significantly enhance the user experience. It would be fantastic if users could automate tasks like rebooting or stopping/starting applications, VMs, or containers directly through Home Assistant. Additionally, automating disk spin-downs during off-peak hours for power savings would be a powerful and eco-friendly feature. The potential of Home Assistant integration is vast, and it's difficult to fully capture all the possibilities in a single topic. However, the core idea is simple: having such an integration, with continuous updates and new features, would be a major advantage for HexOS. While most other operating systems either lack similar functionality or offer only basic, limited capabilities, HexOS could stand out by providing a more comprehensive, user-friendly, and flexible solution.

Feature Suggestion: UPS Integration for Automatic Shutdown Enable Hexos to natively support UPS devices for automatic safe shutdown during power outages. • Benefits: Prevent data loss, monitor power status, and improve reliability. • Implementation: Integrate protocols like apcupsd or NUT for broad UPS compatibility and allow configurable shutdown actions. Would you like help submitting this suggestion? support UPS devices for automatic safe shutdown during power outages. • Benefits: Prevent data loss, monitor power status, and improve reliability. • Implementation: Integrate protocols like apcupsd or NUT for broad UPS compatibility and allow configurable shutdown actions. Would you like help submitting this suggestion?

I know this is a request for a more 'One click' Hex TM integration, but incase people wanted to test this now, you can do this in Hex + TN today. (already had mine running a week without issue. TIME MACHINE INSTALL GUIDE Create a Folder & name it time machine (or a custom name) Set the Folder permissions (I left mine open, add user permissions here to restricted access) Navigate to the TrueNas UI (Server IP > Username: truenas_admin Pasword: server password from install) Navigate to the Shares tab, you should see your newly created share. Click on edit (pencil) On the Purpose drop down change to > Basic or multi user time machine. Press save/apply, and it'll prompt a restart of the SMB process. Go to your mac settings > general > Time machine. Click the + icon and locate your time machine share, then click setup disk. FYI if you aren't already connected to your Hex server, you'd need to do so now. Either search for the server in the network tab of finder OR connect to the server with finder > go > connect to server > SMB://[THE IP OF YOUR HEX SERVER] You can now choose to encrypt your backup with a password + if you choose, restrict the total disk usage the backup will have. You should now see your time machine backup setup. This will start automatically, but you can create a back up straight away if you choose. AUTO CONNECT SHARED DRIVE SETUP Now that could be it, but to ensure your Time machine backup will always occur, you need to ensure your Mac is always connected to your Hex server. to do this, we need to add the share to the login items Open Settings > general > Login items > click the + icon Locate your connected time machine share, then click open. You should now see the drive in the login items. That's it, you should be all setup and running.

In TrueNas there is an option to set a sleep/standby mode for HDDs. In my experience, however, this does not work in such a way that the hard drives actually shut down reliably after a certain time. TrueNas accesses the disks too often for various reasons, even if no user data is being written. I would like to see a reliable standby option for HDDs (perhaps for an entire pool) that actually spins down the hard drives completely. My use case (perhaps a bit special) is that I have all my active data in an SSD pool and only use my hard drives as bulk storage for old data and as a first backup of my SSD pool. Therefore, my hard drive pool would only need to be active for direct user access or once a day for an automatic backup of the SSD pool and otherwise not run. But maybe there is another solution that I haven't found yet?

That would also be my wish. I live in Germany Electricity cost is quite high and i know i could use an only SSD pool but i have 4x4tb HDDs and 2xtb SSDs and don't plan to change that anytime soon. I would i'm a noob and would love this exact feature. User has 1 share ! All data from user is written on SSD and only once a day copied to hdds The top things i access offen are also stored in SSDs and IF i need something else the hdds spin up. And the system Spins them up in the night does its things and then goes to sleep.

I need light mode, my eyes ache when doing dark mode Please fix

I hope we see these and of course SabNZB support early 2025. Edit: I just noticed there's an application section. Sorry all.