Mascot

It's not about delivering on a milestone promise, it's about how customers experience the product. Imagine being someone who thinks they're buying a "plug and play" NAS software, meant to hide the complexities. They particularly like the idea of local image storage. They pay $200 for HexOS. They install it, see Immich, and find that it doesn't install. Assuming this person was not involved in the forums, this was their experience of the product between the time app installations and updates stopped working in last year's TrueNAS version, and the delivery of the Q2 update where (if I remember correctly) there was a prompt to update TrueNAS. And now? Same thing. A new customer would again see a broken feature. Assuming they do go to the forums they see it's supposedly "top priority" to fix, but a month and a half later the response is "wait and see in Q3". Your perspective as a company seems to be entirely technology focused, but you have users now. Who are customers. They're not all geeks. They don't all read forums. I think it would be a good idea to spend a bit more time considering how they experience the product and any issues with it. That doesn't necessarily mean throwing everything else on the back burner to hurry up and fix an issue immediately, but at least surfacing information in the HexOS interface where most people would expect it to show up, might be a good idea. I can think of no good reason for instead letting users just try and fail to use a feature that is currently known to be broken. My intent here isn't to bash. It's the same type of feedback I give our R&D department where I work, when they try to release products that are fine for a technical person, but six months away from being ready for consumers. They can get laser focused on making the technical side work, and aren't always able to take a step back and think like a user. If you (as in the company) don't really care, fine, it's your business. I think you _should_ care more than you seem to be doing, is all I'm saying. 🙂 I won't flog this horse any more now. No need to respond, I just hope it's taken onboard as constructive feedback.

Can I add a quick(ish) whine? Immich. It's one of two supposedly supported applications, and sorting out its issue with HexOS using a now deprecated storage configuration was claimed as "a top priority". In June. I haven't spotted any updates in this regard. The deprecation message is still present for current installations, and based on comments here in the forums new installations have been non-functional for a while now. If that's the case, I'd call it unprofessional that it's still listed as a recommended app in the HexOS UI, with no indication of any known issues. Personally, I care much more about feeling like the current version of HexOS is actually being supported, than hearing about forthcoming features. I find the prioritization of what to focus on quite odd. This product is not a free alpha, it's an expensive beta. I think it's fair to expect better support of existing features, or at the very least UI updates indicating that something is broken and linking to up-to-date information (it should not be expected that everyone's active in the forums). Like it or not, once money was exchanged this ceased to be a hobby project, but to me it feels like it's still being treated as one. Even just information would go a long way. Is the plan to automate a fix of existing installations? Is it only to fix the initial installation process (if that hasn't already been done)? If no automatic fix is planned, will there be a step-by-step guide published for how to do it? Why is it taking so long? Instead, I haven't seen any mention of the issue since that post in June (though I might have missed it mentioned in some forum post, of course). This, to me, is not congruent with it supposedly being an issue of top priority.

Assuming a user is aware of its existence before the boot drive dies, I would think downloading the TrueNAS configuration file (system - general settings - manage configuration - download file) so it can be imported after reinstall would save some time here. I've never done so, but it claims to contain accounts, shares etc. Personally, I'd consider a user friendly way to recover from boot drive failure to be a core HexOS feature, but I've seen no mention of any plans.

I'd settle for the apps already supposedly supported to actually be supported. Thinking of Immich, which they claimed they would look into but I haven't noticed any updates on, and once the storage setup does go deprecated and prevents updating (or worse, breaks on an update) that'll be too late.

£2.22 per KWh? Holy smokes. I did a google and landed at .gov.uk address that claims there's a price cap in place that should result in an average price of about 25 pence per KWh, so how does that even happen?

It's not the uptime of the website UI I'm thinking of, that's clearly fine considering it's there to tell us the server is unreachable. The issue is the uptime of the connection between our HexOS installations and whatever the backend is. It doesn't mean the backend is down, but for whatever reason that connection dies and is not re-established even though there's no connectivity issue as far as the HexOS installation is concerned. I would hope it would be solved, but it's hard to tell. Based on some comments I've seen it looks like architecturally what we might end up with isn't a local interface in the traditional sense, but a container running what is currently running on deck.hexos. If that is the case there'd still be a connection happening, even if between services on the local machine, and we've only removed the internet from the mix. So if the issue isn't "unable to reconnect after internet blip", but rather that something at either end is buggy and crashing or dropping the connection regardless of network connectivity, it could persist. We'll just have to wait and see. Considering the TrueNAS interface remains available, this isn't much an issue for me, but I do find it a bit puzzling that the root cause appears to still be unknown after all this time.

As far as I am aware, that's pretty much what it is. The HexOS UI does not run on your server, it runs on theirs (Eshtek). HexOS is apparently bad at keeping this connection alive/reconnecting when it goes down. So the TrueNAS interface will work fine, since you access it locally, as will every other service you're running on your server. You just lose access to the one thing you paid for, the HexOS interface. 😛

I've been getting the occasional "server unavailable" for a long time. Probably a lot more often than I realize, since I use the HexOS interface so rarely. Whatever functionality is there to detect a lost connection and reconnect, seems to be rather lacking. With no ability to restart just the HexOS layer, the only solution I've found is to restart the whole server. That has always fixed it so far.

I had the password issue back in the day when I uninstalled and reinstalled immich. At that time, my solution was to uninstall, remove the folders created for it, and then reinstall. That way it started with a clean slate and was able to set the password for itself. Given that installations, or at least updates, are a bit broken in general at the moment, now might not be the best time to sink a lot of effort into this. But the errors listed in this thread so far do not seem related to those issues, so I guess there might be hope.

I'm also eagerly awaiting retail, because I want a few more of them. The last I heard (it's been a while, but I was unable to locate the mail to check the date) was that they were going to offer it via their own website initially, to limited regions, with Amazon hopefully not long after. The phrasing lead me to believe that there are some things for them to work out before they can sell it via Amazon, but that's conjecture on my part. Also, things have changed a bit in the world since then, trade war and all. For me, not being in the US and with Amazon having no local presence, getting it straight from them should be a lot cheaper than buying it from Amazon after they've been imported and taxed through the roof there. I'm curious to see what availability ends up being. Norway's a tiny country so with my luck it won't even be possible to get here (for some reason it even stopped being possible to order here during the extended kickstarter period).

I guess that makes some sense now that I think about it. If it's just a physical split with no circuitry involved, then higher voltages would be a very bad idea to send through it without some way of knowing if both devices could handle it. It seems to me that it would make some sense for PD to go for a "something's connected but I'm not getting negotiation, I guess I'll send some old school USB-A power" mode, but I know nothing about the protocol so that notion might just underline my ignorance of how this works.

Did you try without the splitter to see if that's the issue?

This does not seem to be universally true. I just tested mine with a usb-c to usb-c cable on three different power supplies, it powered up just fine in all three cases.

My only issue with my JetKVM, is that it's not yet possible for me to order more of them.. 😛

I've been using Plex for about 11 years now, going by the date of the receipt for my lifetime payment (that works out to about $7/year, at present, so I'm pretty happy with that deal), and I'd say... not really. On the one hand, it's working great for my use case, and I use it pretty much every single day. But, there are some small issues here and there that just never gets fixed. When I do searches for them I find years old reports that were ignored, so I don't even bother contacting them. Luckily, for my use case, the issues are mostly tiny cosmetic things. Like how the Android TV client won't show a file is HDR if it only contains DV, not HDR10 as well. The server identifies it correctly, the web client displays it, but not the Android client (to clarify, it plays DV content just fine, it just won't tell you it's a DV file).

In the end HexOS turned into more of a TrueNAS installer for me. I don't know if that saved me a ton of time and hassle, or if it was more like an hour worth of following a guide instead, but either way getting up and running was very painless. After that, I can't think of a thing HexOS has actually fully supported without needing to pop into TrueNAS. Not even the health status in HexOS can be trusted, which is stil baffling to me. I've been saying I feel it was launched very prematurely, and I maintain that. I'm hoping that it was because they desperately needed cashflow, in which case HexOS could turn out well in the end. If, on the other hand, they felt it was in good shape to launch to early adopters, I would be much less optimistic. Time will tell. I've gotten the NAS to a state where it does the job now, without having done anything to break or confuse HexOS (at least that I can see), so I'm just using it now and seeing what the future brings. It might be HexOS, it might be shedding HexOS and just going pure TrueNAS. In a sense you could say I've shelved HexOS, because there's no reason for me to ever access its interface. If my boot drive exploded today I would probably just install TrueNAS and recover the pool there instead, because HexOS doesn't even offer a way to backup and restore itself (another baffling "nah, we don't need that before releasing" decision), or even recover an existing pool without at least threatening to wipe it in the process. But, technically, HexOS is still on my server, so there's that.

I believe someone needs to manually update the catalog for TrueNAS for any app updates to appear, so there's a time delay. 125 popped up for me just now so if you go to discover apps and hit refresh catalog it should show up for you as well. As for HexOS, I don't know if it even supports app updates currently. I can't remember it alerting me to one being available, then again I hardly bother looking at the HexOS interface anymore I just go straight to TrueNAS because I find HexOS to be so limited it's not really relevant after installation.

This is what I get when I shut down my functioning system. I don't think it's great to get a bunch of failures on shutdown, but as far as I can tell this is to be expected so probably isn't relevant to your issue.

I seem to recall seeing a comment from them indicating they plan on selling them through Amazon pretty much as soon as the kickstarter rewards are all shipped. I got mine yesterday and am loving it. It's a proper product. Everything from packaging to the look and feel of the device itself is really well done. I did have to switch the HDMI cable from integrated graphics to discrete to get into BIOS. The output from the i7 in that machine is really weird and hardly works on anything until it's past booting (in the past I've found it only works on monitors, not on TVs, so it was no real surprise the JetKVM couldn't handle it either). While I don't actually need more than a single one at the moment, I'm still going go get me a few more once they become readily available because it's so handy it's only a matter of time before I find myself in a "oh, dang, if I had another one of those right now that would have been so convenient" situation. The only thing I see myself as potentially missing in the future, is wifi connectivity.

When I was struggling with hardware transcoding in Plex, I came across a number of posts with that uuid error in various TrueNAS forums/threads. It wasn't relevant to my issue (I had no errors, it just didn't seem to work), but you might get lucky if you try to search for that error. I seem to remember there were some suggestions of command lines to fix it.

Have you tried removing the ".tmp" extension as suggested here? I had to do that before transcoding would work for me.

For me, I would have gotten a second nvme to add boot drive redundancy when installing. It looks like it can be done after the fact via TrueNAS, but it would have been nice to have that set up from the start and not have to risk boot failure from changing it later on. I'll wait for my JetKVM to arrive before I give that a go, I think. I was generally aware the release would be very limited before I installed, and my mindset was pretty much "just give me a functional RAID5 with SMB shares". It turned out to be a bit worse off than I expected, but it still serves my purpose as a backup for my primary non-redundant NAS (long story). As for waiting.. Yeah, I would tell anyone asking me to forget about it for 6 months or so, then check up on it again. This is more like an internal development build than a product at this point. It's not ready for any kind of "normal" consumer yet, not by a long shot. They got some money out of this, let's hope they use it well and don't rush the next release.

Also worth mentioning is that during HexOS installation, I noticed you can checkbox multiple drives for installation. I assume this creates a mirror pool of boot drives, thus giving you redundancy. After installation, it looks like you can add a second drive to the boot pool in TrueNAS (which is what I'll have to try, since I did not have an extra nvme when I first installed and I can't be bothered to reinstall at this point unless I really have to).

Yeah, I would have expected it to show up in my account or under "manage purchases" or something. I figure it's a low priority "no rush before 1.0" item for them. I ended up digging up an email to guide me to that post.

There's a link in this post: