PsychoWards

Happy to see that it's working now for you. 🙂 I still don't understand why this makes a difference which software you are using to create the USB drive, but hey at least it's running now. =D

Hey, you can basically look at any NAS or Server/Entreprise HDD WD Red Pro Seagate Ironwolf (Pro) Seagate Exos Etc... However they have all exploded in costs unfortunately. Looking at refurbished entrepris drives might also be a good alternative.

In that case, did you try another USB drive or just 1 single drive? Also try using Etcher instead of Rufus.

The above messages are coming after selecting the boot drive where Hexos should be installed or beforehand?

Hey, please keep us posted about the progress. Concerning why you shouldn't use a HW Raid in combination with Truenas, the official ZFS documentation has a great section about this you find it here: https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/Performance and Tuning/Hardware.html#hardware-raid-controllers

Hey, 1. The drive you are installing on, does it already contain an OS/was it used before or is it a new drive? If it was used in the past, can you please try wiping? This helped some people in here already which were also not able to install Hexos on an used drive. 2. Try installing Hexos without any data drives connected and then login into the UI and use following guide to migrate from Core to Hexos, you should follow the path for migrating to 24.10 or later https://www.truenas.com/docs/scale/24.10/gettingstarted/migrate/migratingfromcore/ 3. Never use HW raid in combination with Hexos/Truenas, let the OS handle everything in SW raid. HW Raid + SW Raid gives you the disadvantages of both but none of the advantages 🙂

Hey, You changed the Truenas GUI ports, that's the problem. The Hexos button is pointing to the port 443 (https) or 80 (http) but nothing on the server is listening at that port thus the rejection. You currently cannot change the destination ports of the truenas gui button in Hexos. To keep its functionality, you need to revert back to the ports 80/443. If you want to keep your custom ports, bookmark the page in your browser 🙂

Hey, The quickest check which you can do; when you connect a display to your server, what IP address is shown? 10.0.0.28 or a different one?

Hey, So, the save approach would be to get an HBA card so that you can connect all 5 drives together and copy your data using the task replication in the Truena GUI. You can use the HBA in future if you want to add more then 4 drives to your pool or if you want to create a 2nd pool. However, if you don't want to buy a HBA card, you could, although I strongly advise against it, unplug 1 drive from your current pool, plug in the 3 other drives, create your new RaidZ1 pool and copy the data over this way, again using the Truenas replication task.

Hey, this depends on a couple of things. Do you have any apps installed? If yes, I'm not sure how this is going to look like after the migration to another pool. Also, do you have enough slots to connect all the drives at the same time? If yes, creating a new pool will be the only way to get more storage with your current number of drives. Once the new pool is create, you need to login into Truenas and use the task replication to copy everything over to your new pool. This is the best and safest way to copy things over to the new pool.

Hey, that's a very nice setup! Overkill? Your backup server maybe, if it's really only used as an offsite backup and not running any apps. Your main server? Let's call it future proof and not overkill =D 😉 What apps are you running?

Hey, Unfortunately Hexos does not offer the possibility to use any drive as a write cache, you can only use it as a read only cache drive, which only offers a benefit in particular use cases and streaming isn't one of them. You can use your current 500GB drive for the OS it's just a lot of wasted space. But if that's what you have and don't want to spent ridiculous amount of money for a new lower size SSD, go with the 500GB one. You don't necessarily need a new NIC, it's just possible that your current will not work, but not a certainty. Some of the newer Realtek NICs work fine. Give it a go and only buy a new NIC if yours isn't working or causing issues.

Hey, that is a nice setup and will allow you to run a lot of stuff on your server 🙂 Some things to consider: You can only us the boot drive for the OS, 32GB are more then enough, 500GB are overkill, but you can still use it with 2 drives, Hexos will create a mirrored pool, which means you will have the capacity of 1 drive (4TBs in your case) and you can lose 1 drive. Additionally a mirrored Pool cannot be extended. If you want to have the possibility to extend the pool in the future, you need to have at least 3 drives now to create a RaidZ1. A RaidZ1 can be extended with additional drives in the future and you will have the capacity of your smallest drive * (the number of drives - 1) Your Motherboard has a Realtek NIC, which have a tendency to not work well or at all with Hexos. It's a new 5Gbps NIC which might work better, but keep this in mind if you face network issues. Hexos is an awesome, easy to use OS and offers exactly what you need to get started. It offers both Plex and Jellyfin as 1 click install apps, so that you have the choice what you want to use. It also offers other popular apps as 1 click installs and more apps will be supported in the future.

Hey, can you please post your complete HW specs ?

Just to clear things up, I was only talking about encrypting local datasets and not buddy backup. 🙂 No, you only need to have the keys once, when mounting the dataset to a new server or fresh install, afterwards you can save them in the OS and don't need them anymore. This will not be a problem with local UI dashboard. It might be that it's just stored in a Vault on the Hexos Server and you can retrieve them from there, or that during the setup, which requires an Internet connection anyway, they are automagically fetched from there or sth similar. Or the Eshtek team is not going to store the keys at all for us, I mean we are only talking possibilities and dreams at the moment 🙂 But, as @TheGlitch already mentioned, if you have them in a vault and that vault is an app in Hexos as part of the encrypted dataset, you are out of luck. Also, in case where the Hexos Server gets compromised, and the keys leaked, for local datasets this should be less of a concern, because typically, they shouldn't even be accessible from the outside in the first place and 2nd you can easily change them. And you can even make the storage of the keys optional.

Hey, You don't need to take care of this for the Hexos curated apps, as this is part of the Hexos install skript. Storage paths are also taken care of, so that it's a real 1 click install and you are done and the app is running. Of course, if needed, you can still tweak everything before or after installation.

As much as I like the idea of encrypted datasets (i'm using them myself), I fear that it will cause a not insignificant amount of headaches and data loss. Seeing how many users currently are just reinstalling Hexos if something is not working as they expect, currently, they just nees to mount the pools again and no harm no foul. But with encrypted datasets, where they didn't save the keys or have the keys saved on the encrypted dataset themselves it's bye bye data. So if we go done the path of encrypted datasets, we need to have a way to easily manage the decryption keys. Maybe there will be an option to store them on the Hexos Server and use them from there if anything ever goes wrong with a server. If not, a lot of people are not going to remember where they put those keys X years ago, which are now standing between them and their data. Don't get me wrong, I think those are definitely valid points, but such a crucial part requires a basically fool proof setup to not cause any harm. 🙂

Hey, You can only expand your Pool if your drive has the same or higher capacity then the lowest drive of your pool. So if you want to expand your current pool you need at least 4TB drives. Drives with more than 4TB capacity will not give you more storage then a 4TB drive because the lowest size drive will always be determining factor for the size of your pool. With your 2 500GB drives you will only be able to create a mirrored 500GB pool.

Hey, No, don't restart regularly, high memory usage is good, because unused memory = wasted memory! Hexos is using the memory for the ARC cache, this is a read only cache where Hexos is preloading files which it believes you are using next and can then deliver those files from the memory instead of having to read them from the drives. Depending on your current usage you will not notice any performance boost with more memory, but you might future proof it. Memory prices are currently going through the roof, only buy memory if it's not overpriced.

Oh nice thanks, yes that works.

Can you please also post more details on your HDDs? Those might be SMR drives which will likely cause a lot of (performance) issues in the future.

Hey, Backups are done over the local network or Internet (which requires additional setup) and are done using the existing network connection. Using an USB cable to connect to your server is not supported. What exactly do you want to backup from your devices? There are different ways and apps, depending on what you want to do. Backing up pictures from your phones (and Mac maybe?) you can use Immich, which is a one click install app in Hexos. For documents you could use something like paperless, which requires manual loading of the files and is more like a document manager, rather then a simple backup solution. And there are other solutions to backup every kind of data. For your family, not living in your house, to be able to backup to your server you need to either setup a VPN or Cloudflare Tunnel or similar. Hexos is using ZFS and in ZFS it's called RaidZ1 and not Raid5 🙂 Also please post your specs of your Server which you want to use, this way we can identify possible incompatibilities and issues beforehand and mitigate them.

Hey, yes this is a good idea, I currently have a similar setup, Hexos as main Server, Unraid as on site backup and a synology NAS as an off-site backup, planing to replace Unraid with Hexos once the HDD prices are normalising again. Let's first start with backups: Since Buddy Backup currently isn't available, you will need to setup the task replication in the truenas GUI to backup to your other Hexos. Since this is not in your local network you need to setup a VPN connection or URL or similar to be able to connect both server together. For the backup to your Unraid, you can use rsync to backup to it. Having app failover is an entire different and way more complex topic. The above backup is only creating snapshot but it's no live backup meaning it cannot be used for app failover since the data is not live. Hexos/Truenas Scale doesn't have app failover support, this is exclusively reserved for the entireprise stuff. I know that some apps have some way to have this, but this depends on the app and requires additional setup per app etc. The easiest thing would likely be running everything in a VM in proxmox and have High Availability setup, but this comes with it's own set of restrictions. Unfortunately, there is no easy or moderate complex way to set up app failver

Truenas itself already offers a lot of possibilities, you have the standard rsync which you can use to backup to virtually any other type of NAS and you have the replication task which you can use to backup to another truenas/hexos server. If you're looking for options for more tech savvy users, truenas already offers them, there is no need to wait for Hexos to implement them. 🙂

The difference is pretty big, while they do the same thing, they do it very differently. Immich just stores all the images in plain on the file system, all the processing is done on server side, you can connect an external library and if your Immich DB or installation becomes corrupted or breaks and there is no more support for Immich you just take the photos folder and move on. But the admin and everyone who's access to the folder can see all the photos of everyone, so privacy is not that great, but administration is easier and recovery in case of an issue is easy. Ente (FunFact: Ente is German for Duck) is all about privacy. The photos are all encrypted on the server and only the client side can decrypt/see the photos. This also means that the client side needs to do all the processing, but therefore the server can be very low spec (although this doesn't matter in our case, because Hexos needs to run in the first place, so HW specs is not really a concern in any way) and it needs S3 storage and requires more setup an administration. However if your Ente DB becomes corrupted or the Ente app breaks or the Ente dev stops and your app becomes unusable, you lose all your photos, because you cannot access it any other way. But until that happens only your client side device can access the photos and no-one else can.