TheComplex

So, I decided to setup a Homelab since I might be interviewing soon and it seems to come up in interviews when I was on the other side hiring. I have for a very long time kept a media pc hooked up to my TV that I used as a homelab. It had a windows install and it was an old cooler master case that had 2 hot swappable drive bays on the front I had loaded with various large drives over the years but always as JBOD no raid. So for this project I decided to grab a used server and a couple of manufacturer re-certified drives (the drives was the most expensive thing). So this is my first experience with TrueNAS though I have played with Linux some in the past. Here are 2 links for the server and drives (pretty decent prices I think): 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.