Introduction

In my homelab, I need somewhere I can put datas, outside of my Proxmox VE cluster.

At the beginning, my only one physical server has 2 HDDs disks of 2 TB. When I installed Proxmox on it, these disks were still attached to the host. I managed to share the content using a NFS server in a LXC, but this was far from a good practice.

During this winter, the node started to fail, it was stopping by itself for no reason. This bad boy is 7 years old. When it was shut down, the NFS share were unavailable, which was affecting some services in my homelab. Luckily I could fix it up by replacing its CPU fan, but now I want a safer place for these datas.

I this article I will walk you through the entire build of my NAS, using TrueNAS.

Choose the the right platform

For a while I wanted to have a NAS. Not one ready out-of-the-box like Synology or QNAP. While I think these are good products, I wanted to build mine. But I have a huge constraint of space in my tiny rack and the choice for a small NAS case are very limited.

Hardware

I consider full flash NAS. This has several advantages:

• It is fast
• It is small
• It consumes less
• It heats less But with a major drawback, the price.

While the speed is negligible to me because my network can't handle it, the others are exactly what I'm looking for. I don't need a massive volume a data, around 2 TB of usable space is enough.

My first choice was the Aiffro K100. But I couldn't find a way to have it deliver in France without doubling the price. Finally I managed to buy a Beelink ME mini.

This small cube has:

• N200 CPU
• 12 GB of RAM
• 2x 2.5Gbps Ethernet ports
• can host up to 6x NVMe drives
• a 64 GB eMMC chip to install an OS.

I started with 2 drives for now, 2 TB each.

Software

Now that the hardware choice is done, what I would use as software?

In the past I've heard of several NAS operating system, like FreeNAS, Open Media Vault or Unraid. But I never really dig into the subject.

Here my requirements:

• NFS shares
• ZFS support
• VM capabilities

After comparing the solutions, the choice was made to use TrueNAS Community Edition, which is the new name of FreeNAS.

Install TrueNAS

The installation of TrueNAS didn't go as smooth as I expected id to be.

I'm using Ventoy to store multiple ISO in a single USB stick. I was in version 1.0.99, and the ISO wouldn't launch. I had to update to version 1.1.10 to make it work:

But here I encounter another problem when launching the installation on my eMMC storage device:

Failed to find partition number 2 on mmcblk0

I found a solution on this post:

• Enter the shell
• Edit the file /lib/python3/dist-packages/truenas_installer/utils.py
• Move the line await asyncio.sleep(1) right beneath for _try in range(tries):
• Edit line 46 to add + 'p': for partdir in filter(lambda x: x.is_dir() and x.name.startswith(device + 'p'), dir_contents):
• Exit the shell and start the installation without reboot

The installer was finally able to get through:

Once the installation is complete, I shutdown the machine. Then I install it into my rack on top of the 3 Proxmox VE nodes. I plug both Ethernet cables from my switch, the power and turn it on.

Configuration of TrueNAS

By default TrueNAS is using DHCP. I check the UniFi interface to gather its MAC, then in OPNsense, I define a new host override in Dnsmasq. Finally in the Caddy plugin, I create a new domain for TrueNAS with that IP. I restart the machine a last time.

✅ After a few minutes, TrueNAS is now available on https://nas.vezpi.com.

General Settings

During the installation I didn't choose to define a password for the user truenas_admin. I'm requested to change it as soon as I reach the login page:

Once the password is updated, I land on the dashbaord. The UI feels great at first glance:

I quickly explore the interface, the first thing I do is changing the hostname to granite and check the box below to define the domain inherited from DHCP:

In the General Settings, I change the Localization settings. I set the Console Keyboard Map to French (AZERTY) and the Timezone to Europe/Paris.

I create a new user vez, with Full Admin role within TrueNAS. I allow SSH access but only with a SSH key, not with password:

Finally I remove the admin role from truenas_admin and lock the account.

Pool creation

In TrueNAS, a pool is a storage collection created by combining multiple disks into a unified ZFS‑managed space.

In the Storage page, I can find my Disks, where I can confirm TrueNAS can see my couple of NVMe drives:

Back in the Storage Dashboard, I click the Create Pool button. I name the pool storage because I'm really inspired:

Then I select the Mirror layout:

I explore quickly the optional configurations, but none makes sense for my setup. At the end, before creating the pool, there is a Review section:

After hitting Create Pool, I'm warned that everything on the disks will be erased, which I have to confirm. Finally the pool is created.

Datasets creation

A dataset is a filesystem inside a pool. It can contains files, directories and child datasets of files, it can be shared using NFS and/or SMB. It allows you to independently manage permissions, compression, snapshots, and quotas for different sets of data within the same storage pool.

Let's now create my first dataset files to share files over the network, like ISOs, etc:

Creating my first SMB dataset, TrueNAS prompts me to start and enable the SMB service:

I create another dataset: media, and a child photos. I create a NFS share from the latter.

On my current NFS server, the files for the photos are owned by root (managed by Immich). Later I'll see how I can migrate towards a root-less version. For now I set, in Advanced Options, the Maproot User and Maproot Group to root. This is equivalent de the attribute no_squash_root, the local root of the client stays root on the server, not a best practice:

data protection

Use of TrueNAS

Firewall rule

Data migration

Android application

Conclusion