Introduction

In my homelab, I need somewhere I can put data, 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.

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

Choose 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 Scale 25.10 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.

Configure TrueNAS

By default TrueNAS is using DHCP. I check the lease given on my UniFi interface to gather its MAC. Then I reserve a static DHCP lease. 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 the defaults are fine for me: autotrim, compression, no dedup, etc. 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.

SMB share

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:

From my Windows Laptop, I try to access my new share \\granite.mgmt.vezpi.com\files. As expected I'm prompted to give credentials.

I create a new user account with SMB permission.

✅ I can now browse the share and copy files into it.

NFS share

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:

At the end, my datasets tree in my storage pool look like this:

• backups
  • duplicati: Duplicati storage backend
  • proxmox: future Proxmox Backup Server
• cloud: Nextcloud datas
• files:
• media
  • downloads
  • photos
  • videos

On the requirement, I talked about VM capabilities. I won't cover that is this post, it will be covered next time.

Data protection

Now let's configure some data protection features, here is the Data Protection tab:

I want to create automatic snapshots for some of my datasets, those I care the most are my cloud files and the photos.

Let's create snapshot tasks. I click on the Add button next to Periodic Snapshot Tasks. For the cloud dataset, I create a daily snapshot with a lifetime of 2 months, for photos, only 7 days should be fine:

I could also create a Cloud Sync Task but I already have Duplicati managing this.

Using TrueNAS

Now my TrueNAS instance is configured, I need to plan the migration of the datas from my current NFS server to TrueNAS.

Data migration

For each of my current NFS shares, on a client, I mount the new NFS share to synchronize the data:

sudo mkdir /new_photos
sudo mount 192.168.88.30:/mnt/storage/media/photos /new_photos
sudo rsync -a --info=progress2 /data/photo/ /new_photo

At the end, I could decommission my old NFS server on the LXC. The dataset layout after migration looks like this:

Android application

Out of curiosity, I've checked on the Google Play store for an app to manage a TrueNAS instance. I've found Nasdeck, which is quite nice. Here some screenshots:

Conclusion

My NAS is now ready to store my datas.

I didn't address VM capabilities as I will experience it soon to install Proxmox Backup Server as VM. Also I didn't configure notifications, I need to setup a solution to receive email alerts to my notification system.

TrueNAS is a really great product. It requires a little bit of hardware to support ZFS.

The next step would be to deploy a in TrueNAS.