Plex/NAS Server setup advice

[sweeney2330]

Hi folks,

 

Looking for a bit of advice on how I've set up my old PC as a NAS and plex server. 

 

First a bit of background to where I'm at.

Software:
- Ubuntu 22.04 LTS with plex media server and arr stack.
- Ethernet set up for wake on lan from raspberry pi and direct local access to my main PC(I don't need access all the time so I switch off the server for power saving reasons)
- Wifi for everything else which is configured to autoconnect to an openvpn configuration

- Ubuntu zfs utils used for zfs pool NAS array shared to main desktop via sambashare

Hardware
- AMD 3600, 12 gigs of RAM, R9 390

Storage
- 240gb boot ssd
- 1tb SSHD for linux ISOs
- 4 2tb enterprise WD HDDs in raidz1 array

 

Is there anything wrong with the way I've gone about this?  I definitely had some diffculties with getting the folder access permissions right for the plex stuff & the NAS.  I think I only got it working by just giving every user more than they likely needed through chmod which is probably not ideal. Setting up the networking gave me quite a few headaches for both the ethernet static IP and the vpn connection. All squarely the fault of how networking is configured on Ubuntu. However after being set up It has been working very well like this up to now.

So I had planned this to be a general advice thread but as luck would have it my Boot OS drive died yesterday so all of this has taken on a smidge more urgency.  I had originally set this up as an initial "dip my toes" into the space while waiting for the easy NAS OS Linus invested and assess where I go from there. After seeing Hex OS get revealed along with it its pricing I'm not convinced. I was hoping it would have an unraid style hard drive agnostic storage expansion method for example. Of course this is less important now since I got lucky with a used deal on the matching hard drives but still I'm not willing to drop 200/300 quid on it when what I was doing was already seemed fine.

 

All that said, these are the questions I have:
- Is it hard to connect to the zfs pool when I set up a new OS?  Is there a process for reattaching the zfs pool without losing the data?
- I have to starting from scratch now but I was probably going to just move to the latest Ubuntu server LTS. Are there other Linux distros that would be better suited? what advantage would switching to a NAS OS give me?  I am aiming to get back to feature parity with I had before the drive died.

 

Thanks in advance.

[Bersella AI]

1. No it isn't. In a new Ubuntu instance, simply prepare ZFS packages and run zfs import [pool-name] . In TrueNAS Scale however, there's an intuitive Web interface that may import a ZFS pool with just a few clicks.
2. Yes there are. TrueNAS Scale would be best suited here, as it comes with Web admin consoles, native ZFS and Docker support; once initialization is done, a monitor would no longer be needed for it, and this GPU may be dropped to save more power (it barely works in transcoding due to poor codecs).
   As for Hex OS, it's still incomplete and requires further development, per reviews from Lawrence Systems. It would be better to wait until its 1.0 release.

[Ha-Satan]

I'm also relatively new to the world of NAS and media servers and I agree with @Bersella AI that TrueNAS Scale is the best option here. I actually tried using Ubuntu as my NAS OS before switching to TrueNAS and Ubuntu was honestly much harder to use. I found it to be much easier to get SMB shares set up on TrueNAS compared to Ubuntu, and management is also easier since TrueNAS is already configured with a web GUI management console and doesn't require you to do any sort of SSH or remote desktop setup in order to make it work.

 

Getting used to how the containers work in TrueNAS took a little bit of time but overall it was still much easier than getting everything working in Ubuntu.

[sweeney2330]

Okay TrueNAS scale is probably the way to go then.  Are there any concerns with TrueNAS with being regularly powered on & off?  I assume it's designed to be left on all the time. Energy prices are quite high where I live(one of the highest in Europe) so I still want to be able to do that even if it takes a few minutes to turn on/off.

[Bersella AI]

21 hours ago, sweeney2330 said:

Are there any concerns with TrueNAS with being regularly powered on & off?

Yes, TrueNAS itself does not have any options for scheduled shutdown/power-on. Some on this forum utilize an ARM-powered device (e.g. Raspberry Pi or old TV boxes, which draws <1W in most time) to wake up the NAS on Ethernet, given that the BIOS option Wake on LAN has been enabled on NAS side. A scheduled task containing a shutdown command may also be set on TrueNAS.

[sweeney2330]

Yes, I have a Raspberry Pi that I'll be continuing to use a Wake on LAN server.  Just wanted to make sure that I wouldn't be causing any problems.  Hoping to get the server set up with TrueNAS over the weekend.  Will report back with how I get on.

[sweeney2330]

Took a bit more than the weekend to do it and oh boy was it an effort.  TrueNAS is clearly quite powerful but man is it painful to use as a consumer for the first time.

 

Initially it seemed like it was be going to be straightforward, just import my old zfs pool and set up my SMB share.  However the issues began very quickly and never slowed down.

• The pool imported & automatically tried to mount with the old mount point it had in the previous system which caused access permissions issues.  Straight away had to be resolve in the shell instead of using the GUI.
• All my data was on the root folder in the array, which lets face it is what you normally do with your data when you place it on a data drive, but TrueNAS & it's forums told me it was a bad idea to long term to share the root folder for your pool.  Fine, I'll create the share dataset & move the files over and Bob's your uncle.  Nope! Frist there's no built in way of accessing the your files & moving them around, even just within a pool.  Eventually using a combination of midnight commander and a temporary share of the root folder I got the files moved.  After the move was done I found I couldn't access the folders I moved.  Took at least an hour of working with the ACL & folder permissions until I found a forum post that said to change a single inherit setting that wasn't really explained in the UI.  Very frustrating experience for something that should have been simple.
• Turns out TrueNAS does not support Wi-FI so with my present physical set up the only way for me to get Plex working was to use a VM & pass through the Wifi adapter.  Not the end of the world but would have been nice to run the native Plex app.
• TrueNAS is not compatible with ext4 formatted disks, even just to pass it directly though to the VM as a device.  That's another thing I figured was obvious and thought would be simple to do.  Instead I had to wipe to drive & create a new zfs stripe pool on it.   Even then it still wasn't straightforward,  something went in the creation of that pool which meant didn't disconnect properly when the system was powered off.  Once the system was turned on again the pool would be the missing the vdev and had to be exported & reimported.  The bottom line is that I had to wipe the pool & recreate it again after a couple of days because no other solution worked. 

I don't have any questions of the forum now but I thought I'd give an account of my experience in case anyone was interested and open it up for any discussion.  I think had I done this a few weeks ago I would have jumped on HexOS when it was €100, even though it wouldn't solve all my hurdles(Wi-Fi, ext4 support, current situation needs local management etc.) but man I really didn't think setting up a simple share would be as cumbersome on TrueNAS as it is.  I guess if I was starting from scratch instead of importing an array it would have been a little bit easier, but still.  Now that I've gone through the hardship and have my pools setup I'll stick with TrueNAS but I'll be keeping an eye on HexOS and potentially will jump ship at some point while it's still 200.

 

Side note: Over the first few days working on this I was just googling my problems/questions but I found that getting the right information was tricky. The TrueNAS forums contain a lot of info from people doing far more complicated things than I & the documentation is not totally helpful when you run into issues. I switched to using chatGPT/copilot & it was far more fruitful.  I had only dabbled in using AI up to now and not really in a technical topic.  It really is great for giving you multiple options to try as well allowing you to ask follow up questions or explain things further to narrow down the search.  Really made working through this a lot less frustrating.