TrueNAS, a Linux Distro for Low Cost Network-Attached Storage

Network Attached Storage (NAS) is a great way to build out storage for your business. Instead of relying solely on external drives, shared directories or expensive cloud storage, why not deploy a tool that was created specifically for scalable storage?

That’s where TrueNAS comes into play.

TrueNAS is a take on Linux that is purpose-built for storage and comes with all the NAS capabilities you can imagine. TrueNAS can be installed on off-the-shelf hardware (even small form-factor PCs or virtual machines), so your storage server can be tucked out of the way.

This storage solution includes features like:

• User/group management
• Alerts
• SSH connectivity
• 2-Factor authentication
• Storage pools
• Snapshots
• Disks (and disk importing)
• Support for directory services such as Active Directory, LDAP, NIS, and Kerberos
• Sharing via Apple Shares, Block Shares, UNIX Shares, WebDAV, and SMB
• Service management
• Plugins
• Jails
• Virtual Machines
• Shell access

The installation of TrueNAS is all text-based but is incredibly simple to take care of and takes very little time. With minimal configuration work for the installation, I had an instance of TrueNAS up and running within about 2 minutes. The only thing you need to do is set a root password during the installation, which is something anyone can do.

Two minutes to a full-blown, scalable NAS solution is pretty impressive. Once the installation completes, you’ll see the address to access the web-based interface. After clicking on the link, you can then log in with the username root and the password you set during the installation, at which point you’ll be greeted by the main TrueNAS site (Figure 1).

The biggest challenge you might face with TrueNAS comes when deploying it as a virtual machine. With such a setup, you have to have separate drives added to the virtual machine, otherwise you cannot create a storage pool. How you add those drives will depend on the VM solution you use. Once you’ve added the drive, it then has to be formatted.

This process for adding drives in VirtualBox goes a little something like this:

• Shut down the VM.
• Select the TrueNAS VM in the VirtualBox left pane and click Settings.
• In the Settings window, click the Storage section.
• Under Storage Controller: SATA and then, near the bottom, click the Add Disk button, and then select Add Hard Disk.
• In the popup window, click Create New Disk.
• Walk through the Create Virtual Hard Disk wizard.
• Click OK to close out the Settings window and fire up your VM.
• Once you’ve added the drive, you don’t even need to format it, as TrueNAS will take care of that for you.

Now that you’ve added and formatted the drive, it will be available for the creation of a pool, which is equally as simple. Once you’ve created your pool, you can then create secure jails and more.

And that is the most challenging aspect of using TrueNAS.

Accessing TrueNAS

After deploying TrueNAS, I wanted to see how much of a challenge it would be to access it from a machine on my network. The machine in question is my primary desktop that runs Pop!_OS Linux.

To make this work, I had to first enable the SMB service in TrueNAS

To do this, go to Windows Shares (SMB), click Add, and you’ll be prompted to create a new share and enable the service. Next, I had to add a new user (I opted to go with the same username as my desktop user on Pop!_OS), which is handled in Accounts > Users.

Here’s the tricky part. Because of the way Samba works, you have to enable a Samba user and give them an SMB password. To do this, click Shell (in the left sidebar) and then issue the following commands:

smbpasswd -a USER

smbpasswd -e USER

Where USER is the username you created earlier.

At this point, you should be able to access the SMB share from your desktop machines with the address smb://SERVER (Where SERVER is the IP address or domain of your TrueNAS host).

Within roughly 5 minutes I had TrueNAS up and running, a second disk added, and an SMB-enabled user account at the ready. I’ve tried costlier solutions and have yet to find one as simple and effective as TrueNAS.

The Caveat

You had to know there would be a caveat to something this good.

TrueNAS does offer a free version, called TrueNAS Core, which is what I tested and is a great solution for small businesses and home usage. If, however, you’re looking for a solution more suitable for enterprise businesses, you’ll want to look at one of these two options:

• TrueNAS Enterprise: Enterprise-grade hardware, additional features, and around-the-clock support. TrueNAS Enterprise is built on the OpenZFS file system and comes with integrated data protection features such as copy-on-write and data integrity checks, as well as RAID protection, unlimited snapshots, and resilient replication.
• TrueNAS Scale: Open source infrastructure solution that adds Linux containers and VMs to make it possible to run workloads closer to your data. TrueNAS scale also uses the OpenZFS file system and allows you to not only add drives but also cluster TrueNAS deployments together.

I’ve used TrueNAS for several use cases and have yet to regret the choice. It’s powerful, flexible, easy-to-use, and based on Linux. What more do you want?

You can download an ISO of TrueNAS Core and test it for yourself.