I am considering how to upgrade my NAS. zVault 13.3 went EoL 31 Dec 2024. Actual TrueNAS Core is running on 13.0, which EoL'ed on13 Apr 2021. Plus, the TrueNAS middleware can get really kind of flaky at times. With the way that webzfs is developing, and since it made it into beta development, it has grown into a viable alternative. You can manage all aspects of ZFS, and has matured enough to be usable. I have been testing on it since early alpha. I am going to try to rebuild on core FreeBSD with webzfs to manage the pool, replication, and general management.
Since I have two NAS boxes here at home (luna and intrepid), I am starting to think through how I want to upgrade the backup, intrepid. Intrepid was supposed to be an offsite replica of luna, but that never happened, especially since I was using it not only as a backup, but also as a test bed for different NAS distributions. So I ran Xigma on it for a while, until I found that they were even further behind on updates than TrueNAS Core. I also ran Scale on it, only to find that it was just far enough different from Core to really irritate me. Plus, when dealing with ZFS, I prefer FreeBSD, which supports it on boot, out of the box. If I were to run scale, I would have to depend on ixsystems' good will to continue to have zfs on boot out-of-the-box on linux.
For this reason, I am completely uninterested in TrueNAS scale. It is based on Debian, and has all of the things that annoy me about linux, including systemd instead of init and docker instead of jails. And since iX has tried to "disappear" Core, there is nothing left there for me.
So my plan, in broad strokes:
- Install a minimal FreeBSD - I want to run the NAS on FreeBSD, instead of being tied to a specific version that the vendor flavor of NAS software, whether TrueNAS or XigmaNAS. The ability and freedom to upgrade the base operating system makes a lot more sense than depending on a vendor to upgrade the OS.
- Install webzfs and all prereqs - This includes node.js, npm, smartmontools, and sanoid.
- Set up nginx - Configure with reverse proxy, since webzfs only listens on localhost:26619. While fine for a quick glance at a given webzfs install, this is going to be my primary interface to the NAS, so I will want to be able to do https://intrepid/webzfs or whatever.
Once this is done, I will need to walk through setting up replication. All of the datasets on the backup NAS are pulled from other sources. Most from the primary NAS, bt others are the /home and <pool>/ROOT/default of the FreeBSD boxes on the network. I will be converting my snapshot and replication methods from zVault middleware to sanoid/syncoid. At that point, I will get up to speed on day-to-day management, then convert the primary.
This is just notes for myself. I will add details as things progress.