TrueNAS: Full Setup Guide for Setting Up Portainer, Containers and Tailscale  

Spoiler alert: Red Shirt Wendel survives the NAS software configuration.

Wendel... You are the only person on RU-vid, that I can truly trust your information. I have learned so much from you over the years. Getting my feet wet with TruNAS core and built my first NAS/Server about 3 months ago now on an Optiplex 990 (i7-2600). Creating a ZFS Pool was a 1st for me, and setting up an SMD Share... I'm sure I haven't made it the most efficient config, But I'm learning! Thank you for everything you share!!!

Thank God for written guides. It's a rare occurrence nowadays.

Wow I ran into the network share issue last year and thought I was crazy. Lazy solution, I setup a 2nd truenas system in the lab to act as a network share for VMs on the first. Glad to finally find a workaround. Leave it to Wendell to solve a problem I never asked about 😂

Truenas Scale and Truecharts being "sort of clunky" is a ridiculous understatement. The documentation is horrendous as well. I am 2 seconds away from going back to proxmox and never looking back

Nice video Wendell. The wonkiness of the networking is a big turn off for new DIYers, whereas us old farts just sigh and fight thru it. Sadly this means when non techs ask what I recommend for home NAS storage and basic messing around, I just sigh and say Synology.

I've been using truecharts for some of my containers and, as you said early on, they're not very transparent and tend to force you to use their specific workflows. On top of that, I always run into issues with their containers whenever I try to do updates. It's definitely going to be a rough process but this video will definitely help me to transition away from truecharts apps. Also, Tailscale also opens up a lot of possibilities when it comes to remotely accessing my services securely and more simply. So thanks for that too!

I learned a lot from you in past 4 - 5 months! At this moment my home server setup: 12th Gen i7 Intel NUC with 64GB Ram, 240SSD hosting Proxmox and 2TB NVME for VMs. One VM is TrueNAS Scale which handles 16TB Mirror rust drives (Attached Drive BAY). Stores everything from Proxmox (Backups, ISOs, CT Templates, VM Additional drives, iSCSI 5TB drive for my work PC) Addition to TrueNAS, Proxmox spinning another 5 VMs and 10 CT Containers. Drive bay + NUC with all the stuff using on average 45 - 50w

Eek. Glad i watched this. Been wanting to consolidate a few systems into one more modern, and this has me rethinking my direction, which was basically this without knowing the landmines.

I pulled the trigger on unraid after trying and horribly failing at setting up truenas. Needed this video a year ago :P Awesome content as always!

I had this issue trying to set up twingate on my Truenas set up. I could not for the life of me figure out why I could connect to other virtual machines hosted in truenas, but could not connect to the truenas dashboard. I've been wracking my brain for a few weeks trying to figure out why it wasn't working. Can confirm the network bridge fixed it. Such an easy fix but easily overlooked. Thanks Wendell. :)

The best thing about this video was listening to Wendell's aggrieved tone of voice when discussing the broken network stack for TrueNAS Scale. I imagine that's what I sound like to other people when I'm complaining about it stuff myself.

One important thing to mention about the bridging. If you have a VM running or set to 'Autostart', make sure you have it off, or none of the bridge changes will work.

Didn't know about Tailscale, was exactly what I always wanted to access my NAS over Internet. Thank you!

This channel is SO UNDERAPPRECIATED!! Great video! I'm waiting to have the budget to start tipping my toes.

Unfortunately, I've found the mods on TrueNAS forums being rude is their natural state. This isn't a bug, being rude and condescending is aTrueNAS mod feature. Thats why I always look elsewhere and only go there if I absolutely have too. Really like TrueNAS, really dislike how they treat others.. Might be different for enterprise customers; thats the path they've really taken as a company.

Thanks Wendel, I was stuck on this for a few days until I ran across your video.

A good video overall but its the first video with Wendell where my own professional experience differs from what he is advising users to do. Certain types of data should never be ran over NFS. Specifically SQLite databases will encounter all kinds of bugs and are commonly used in docker. There are lots of other software that is incompatible with NFS also which will cause bugs and because users typically don't configure or install any software within a docker image there is little way most users are going to know about a potential problem until it just starts happening. It is possible to still use NFS with docker but really it should be limited only to data files which are unlikely to cause any issues. I know this undermines Wendell's goal of being able to snapshot his docker applications. I've been trying to solve the same problem myself for a long time and have yet to actually solve the problem.

Love your videos Wendell, working on my own home NAS atm. But an idea for a future video because its a huge point of stress for me... disaster recovery for this kind of setup. FreeNAS scale, Portainer... what needs to be done when you loose a drive, or even your boot drive, or other hardware failures.

Switching from unraid to truenas. Followed this tutorial and got portainer going. Now to get all my apps going!

i was wondering why you went through a VM just to install Portainer instead of through docker on TrueNAS... but then i read the writeup! ok. was very well explained and makes a lot (more) sense. thanks for the writeup!

I'm using a Fractal R6 for my home server, and yeah the bridge network took me awhile to figure out when I tried the truenas scale beta. Also personally I moved my docker stuff to a rpi4 due to the memory leak issue awhile back, not moving back since I find it easier to manage for docker.

Did you really think the older videos would escape my gaze? Muhahahah

This is probably the best guide on this but there's still so much that's confusing tbh. It would have been more clear for a Level0 user like myself if you actually walked through more of the steps instead of just have scroll overlays from the forum post with half-cut images for some steps

I somehow suspect Wendell read my threads on TrueNAS community forums. I have a SuperMicro build. I have two nics. I did try to set up bridge. And passthroughs. And it’s all buggy and broken but it works just enough so that if you learn of all the issues you can tip toe your way around those. I finished the build like 5 days ago, and I have my signature on their forum full of issues I encountered with links to relevant posts. To much of the annoyance of their mods, might I add.

Nom, nom, nom, let me consume your knowledge 👾

Thanks for the tutorial! Gonna buy Synology

Wendell, you've mentioned a few times sleeping HDDs in TrueNAS; Is that (and hopefully other TrueNAS tuning) coming in a future video/forum post?

That's weird! I thought that network share issues (not allowing guests to ping the host) was by design. All of the virtual network setups in KVM for example (I used it on Fedora, Ubuntu) required removing the default virtual network and setting up a bridge manually. I think generally it may kinda sorta be a good idea in the majority of virtualization scenarios (by default).

I always find it amusing when tech tubers say things like "2x 20TB hard drives, not that much". Here in Canada, those IronWolfs cost $700 each. At $1400 for storage, that's worth more than most people's computers :) There are so many other computer parts I would spend that money on before I would spend that much on disk drives.

Please do the Tailscale video. Thanks for the video!

Thanks! I had the same issue with the tailscale instance not showing up on the tailscale web ui. The command you showed fixed it

Configuring some engagement for the algorithm

Duuuuude thank you Wendel!!! Fixed my issue with JellyFin so now it should be able to see my nas shares! FINALLY!

Thanks for doing this video. And thanks for sharing the frustration with TRUENAS SCALE. It drove me nuts to set the networking between VM and truenas host. They have some serious issues in their feedback processes. Do you think you could use your influence and push on them a little bit? Something seriously needs to change there.

It's 2024 and bridging is *still* broken. Great job, iXsystems!

Thank you for another wonderful upload! I'm enjoying the homelab content so much!

Do you even network br0?

Amazing guide! Finally set up nextcloud and tailscale and everything works over the tailscale-provided IPs; but I still can't get IPs from my local subnet to work... I guess I'll keep debugging, but even at this point the functionality is fantastic!

17:23 I thought it said *"I added this line to the end of my life"* 🤣

I'm glad I saw this. Seriously rethinking if I would be able to get this up and running. Haha

Honestly, I would use Truenas for the thing that it's extremely good at, and have another machine running Docker. Right now, my homelab is a hodgepodge. Unraid running on a machine that is VERY overkill (Dual socket 6core/12thread Xeons with 128GB of ram), my Proxmox server (Which is overkill, but is severely lacking in local hard drive space) and then a couple of laptops just sitting in my server rack. I'm getting a disk shelf soon and want to make the unraid server Truenas, but JUST for storage.

This is Level 4 tech fixing.

Can someone help with step 2 "Tell the NFS share system to treat the “root” user on the client as root on this system. Map user and Map root should both be set to rot."? I have set Taproot User and group both to room and have also tried nfsdckr but I'm getting access denied when I try to mount /nfsDocker/nfsdckr

Where do you buy your spinning rust? I tried Amazon for a 16TB drive that was an utter fail. Drive came in a baggy with no protection. Immediate return. I bought same from NewEgg drive came in a sealed box with those plastic inflatable pouches. Unfortunately the drive wasn't packaged properly in the cushioning and sure enough it was a dead clicking drive. Thankfully NewEgg refunded my money -- this was before the Tech Jesus motherboard controversy. Any good seller recommendations appreciated.

❤ thank you Wendell Enterprise king 👑 of nerds Seriously though, these walkthroughs are amazing and having an old HP z420 server and running TrueNAS + apps makes my brain go bbbrrrrr with all this optimization 🙏🏼

That was a nice 1 minute case review. Looks good

Should probably mention that UEFI is basically kinda sorta broken on TrueNAS Scale for Linux where GRUB doesn't work so you have to basically create your own boot stuff....

If Wendell manages to break the built in Docker then you know it's bad lol. The problem is IX wanted it done in a particular way and from my understanding even people experienced with Kubernetes can't work out why the hell they did it in this way, it's bassakwards. The VM network thing seems to be something IX just "does". Core does exactly the same thing, the VM cant talk to the host without stuffing around with a bridge. I had so many issues with the Docker / Kubernetes implementation in Scale I went to Core with a Plex jail and anything that didn't need to access the NAS went on a VM. Might tinker with this method instead of setting a Debian VM on one of my other systems.

Your videos are always top quality. Thanks!

We need an update using jailmaker!

The whole solution sounds good. would love to try this soon. I goign to setup new lab on some old server I found from work. I am looking forward to tailscale as a solution to connect to home devices when not at home. :)

I initially wanted to host TrueNAS and Debian VMs inside Proxmox but now I'll probably host a Debian VM in TrueNAS.

This is so awesome. Thanks Wendell

Any thoughts on ZeroTier? It seems to work in a similar way, and it can be self hosted, etc. I was able to use a Caddy container in front of my VaultWarden instance to only allow access from my ZeroTier network. Works well, but I always see stuff about TailScale, so I am interested in how they compare. Also, anyone having issues with TrusNas Scale running on a QNap? I can't restart it without it basically locking up from an endless flood of "rc rc0: receive overflow" messages, which force me to have to hard power it down because they just never stop and block all input.

If I get this tail shit working on my machine I’ll owe u a cookie

Just a note that it looks like you're using scale rather than core here. The video title/description were ambiguous. Scale ftw!

What i'd like to do is set up TrueNAS 'apps' to run plex, as well as TDARR to transcode recorded TV/movies, i just recently discovered that TrueNAS Scale can forward hardware decoder/encoder so i can now use my TrueNAS Plex instance as my primary playback server without worrying about weird CPU performance degredation for critical file share services instead of a seperate windows machine(i've recently had issues in linux with the PCIE TV tuners i need for my area for reliable signal). Though i wouldnt be transcoding to H265/AV1 with hardware, as all hardware encoders are very poor at space efficency, especially when going from one codec to another. In my case MPEG2 to H265 or AV1, both are qually bad, often either worse quality, or larger than the original MPEG2 file ~2GB/hour for 1080p, where as CPU is often 1/3rd-1/5th the size of the original for the same quality. I just need to be able to add in a PCIE TV tuner and i'll be set with a single device solution (seperate machines for on site redundancy and off site backup)

Good content as always and I love the server stuff. However I’ve tried Scale multiple times including the most recent version as of writing this. I continuously ran into issues or paper cuts here and there unfortunately. Core on the other hand has been rock solid for me - if you don’t use behyve.

For a home server, I would've just installed tailscale on the host truenas installation. Would've made configuration a lot easier. Probably not the best way though

Just spent the entire day stressing over not being able to mount any NFS share. Turns out that TrueNAS Scale (Cobia?) will not export ANY NFS shares if there is an user missing or something like that. I added a missing (I think it was missing) user on the host side and deleted (then recreated ) most of my NFS shares and lo and behold, I can now mount the shares!

Great video as always. I ran into exactly this issue after i gave up on the (horrible) kubernetes implentation. Went with Ubuntu server with docker instead. Wishlist for videos: 1. Traefik for Nextcloud 2. Obsidian

That was an a amazing tutorial... any idea about setting up ZFS on a linux distro without using TrueNAS almost seems like it would be easier

is it safe to have your hdds start and stop spining so often? or will it degrade the hhd and make it fail earlier then if its spining all day. and after watching the whole video im kind of confused about the power saving thing mentioned at the start. you didnt speak about it again through out the video

Awesome, thanks for that! Can we get that guide extended with VLANs, to have some network separation? Bunch of containers should be visible only to user devices, other to servers, yet another to IOT...

Hard to expect a response to a question on an 8 month old video, but here goes. Can you comment on the pros/cons of having the docker vm mount the nfs share vs setting up an nfs based volume and having the container mount it?

can you do a video on how to properly migrate from Core to Scale? Specifically how to move Jails (Nextcloud, UniFI, Plex, Tailscale, etc.)

Thank you, Wendel :) I'll install Proxmox

If TrueNAS Scale has terrible hypervisor support, what’s the benefit of Scale over Core? I was thinking of moving to TrueNAS from Unraid, but now I’m thinking I keep one NAS on Unraid with my containers, TrueNAS with a copy of the data and some fast file and block storage, and a Proxmox cluster for my homelabbinf nonsense and VMs.

Great tutorial. Thank you!

NFS seems a safer way to do this than iSCSI.

i think where must be a mounting issue with my vm.. in the nextcloud setting it says it only has 132Gib of space... can anyone help. i followed everything

@Level1Techs Is there anyway to write a script to automate the process of setting up the bridge networking?

Wtf... l just installed truenas 2 days ago... WHERE WERE YOU 2 DAYS AGO!? :(

Excellent very detailed video I could understand outstanding thank you

Thanks!

Any chance of getting an explainer on the NFS setup portion for Linux dummies like myself? I don't understand what it is we are trying to do or what mount/umount does in this context.

Hi, Thanks a lot .. but you said in the beginning of the video you show us how to stop the spinning rust from spinning and by that save engerie .. this i still don't know!?! i really want to lower my truenas server power consumption!

Great video! Do you have any recommendation for a quiet PSU to build a NAS. The eight year old psu of my homeserver just went up in smokes and I am looking for a new one. Thanks for your help in advance.

got stuck on giving my client permissions so I just made it open to everyone on my local network to use. Probably not best practice but this nas is just for fun I'm fine with it. Thanks for the great guide!

Somewhat new to Truenas, what I don't understand is what is the benefit of setting up these applications through Portainer? When you can just set them up using Truecharts?

Having memory not shared by the host, thus reducing zfs cache capability makes this seem like a workable solution that limits my machine. What about using portainer as a chart in truenas and then running all dockers with NFS. Does that work and solve the network, data/codebase, and reliability issues.

I was wondering if I could bounce ideas off of someone. Would you rather setup a config such as this (TrueNAS Scale + VM with docker inside of it) or Proxmox with a TrueNAS Core/Scale VM (with passthrough of an HBA of course). They seem to accomplish the same end result but I'm unsure as to which approach is "best" to manage long term. Thanks!

Hey Wendell, for that exactly use case, couldn't you make a case to use proxmox instead of truenas? If your intent is virtualization that would seem like a good start point.

Ha, the inability to access the host was driving me nuts! I didn't even know what terms to search for. I worked around it by using dual NICs and a physical switch.

I was very excited for TrueNAS Scale. TrueNAS is my choice of NAS OS and I run primarily Docker containers for home/homelab services and have a few VMs. I am really disappointed that TrueNAS Scale has such crap support for native Docker and weak VM usage. I was hopefully to consolidate the homelab to 1 server. But given the current state of Docker/VMs on Scale, I think I will stick with Core as a NAS and a second host for VMs and Docker.

Couldn’t find the other video reference dificult to find all have the same title 🤣🤣

Why use Scale if you create a VM anyway for Docker containers? Isn’t running Core faster in that case?

The KILL A WATT(tm) points out watt consumed per second ?

I have 4 nics on my scale server. Can I change this for a vm to be different that the storage instead of a bridge to be able to mount the vm to the storage?

When I install debian and it goes to reboot it wont load the grub and brings me to the UEFI Bios shell....any suggestions?

You can create bridge interfaces from the WebGUI. I did this for my Ubuntu VM running plex so I could mount the host media smb share. Just add the br0 as a second nic to the VM

Is there a way to host the containerization system on bare metal instead of visualizing it so you can use native filesystem calls instead of having to invoke the network subsystem and nfs and all the overhead involved with that? If that's possible then you can also worry less about segmenting memory to the virtual machine or applications and allow for dynamic memory allocation and/or better management of memory on an container by container basis. Also, and this is probably a containerization n00b question, but do containers group themselves into application clusters or when i look at all the containers running do i just see the complete list of containers? - I'm just curious about managing the various containers. I'm used to TrueNAS Core with jails and putting a complete application stack in each jail. What is the purpose of splitting off portions of an application into various containers anyway (like for the example of nextcloud a database container and a web server container)?

Soooo the short version is that TrueNAS Core is good for storage, but still sucks at virtualization? This the reason why people run Proxmox on metal, and TrueNAS Core in a VM?

Why is TrueNas using macvlan by default?!

This doesn't work anymore, now we need cloudnative-pg and prometheus-operator. I have no idea how to install now...

I havent had issues with the 'apps' in Truenas Scale, and IIRC it uses docker, i'll have to check when i get home.

can someone explain how this tailscale works? I've set this up and get it to work, but the performance drop is HUGE. I suspect the packets are relayed through some other node and not a real P2P.. i'm a noob on networking but the numbers im getting suggested there's throttling somewhere... my NAS is on 200Mbps link and I connected using another broadband at 50 Mbps file transfer stucks at 500Kb to 1Mb

I guess I’m not the only one upset with the current state of networking in SCALE

I know this is a 2yr old video, but, the networking thing is a docker feature, nothing to do with truenas. I've done this trying to spin up bind9 containers in the same subnet on a custom vlan network as the host (my mgmt network). I forget the exact steps of it all of, having to add in custom routes and such, to get back to the host and would have to look it up again... You probably know all this by now, though...