A few months ago I picked up a client looking for management of their TrueNAS servers. They had four, now five, servers spread across three physical locations. While I've had limited experience with FreeNAS and TrueNAS CORE (version based on FreeBSD), I really didn't have much experience with the newer TrueNAS SCALE, now called TrueNAS Community Edition. It's based on Debian, which I did have plenty of experience with. Additionally, I also have quite a bit of experience with Nextcloud, which they have three instances of.
The first task was software updates. All four servers had various versions of TrueNAS, including one CORE system. I did some testing in a personal virtual environment, and every upgrade from CORE to SCALE was flawless. I'm sure it helped that the CORE system didn't have any apps, and was purely used as a file server.
The second task was remote access. I was given after hours access to workstations via Rustdesk, but needed to secure my own access for flexibility. I'm a huge fan of Netbird, so that's the direction we went. I registered for an account and followed this video to setup a birdnet using a Compose file. Fortunately for me the Netbird client had recently introduced multiple profiles, which has helped manage computers for multiple clients. (I will say that the Netbird containers crash on bootup so I had to make a simple cron job to start it if it's not running. I've reached out to the Netbird and TrueNAS communities for support, but have come up with no answers.)
The next thing I had to worry about was data protection. We initially started out with USB pools for external backups. The client ended up building a new TrueNAS server to place at another location for replication of snapshots. I had to do cleanup of some old snapshots, as two of the systems ended up passing 10,000 snapshots due to very old snapshots not being deleted. Finally I setup notifications via SMTP using Sendamatic as my transactional provider.
After spending so much time in TrueNAS I've grown to love it. I've decided to migrate from a Debian+Incus server to TrueNAS. I've already started the process, and plan on writing additional posts in the 'Getting Started With TrueNAS' series about the process, app selections, and more.
