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Comment by sandreas | Hacker News Reader

Once more a sad story about so called plug and play devices doing weird stuff. I prefer getting my hands a bit dirty using:

  - FreeNAS / NAS4free / OpenMediaVault (for Home-NAS)
  - OpenWRT / OPNsense / PFSense (for Home-Firewall)

Nearly Plug and play with this Hardware:

  - Dell T20 / T30 / T40
  - HP Microserver N54L / Gen8 / Gen10
  - Linksys WRT 1200 / 1900 / 3200 / 32X (https://dc502wrt.org/)
  - Alix APU

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Been running a T20 w/4x 4TB HDs with plain FreeBSD for a few years now and it works pretty well. I'm barely even competent when it comes to sysadmin sorts of things, but it was pretty easy to get set up following a blog post I found years ago.

The consistency of FreeBSD is a real benefit here — it's well documented to begin with, and since things change so little between releases, bits and pieces you find online are largely still relevant even if they're a little old.

First thing I did when I got my Buffalo Terastation was look up how to install plain Debian Linux on it and set it up myself. There is usually very little benefit to using the manufacturer's neutered, cobbled-together firmware.

Same thing with my Internet router. Flash it with non-manufacturer firmware so I can configure it properly.

+1 for FreeNAS.

Its use of ZFS and ability to easily manage multiple "jails" and vms is perfect for a reliable home automation platform!

The only major downside I've found thus far it that you cannot pass USB devices selectively to a jail/vm.

I really wish it could do USB passthrough. I need that for home automation to run in a VM under TrueNAS. The solution I've been running for a few years now is to have TrueNAS and Home Assistant running under VMWare ESX. Required getting an HBA that I could pass through to the VM instead of using the ports on the mobo but it works nicely.

Having Home Assistant as a guest under TrueNAS would be nicer though. Right now there's no data redundancy for Home Assistant.

I'm looking forward to TrueNAS SCALE[1], which is basically TrueNAS on top of Debian instead of FreeBSD.

Mainly because then my containers can run on the metal rather than being limited by Bhyve.

Currently in Alpha. I fired it up in a VM and it had some rough edges still but did manage to create a pool and fire up some containers.

Been running FreeNAS, now TrueNAS, for several years and been happy with that, but not being able to take full advantage of the hardware due to Bhyve has been a pain point.

[1]: https://www.truenas.com/truenas-scale/

I also had good experience with mini-PCs like Chuwi's. They are pretty cheap, have a good amount of ports and have the advantage of having newer CPUs with very little power consumption.

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