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Comment by Jhsto | Hacker News Reader

What is the technical upside of using TrueNAS instead of samba? If you want to optimize for control, it seems a bit weird to me to settle for an "all in one" software stack.

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Not really sure the comparison is valid. TrueNAS uses Samba to provide SMB network shares.

I see, so I assume the upside is that it's a time saver. Thanks! I personally wen't with samba on Linux and with btrfs. I was wondering if there's something non-obvious in TrueNAS that I'm missing out on.

And to my account, I think my upsides are that:

- ability to choose the kernel

- no need for SSD for base OS since running off of RAM is rather easy on Linux

- samba can run in a container thus a bit more control security-wise

- server may run something else as well

Of course, this comes with a lot more technical hurdles. More like a side-project than utility really. That's why I was wondering does TrueNAS provide non-obvious upsides that would be lacking in self-rolled one.

There are two flavors of TrueNAS - Core and Scale. Core is basically a FreeBSD distro and Scale is basically a Linux distro. They're both a base OS with the typical packages anyone would need for a NAS, with sane defaults + a user-friendly web-based management system.

The upsides are that it's plug-and-play for anyone who doesn't want to research all the options available and figure out the various pitfalls on their own.

> no need for SSD for base OS since running off of RAM is rather easy on Linux

I don't understand this sentence. You're running off a RAM disk with no boot drive? What if you have a power outage?

> samba can run in a container thus a bit more control security-wise

Core supports FreeBSD jails and Scale supports Docker so you could run samba in a container on either if you're willing to do set it up yourself.

> server may run something else as well

As before, both have jail/container functionality. I haven't used Scale myself but Core comes with a bunch of "click to install" jail options for stuff like Plex, ZoneMinder, etc. Our machine also runs a Windows VM (ew) and a Wordpress install in a Jail

Thanks, this is a great explanation! I wish the blog post would have described the TrueNAS like this.

> You're running off a RAM disk with no boot drive? What if you have a power outage?

Yes, the server only has the HDDs which contain the NAS data. The server bootloops until it gets an image from the router (ipxe boot). The disk images have systemd scripts which install everything from 0 on each boot. Coincidentally, this means system restart is how I upgrade my software.

> Core supports FreeBSD jails and Scale supports Docker

This clarifies the situation -- TrueNAS seems like an option that I would recommend for anyone who wants a quick OSS NAS setup.

Samba config files are painful, it's pretty old school. On top of that you need to setup users/groups etc...

You’re asking the equivalent of “why use Linux instead of TCP?”

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