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Comment by kllrnohj | Hacker News Reader

I can setup Samba, NFS, and ZFS manually myself, but why would I want to? Configuring samba users & shares via SSH sucks. It's tedious. It's error prone. It's boring.

Similarly while docker's CLI interface is relatively nice, it's even nicer to just take my phone, open a browser, and push "update" or "restart" in a little gui to quickly get things back up & going. Or to add new services. Or whatever else I want. Sure I could SSH in from my phone, but that's awful. I could go get a laptop whenever I need to do something, but if Jellyfin or Plex or whatever is cranky and I'm already sitting on the couch, I don't want to have to get up and go find a laptop. I want to just hit "restart service" without moving.

And that's the point of things like TrueNAS or Unraid or whatever. It makes things nicer to use from more interfaces in more places.

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Yeah; once you get deep enough, you realize you can just install things yourself, configure them with Ansible, or Nix, or whatever, and have full control.

But for probably 90% of users, they just want a UI they can click through and mostly use the defaults, then log into now and then to make sure things are good.

The UI is also especially helpful for focusing on things that matter, like setting up scrubs, notifications, etc. (though even there I think TrueNAS could do better).

It's why Synology persists, despite growing more and more hostile to their NAS owners.

That's fair enough; I certainly understand why you might do this if you're just buying something pre-made and letting it sit in a network closet or something; having something that is just pre-made that you can use has advantages.

I guess the thing is that I've never done that with [Free|True]NAS :). I've always used some kind of hardware (either retired rack mount servers or thin clients) and installed FreeNAS on there, and then it never really felt like it saved me a lot of time or effort compared to just doing it all manually.

Of course, I'm being a typical "Hacker News Poster" here; I will (partly) acknowledge that I am the weird one, but at the same time, as I said, if you're in the market to install TrueNAS on your own hardware, you are also probably someone who could relatively easily Google your way through doing it manually in roughly the same amount of time, at least with NixOS.

For me, this is about personal priorities. I’ve been a professional sysadmin and definitely have the skills to build a NAS from scratch - I’ve done it more than once.

But this is one aspect of my life that I look at as core infrastructure that needs to just work, and I don’t really gain anything from rolling my own in this particular category.

I still run a mini home lab where I do all kinds of tinkering. Just not with storage.

But I also completely understand wanting to do this all manually. I’ve been there. That’s just not where I am today.

This reminds me of the famous HN Dropbox comment [0]. It was perfectly correct and yet so wrong at the same time. TrueNAS is probably for the people who want the power and flexibility with almost none of the hassle. Ironically, the people who have to deal with this professionally every day probably want to leave the work at work.

Having a playground/homelab at home is one thing, but playing with your family's data and access to it can get annoying really fast.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Yeah, that's what I was referring to when I said "Hacker News Poster", and it's why I said that I know I'm the weird one. I'm not completely out of touch.

It's a little different though; TrueNAS still requires a fairly high level of technical competence to install on your own hardware; you still need to understand how to manage partitions and roughly what a Jail is and basic settings for Samba and the like. It's not completely analogous to Dropbox because Dropbox is trivial for pretty much anyone.

I think most people who don’t want to tinker would prefer a Synology or similar NAS solution.

The problem with TrueNAS is it fills the niche where it’s targeting people who want to tinker, but don’t want to learn how to tinker. Which is likely a smaller demographic than those who are willing to roll their own and those who just want a fully off-the-shelf experience.

I also think Synology would be closer to the Dropbox experience than TrueNAS.

I rolled my own with freebsd and ZFS. And set up some media server apps in a freebsd jail. It's not as polished and I'm missing out on some features, but I'm definitely learning a lot.

> but at the same time, as I said, if you're in the market to install TrueNAS on your own hardware, you are also probably someone who could relatively easily Google your way through doing it manually in roughly the same amount of time, at least with NixOS.

Sure, but both are free options, one just takes strictly less work to do the task of being a NAS. Why would I pick the one that's just more work for the same result? If I want a NAS, why would I roll my own with NixOS instead of just picking a distro that focuses on being a NAS out of the box? What's the benefits of doing it manually?

If I want to just play around with stuff in a homelab setting, that's what proxmox clustering is for :) But storage / NAS is boring. It just needs to sit there doing basic storage stuff. I want it to do the least amount of things possible because everything else depends on storage being there.

  > But for probably 90% of users, they just want a UI they can click through...

90% of HN users. More like 99.99% in the real world!

Honestly, even TrueNAS is way more in depth than 99% of users in the wider world want. They want Dropbox at most, and very possibly they don't even want that much involvement. They want backups to just happen without having to put any thought in.

> Yeah; once you get deep enough, you realize you can just install things yourself, configure them with Ansible, or Nix, or whatever, and have full control.

I think if you've gone through the effort of setting up Ansible scripts for setting up & maintaining a NAS, you probably are not actually making a NAS anymore. Like maybe you're doing Ceph or Gluster cluster or something, which can be fun to play with. Heck, I did that with a bunch of ODROID-HC2's as well. It was fun to setup a cluster storage system.

It also wasn't practical at all and at no point did it ever seriously compete with replacing my "real" NAS (which currently is Unraid, but I'd absolutely consider switching to TrueNAS in a future upgrade), since the main feature that a NAS needs to provide is uptime.

> I can setup Samba, NFS, and ZFS manually myself, but why would I want to? Configuring samba users & shares via SSH sucks. It's tedious. It's error prone. It's boring.

I agree for the most part, though even vanilla Ubuntu has Cockpit if you need a GUI.

Personally I find that getting it set up with NixOS is pretty straightforward and it's "set and forget", and generally it's not too hard to find configurations you can just copypaste done "correctly". And of course, if you break something you can just reboot and choose a previous generation. Of course restarting still requires SSHing in and `systemctl restart myapp`, so YMMV.

I want to configure it myself because now I know exactly how it works. The configuration options I’ve chosen won’t change unless I change them. Disaster recovery will be easy because when I move the disks to a new machine, LVM will just start working.

I actually can’t recall the last time I setup a share on SMB, has to be years if not tending towards decades.

A few big shares is all I really need; I no longer create a share for every single idea/thing I can think of.

I’ll take Configuration Management for $100, Alex.

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