TrueNAS at Home
Introduction
While our kids were growing up, administering upward to 8 computers at home, most of which were running Windows XP at the time was onerous for me. I would have one Saturday a month applying updates, scanning for viruses, malware and re-orging the disks. What we lacked was data backup.
The Test
I put my kids to the test as to why they needed to run Windows. I put a Fedora Linux desktop out in our game room and had the kids do their work and play on that machine and to tell me what software they needed that would only run on Windows. After a month, we discovered that there was no need to run Windows. OpenOffice and Firefox would work for all their school related tasks and the games they played were all in Flash or Java off the web.
After the expirament was over, I repurposed all the other Windows based desktops with Fedora Linux (outside of my wife’s desktop – that took more convincing). I implemented NIS for identity management and deliver automount maps along with serving all the home directories off of my desktop via NFS. Standing up an LDAP server wasn’t worth the hassle for such a small user base and security wasn’t that critical. I later bought a full height computer that I could stuff with several hard disks and imaged it with FreeNAS, a BSD UNIX OS running ZFS as the file ssystem developed by iXsystems. iXsystems provide a commercial hardware/software solution suitable for small to possibly medium businesses.
The Result
It worked real well for delivering data over NFS to all the desktops. The only residual problem I then had to deal with was the whining of the kids as to which desktop they wanted to use. Performance-wise, the desktops had different processor classes and memory footprint. Of course the kids only wanted to use the one machine that was the fastest! NFS performance was never an issue.
Today, iXsystems have consolidated their community version of FreeNAS as TrueNAS Core. TrueNAS utilizes the BSD UNIX “jails” to provide more services than merely supplying a filesystem over the network. I am currently working with a packaged NextCloud jail to see how I like being able to access files from tablets and phones.
For backups, I simply perform an rsync of the data onto a USB drive. So far, this is possible since I have less than 2TB of data. Using a Linux based backup software did not make sense to add complexity into mix for such small amount of data.
You can read more about TrueNAS at (https://www.truenas.com/)