I’m a noob who thought they knew what they were doing!

My trusty unraid server running off some ancient consumer hardware finally gave up the ghost due to hardware failure. Needing an alternative in a hurry, I thought I’d do things properly, and got an incredible deal on an R720XD with shitloads of RAM and storage, couldn’t be happier with the hardware.

It came with TrueNAS Scale already installed as it’s what the previous owner was running. Got everything NAS set up in a couple of hours and have been running an SMB share quite happily.

However, I also run a fair few Docker containers, and this is where the pain starts. I’ve spent so long trying to get things working, and have simply hit a brick wall. Everything I try yields another bizarre error message that requires hours to resolve, and I feel like I’m trying to track down the solution for some obscure edge case rather than doing something incredibly standard. But I’m trying to piece things together from multiple guides and videos, none of which contain the whole story, and most of them result in more errors that aren’t covered.

The TrueNAS forums look like a bit of a dumpster fire when it comes to these issues, particularly around containers, with things getting quite heated. The ‘official apps’ are extremely limited, TrueCharts extends functionality, but still limited, and not really working well for me. There seems to be a lot of friction with the devs of TrueCharts, and between people wanting to virtualise stuff and those who’s solution to these issues is running TrueNAS bare metal and not using virtualisation or containers. It’s like, yeah, you’re less likely to have issues if you ignore half the feature set. And if it’s only ‘supposed’ to be a file server, then it’s frustrating that running it in a VM is also ‘not officially supported’ too.

I tried spinning up a Debian VM and managed to get Portainer running, but once again hit an absolute mess with filesystems and permissions for any other containers I tried running. I know it’s to do with the quirks of TrueNAS and that the setup makes sense, especially for an enterprise focus, but this stuff just worked in Unraid as smooth as butter. I know it can be easier, and I’m just not having a good time. I want to be using containers, VMs and developing, not spending my 4th evening this week losing my mind over permissions so I can progress to the next error message!

Anyway

I am a noob, I liked Unraid, it worked, and TrueNAS Scale was probably never the right choice for me. But now I need to get redeployed quickly, and I’m looking for a path forward that gives me flexibility.

As I said, I like UnRaid, I’d quite like to give TrueNAS Core a try purely as a NAS, but I’m happy to stick with Unraid if that’s going to save some headache. I’d quite like to try both to be honest, set up a hypervisor so I can get Unraid functional quickly, then slowly work on TrueNAS.

So I’m thinking XCP-ng or Proxmox bare-metal, Unraid for NAS + Docker, TrueNAS to work on, and the ability to spin up more VMs.

Problem there is that Unraid is only ‘supposed’ to be booted off a USB. Once again, any discussion of any other way is ‘not supported’ and discussions on the forums inevitably lead to ‘why would you want to?’ or ‘you don’t understand’, implying you’re trying to get better speed or something. I know it runs in RAM, I just don’t really like having my config and license dangling off my server permanently (although I could try the internal USB), and virtualising it would be incredibly useful.

I could use Unraid as a hypervisor, I’ve heard of people adding a Proxmox VM to Unraid, which seems a bit bass ackwards on the surface, and doesn’t ‘feel’ right, but I guess if it works it’s fine. Unraid was absolutely rock solid stable for me, after all!

Again, I don’t think I’ve particularly been fair here, in fact, TrueNAS has impressed me in lots of ways, and I shouldn’t be critical of those doing development and answering the same questions over and over from people like me. I just need to get running, don’t have a huge amount of free time at the moment, and just want to get NAS+Docker functioning, but ideally in VMs to reduce the upheaval when/if I change things again!

Your help would be appreciated, as would the extra sleep!