In this video I am going to show you how to upgrade TrueNAS 12 to a Release version and the problem that goes with it and how to fix 🔧 that problem.! 🔨 which is TrueNAS reporting not working after update to v12-RELEASE version.
The Problem
Everything seems perfectly fine so far 🥰. Hard disks 💾 appear to be normal, mirror pools with all the datasets seem functional the way it should with all the sharing enabled except for one thing: System Reporting.
System Reporting seems missing from #GUI as a UI bug 🦠 🧫
TrueNAS-12-RELEASE system reporting GUI bug
It doesn’t matter what I do, for instance changing System Dataset to boot-pool, switching to a different browser or restarting system statistics collection daemon “collectd” in TrueNAS command line. System Reporting doesn’t seem to work the way it’s supposed to.
Therefor my advice to you is to hold off this update. #iXsystem is aware of this issue and has been investigating this bug. Most likely it’s UI bug that’s plagued with this TrueNAS-12-RELEASE.
If you wanna see a fix for this. I can certainly show you how but I have to warn you though, it’s not a permanent fix. Go to Preferences and choose a different theme then click on update preferences. Now go back to Reporting, everything appears just fine. As I said earlier, it’s not permanent. If you close down the browser and get back in the GUI after certain amount of time has passed, System Reporting in the GUI still fails showing the data.
Customized TrueNAS-Grafana dashboard using influxDB time series database
That is my custom TrueNAS-Grafana dashboard that I made couple weeks ago for System Reporting. It is more intuitive that look at. I also made a video tutorial how to setup Grafana for TrueNAS using influxDB in my channel. You can certainly check it out. Because everything works except the UI doesn’t show the data properly from system statistics collection daemon “collectd”
If you have any question or comment don’t hesitate to ask or shoot me a line. Thanks for watching and I see you in the next video. Bye for now 👋 and have a good weekend! ❤️
Once again, I put my dual Xeon® E5-2667v2 up against 5Ghz all-core overclocked Core™ i9-9900K on Asus Realbench software to find out who is the winner. All being equal with the same graphic card GTX 1060 6G. Of course, you guess it right. Modern CPUs are hard to beat. The real word performance is all that matter.
What do you think? Besides the i9 runs a bit hotter than the server class CPU’s due to being overclocked all core to 5.0Ghz. I have these dual Intel Xeon E5-2667 v2 processors in my homelab system that I build couple months ago and no complains whatsoever about them. They run stable and pretty much anything I can throw at them without a hitch. I select them due the the price being cheaper than some modern server class CPU and its availability on the market. You can easily find them on eBay.
Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2667 v2, 25M Cache, 3.30 GHz vs. Intel® Core™ i9-9900K Processor, 16M Cache, up to 5.00 GHz
Brief overview of my TrueNAS server monitoring setup and how to modify and customize TrueNAS-Grafana dashboard using InfluxDB time series database with graphite endpoint enabled. In this post, I will shows how to setup a “Current Disk Temperature” panel for TrueNAS in Grafana.
video showing “How to setup current disk temperature panel for TrueNAS in Grafana”
This is Part 2 in three part TrueNAS-Grafana series. You might need to have a knowledge how to setup a logging server as shown in my previous post.
Custom TrueNAS dashboard powered by Grafana and influxDB time series database
You can also access my github link for additional information and steps to create this dashboard using headless Ubuntu server OS in VMWare Type 1 hypervisor ESXi 7.0 virtual machine https://github.com/cucac/truenas-influxdb-grafana
If you have any questions, please comment down below.
Do you wan to customize TrueNAS dashboard? Do you want to setup your own TrueNAS dashboard on Samsung tablet? In this video I’ll walk you through the process how to create your own customized TrueNAS dashboard using Grafana 7.0 and InfluxDb time series database. You can also view the step-by-step instructions how-to video on my YouTube channel.
Image of TrueNAS customized dashboard running on Samsung tablet
Running on
Grafana 7.1.4
Influxdb 1.8.2
Define your custom ports, local static IP address, InfluxDb username and password.
To make things easier to remember, we will decide on what port and local static IP address to use for this logging server. Depends on your network settings, yours can be different from this. If default ports numbers are used, ensure they don’t conflict with other system ports you might have running. Also, if firewall is enable on the system, make sure these ports are allowed to pass through firewall.
Software Port Number
Grafana 9800
InfluxDB 9600
Assign local static IP address. ie: 192.168.11.50 (this IP should be within the range of TrueNAS local IP address so that TrueNAS can communicate with this logging server) For influxDb username and password, please use your own imagination to create username and password here. I leave them here for reference purpose ONLY.
username: influx_admin
password: admin_Password
Grafana Installation and Configurations
Visit https://grafana.com/grafana/download to get instructions to install Grafana. But before Grafana installation, run this first to update the system
$ sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade
Choose your Configuration Options
Edit Grafana configuration file located at /etc/grafana/grafana.ini to your liking. In our case
Visit this website https://portal.influxdata.com/downloads/ and select InfluxDB version to install. At this point, we will determine graphite endpoint is enabled in InfluxDb setting by editing configuration file. Also, we will modify the its template for TrueNAS. Configuration file is located at /etc/influxdb/influxdb.conf
[http]
# Determines whether HTTP endpoint is enabled.
enabled = true
# The bind address used by the HTTP service.
bind-address = "192.168.11.50:9600"
# Determines whether user authentication is enabled over HTTP/HTTPS.
auth-enabled = true
[[graphite]]
# Determines whether the graphite endpoint is enabled.
enabled = true
database = "graphitedb"
retention-policy = ""
bind-address = ":2003"
protocol = "tcp"
consistency-level = "one"
templates = [
"*.app env.service.resource.measurement",
"servers.* .host.resource.measurement.field*",
# # Default template
# "server.*",
]
Enable service, start influxdb, and double checking to see it’s currently running.
Visit https://docs.influxdata.com/influxdb/v1.8/introduction/get-started/ for more info to create admin user and password to accept TrueNAS outputs. While there get to know how to assign user privilege. But before doing that we need to get into InfluxDB shell command line
$ influx -host 192.168.11.50 -port 9600
Once everything is setup with admin user, we now can tell TrueNAS to output time series data to influxDB
We can also run a few queries to see if the data you are looking for is being populated.
$ influx -host 192.168.11.50 -port 9600 -username "influx_admin" -password "admin_Password"
Connected to http://192.168.11.50:9600 version 1.8.2
InfluxDB shell version: 1.8.2
> SHOW DATABASES
name: databases
name
----
_internal
graphitedb
> USE graphitedb
Using database graphitedb
> SHOW MEASUREMENTS
name: measurements
name
----
.
.
da1.temperature
.
.
> SELECT * FROM "da1.temperature"
name: da1.temperature
time host resource value
---- ---- -------- -----
1598032699000000000 truenas_local disktemp 38
1598032999000000000 truenas_local disktemp 38
1598033299000000000 truenas_local disktemp 38
Now you can access Grafana with default username and password admin/admin and customize your own TrueNAS dashboard.
Future improving:
I am still learning thru the process how to pull time series data from TrueNAS and display it with Grafana. A lot to learn. Hope this post helps you to create your own meaningful TrueNAS dashboard. If you have questions please post it on my YouTube video comment section.
I purchased a used Lenovo ThinkStation D30 for $260 CAD on Kijiji with very under powered chip Xeon E5 2403v2 and 2x8G ram. The CPU is very weak but what important to me was that the machine supports Xeon E5 v2 product family processors (confirmed by machine type number on the sticker) and it has dual LGA-2011 sockets. So I upgraded right away to dual chips with Xeon E5-2667 v2 CPU for $180 CAD each with aftermarket $25 Deep-Cool CPU cooler. They both together perform really well in multi-core performance just like my current overclocked i9 9900K or even better than in some cases. I did some benchmark to compare these systems here if you’re interested in the results.
I also upgraded to 4x16G DDR3 1600MHz ECC RAM for a total of 64G currently for additional $100 CAD. I plan to upgrade to total 128G of RAM in really near future to utilize quad channel feature that the system has to offers.
The issue I faced with ThinkStation D30 case was the heat produced by both 130W TDP CPUs was too much for the original case. It quickly heats up the 1100W power supply. Though, it didn’t give me trouble at the time but I needed to find out the solutions for it because I planed to run this homelab system 24/7. I searched Reddit and Google up and down for build tips but unlucky found anything useful. Luckily, my brother gave me his old case which is the Corsair Obsidian 800D. I needed to transfer all the components to this new case. The process wasn’t simple plug-and-play as you might think. I had to drill the case and made custom supporting brackets on my 3D printer for the mounting points. But eventually, I successfully secured dual socket ThinkStation D30 motherboard to this after market full tower Corsair case. The results were much better in terms of heat issue. Besides it looks much “cooler” with LEDs from the fan. 🙂
I also purchased a LSI 9207-8i HBA card for additional 8 internal 6G/s SATA ports for $60 CAD. This really helps me to expand the system storage capacity to total 16 SATA ports. The case has 4 hot swap drive bay which really helps changing hard drives quickly. If you’re interested in the build process and how I build this home-lab system, you can view it here on my YouTube channel. It explains things more clearly.
If you have followed the money trail in this long post. Summing up, I paid a total of $830 CAD for this system. This cost doesn’t include $20 CAD for EPS CPU extension cable due to the bigger case and cost of hard drives which I already have. All in all, I am very happy the way it turns out after few months collecting parts and thoughts put in to build this system.
In this video, I show you how to do it yourself (DIY) drilling a pc case mod for motherboard standoffs by hand using readily available basic tools.
Drilling PC case for motherboard standoffs
You will need a small power tool hand drill, #2 centre drill, #40 (2.5mm) drill bit, M3x0.5 metric tap tap some drill bit that snugly fit motherboard PCB hole size for marking and a little bit of elbow grease. 🙂
This is how I precision drill holes for standoffs by hand. Anyone can make holes in PC case but it takes skills to precision drill a hole that has high positional tolerance such as mounting holes for motherboard standoffs.
Hope this is useful info for your future case mod.
“FreeNAS has evolved to become part of the TrueNAS Family as TrueNAS CORE.”
truenas.com
In this video I first quickly mentioned about TrueNAS CORE 12 hardware requirements in general and then walk through installation process of TrueNAS CORE 12 in virtual machine settings in VMware ESXi 7.0. Even though it is still in beta stage but the installation process should be the same with the release of production version of TrueNAS in the future. Although it is in virtual machine settings but the installation process should be very similar to bare metal system.
At the end of the video, I give some tips and tricks to make TrueNAS CORE actually work in VMware ESXi virtualization environment.
Tip 1: Use separate SAS or SATA disk controller and enable passthrough in ESXi. You can get one disk controller to work in VM but be warned there’s a high chance you will loose all your data on FreeNAS/TrueNAS
Tip 2: Assign and reserve specific amount of RAM for TrueNAS system as shown in the video. Preferably more than 8G of RAM as hardware requirements indicate.
Tip 3: Use CMR technology in hard disk. Seagate Iron Wolf product line uses CMR in all of their disks. While only Western Digital RED with PLUS and PRO use CMR technology. The other regular REDs use SMR. So watch out before buying NAS drives from WD. It will take forever to resilver the disk later on if you run into problems with hard disk.
Tip 4: Don’t bloat your FreeNAS/TrueNAS with plugins. It’s not healthy for your system. If you must use plugins, use ESXi to spin up Ubuntu/Windows server to host those plugins you found on TrueNAS and have it access your NAS system through file sharing.
TrueNAS CORE v12 is still in beta release state and not ready for production environment just yet. But in this video, I tested out its storage pools survivability from re-installation of NAS operating file system itself.
TrueNAS CORE upgrade and install as virtual machine
I have used Windows Server 2019 Storage Spaces in the past and all of my data was lost and disappeared after the re-installation of Windows Server. Something that’s unacceptable for rfs storage filesystem. You should always have backups of your files if you use Windows Storage Spaces just in case that your Windows Server OS won’t be able to boot up. All your data on storage spaces will be gone with it. You have been warned!
In order for me to be committed using TrueNAS CORE OS for my NAS system in VMware ESXi, I need to find out about this issue whether or not storage pool data is affected even with brand-new and fresh installation of TrueNAS CORE 12.
Intel® Xeon® E5-2667 v2 is probably the best of its server class in single core performance for an Ivy Bridge CPU. In this video, I benchmark it in dual configuration (16C/32T total) against more recent and modern single CPU namely Core™ i9-9900K overclocked all cores to 5.0GHz in various benchmark software available today like PassMark, Geekbench, Cinebench R20 and ROG RealBench.
Are you considering building a gaming PC in year 2020 out of old Xeon processors, maybe this video can help you to decide whether it’s worth your money since Core i10-10700K is roughly about $430 US at the moment. While the dual configuration Xeon CPUs can be had for half the price.
For home-lab server build, I absolute recommend these CPUs if you’re on the tight budget. With the abundant and cheap ECC DDR3 RAM available on used market, it won’t cost you an arm and a leg to spring up your home-lab server for your Plex Media Server, Nextcloud or just simple TrueNAS-CORE storage server.
Are you looking to create a WordPress website hosting for free? You have come to the right place.
Free wordpress website hosting on Google Cloud Platform
In this how-to video I will walk you through step-by-step instructions how to claim free WordPress hosting on Google Cloud Platform using provided $300 US dollars credit for 12 months.
After your trial period ends (either using up all your $300 credit or having passed 12-month period whichever comes first) you will not be charged unless you upgrade to paid account. Please note that once your trial period ends , all data you stored in Compute Engine is lost, all resources you created during the trial are stopped. You must upgrade to a paid account to continue using Google Cloud.
According to Google Cloud Free Tier FAQ, any remaining or unexpired free $300 trial credit remains in your account once your upgrade to a paid account. Therefore, it is very important to activate to paid account before your trial period ends so that any unused credit will be carried forwards into your paid account for future use. The “Always Free Tier” products will also continue to be FREE.
If you’re starting out your own business with tight budget, I think this free trial on Google Cloud Platform is very good option to save the upfront cost of having your own website. Your website might not have a lot of traffic at the beginning, therefore using the Free Tier options as shown in my video should suffice. Most importantly, check out the Always Free program from Google Cloud for usage limits.
Step by step instructions:
Time needed: 37 minutes.
Step 1: Setting up Virtual Machine on Google Cloud Platform
00:59 – Creating new Project 01:46 – Creating VM instance in Compute Engine 03:52 – Connecting to VM instance using gcloud SDK 07:54 – Creating a Linux Swap FIle
Step 2: Setting up Domain Name
10:36 – Creating Type A Record to direct Domain Name to WordPress Host
Step 3: Installing WordPress Requirements
12:38 – Installation of Apache web server for Ubuntu system 18:30 – Installation of MariaDB v15.1 database server for Ubuntu 20:27 – Installation of PHP v7.4.3 22:02 – (Optional) Installation of phpMyAdmin 23:39 – Setting up MariaDB database
Step 4: WordPress Installation
26:52 – Downloading and extracting WordPress software 27:48 – Moving WordPress files into Apache web server 29:09 – Setting up WordPress configuration file
Step 5: Securing website with SSL using Let’s Encrypt CA
33:54 – Installation of Certbot to automate securing process
If you have any questions or comment, please leave a reply below…