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TrueNAS-12-RELEASE System Reporting Bug 🦠 🕷 🕸 – How to fix it 🔨

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 system reporting GUI 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.

The Fix

But if you want to have a permanent fix you can setup your own system reporting using Grafana with influxDB as shown here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xN47J-Tp2oU

custom TrueNAS-Grafana dashboard for system reporting/monitoring
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! ❤️

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Lenovo ThinkStation D30 home-lab build with dual Xeon E5-2667 v2 processors

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.

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TrueNAS CORE 12 VM Installation on VMWare ESXi 7

“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.

#VMware, #ESXi, #virtualization, #VM

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TrueNAS CORE 12 Virtual Machine on VMware ESXi

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.