Setting Up Home Server

For a homelab NAS running TrueNAS SCALE, CPU choice depends on the workload:

• Light NAS duties (SMB/NFS, snapshots, periodic scrubbing): Intel Celeron J4125 or N5105, AMD Ryzen 3 3200GE. These draw 10-25W TDP and are more than sufficient.
• Transcoding / media server: Intel chips with Quick Sync Video (QSV) are strongly preferred. An i3-12100 or i5-12400 gives you hardware transcoding for Plex/Jellyfin at negligible power cost.
• Virtualization heavy: i5-12400 or Ryzen 5 5600G. More cores for VMs and containers.

Avoid high-TDP desktop CPUs unless you are comfortable with power consumption and thermals. ECC Support is a nice-to-have but not required for ZFS; uncorrectable errors from non-ECC RAM are rare In homelab workloads.

ZFS is a greedy consumer of RAM. The old rule of thumb “1 GB per TB of raw storage” is a starting Point, but in practice:

• Minimum: 16 GB for a 4-drive homelab NAS
• Recommended: 32 GB if you plan to run VMs, Docker workloads, or Plex transcoding
• Sweet spot: 64 GB DDR4 ECC UDIMMs (two 32 GB sticks) on a Supermicro or ASRock Rack board

Do not run ZFS with less than 8 GB. The ARC (Adaptive Replacement Cache) will starve and performance Will tank. ECC RAM is recommended but not mandatory — ZFS has its own checksumming at the block Level.

Use NAS-grade or enterprise drives. Consumer desktop drives (WD Blue, Seagate Barracuda) have Aggressive head-parking and shorter warranties.

Key considerations:

• CMR vs SMR: Only use CMR (Conventional Magnetic Recording) drives. SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) drives cause catastrophic ZFS performance degradation during resilvering. WD Red Plus is CMR; regular WD Red may be SMR.
• Drive count: Plan for at least a mirror (2 drives) or RAIDZ1 (3 drives). RAIDZ2 (4+ drives, double parity) is strongly recommended for any pool holding data you care about.
• Shuck externals: WD EasyStore and Elements drives are often cheaper than their internal equivalents. Shucking is common practice in the homelab community.

• IPMI: Strongly recommended. Supermicro X11SCA-F or similar boards with IPMI let you manage the server headless — remote console, power control, sensor monitoring. Without IPMI you need a display and keyboard attached.
• SATA ports: Ensure enough ports for current drives plus expansion. A 6-port HBA card (LSI 9211-8i flashed to IT mode) is cheap and gives you 8 SAS/SATA ports.
• Chassis: Fractal Design Define 7 or similar with hot-swap bays. Hot-swap is a quality-of-life feature you will appreciate.

A UPS is non-negotiable for a ZFS NAS. Power loss during a write can corrupt the pool. Recommended:

• CyberPower CP1500PFCLCD or APC Back-UPS Pro 1500
• Must support USB HID signaling (not just serial)
• Use NUT (Network UPS Tools) — TrueNAS has built-in NUT support

• Rufus or Balena Etcher for writing the ISO
• TrueNAS SCALE ISO — use the latest stable release, not beta/nightly

1. Plug in the USB drive (all content on it will be erased)
2. Start Rufus and select the TrueNAS SCALE ISO
3. Change the file system to FAT32 or exFAT
4. Click Start and select DD mode when prompted
5. Unplug the USB and plug it into the server
6. Boot the server and select the USB as the boot drive
7. Select Install on your SSD when prompted
8. Create your admin account (username: truenas_admin)
9. Open the internal IP address of the server in a browser on another device
10. Log in with the admin credentials

Set a static IP on the TrueNAS web UI:

1. Navigate to Network > Interfaces and click on your primary interface (e.g., eth0)
2. Set IPv4 to Manual and assign:

• IP: 192.168.1.10 (or whatever fits your LAN scheme)
• Netmask: 255.255.255.0
• Gateway: 192.168.1.1
• DNS: 1.1.1.1, 9.9.9.9

3. Click Save
4. If you have multiple NICs, consider bonding (LACP) for redundancy and throughput

Check connectivity from a terminal:

ping 192.168.1.10
ssh truenas_admin@192.168.1.10

1. Navigate to Storage > Pools and click Create Pool
2. Give the pool a name (e.g., tank)
3. Select a topology:

• Mirror (2 drives): Best IOPS, 50% usable capacity. Good for SSD pools.
• RAIDZ1 (3+ drives, single parity): Good balance. One drive can fail.
• RAIDZ2 (4+ drives, double parity): Recommended for important data. Two drives can fail simultaneously.
• Stripe (single drive or multiple with no redundancy): Only for temporary/cache data.

4. Add your drives and select the data VDEV type
5. Click Create Pool

Important ZFS pool design rules:

• Never mix drive sizes within a VDEV (all drives in a VDEV should be the same size)
• You can add VDEVs to a pool (striping across them), but you cannot remove a VDEV from a pool
• A pool”s IOPS is determined by the slowest VDEV
• Plan your pool layout carefully — resizing later is limited

Datasets are ZFS filesystems within a pool. They are lightweight and you should create them Liberally.

Navigate to Storage > Pools, click the three-dot menu on your pool, and Add Dataset.

Recommended dataset structure:

tank/
├── apps/          # TrueNAS Apps (Kubernetes/Docker workloads)
├── media/
│   ├── tv/
│   ├── movies/
│   └── music/
├── share/         # SMB/NFS shares
├── backup/        # Backups from other machines
└── iso/           # ISOs and install media

Key dataset options:

# Verify compression savings from the CLI
zfs get compressratio tank/media
zfs get compressratio tank/apps

# List all datasets
zfs list -o name,used,avail,refer,mountpoint

1. Navigate to Credentials > Local Users and click Add
2. Create a user for each person who needs access, or create role-based users:

• media_user — read-only access to media shares
• admin_user — read-write access to everything

3. Navigate to Credentials > Local Groups and create groups as needed
4. Assign users to groups

From the CLI:

# List users
midclt call user.query

# Create a group
midclt call group.create '{"name": "media", "gid": 5500}'

# Create a user and assign to group
midclt call user.create '{
  "username": "wyatt",
  "full_name": "Wyatt",
  "group_create": true,
  "groups": [[5500]],
  "home": "/mnt/tank/share/wyatt",
  "shell": "/bin/bash"
}'

1. Navigate to Sharing > SMB Shares and click Add
2. Select the dataset to share (e.g., tank/share)
3. Configure:

• Name: The share name visible to Windows clients
• Purpose: Default (multi-protocol) is fine for most cases
• SMB/CIFS Options:
• Enable SMB Multichannel if you have multiple NICs
• Set AIO (Asynchronous I/O) to enabled for better performance

4. Under ACL, set permissions. For a simple homelab:

• truenas_admin: Full Control
• media_user: Read

From a Windows client:

\\192.168.1.10\share

From Linux:

# Mount SMB share
sudo mount -t cifs //192.168.1.10/share /mnt/nas -o username=wyatt,uid=1000,gid=1000

Enable SMB3 on the TrueNAS CLI for better performance:

midclt call smb.update '{"smb3": true, "aio": true, "protocol": "SMB3"}'

1. Navigate to Sharing > NFS Shares and click Add
2. Select the dataset
3. Set the authorized hosts/network: 192.168.1.0/24
4. Maproot user if needed (for root squashing behavior)

From a Linux client:

# Mount NFS share
sudo mount -t nfs 192.168.1.10:/mnt/tank/media /mnt/nfs-media

# Add to /etc/fstab for persistent mount
192.168.1.10:/mnt/tank/media /mnt/nfs-media nfs defaults,_netdev 0 0

NFSv4 is used by default. NFS is preferred over SMB for Linux-to-Linux file transfers due to lower Overhead and better POSIX compatibility.

ZFS snapshots are instantaneous, space-efficient point-in-time copies. They are the backbone of any Sane backup strategy.

1. Navigate to Data Protection > Periodic Snapshot Tasks
2. Click Add
3. Configure:

• Dataset: Select the dataset (e.g., tank/media)
• Naming Schema: auto-%Y-%m-%d_%H-%M (or use custom-%Y%m%d-%H%M%S)
• Schedule: 0 */6 * * * (every 6 hours) for important data, daily for media
• Lifetime: 2w (2 weeks) or 30d for longer retention
• Recursive: Check this to snapshot child datasets too

# Take a manual snapshot
zfs snapshot tank/share@before-upgrade

# List snapshots
zfs list -t snapshot -o name,creation,used

# Rollback to a snapshot (destroys newer snapshots!)
zfs rollback tank/share@before-upgrade

# Clone a snapshot (read-write copy, no data copied until modified)
zfs clone tank/share@before-upgrade tank/share-restored

# Destroy old snapshots to free space
zfs destroy tank/share@auto-2025-01-01_00-00

Snapshots on the same pool are not backups. If the pool dies, the snapshots die with it.

1. Navigate to Data Protection > Replication Tasks
2. Click Add
3. Select source and destination datasets (can be on the same server or a remote TrueNAS)
4. Configure schedule and retention
5. Use SSH key authentication for remote replication

For true offsite backup:

• Rclone + B2/Backblaze: Install rclone as a TrueNAS App or run from a cronjob. Back up critical datasets to Backblaze B2 cloud storage.
• rsync to another machine: Simple but effective for a second local machine.

# Example: rclone cron job to Backblaze B2
rclone sync /mnt/tank/backup b2:my-bucket/truenas-backup \
  --bwlimit 10M \
  --log-file /var/log/rclone-backup.log \
  --exclude "*.tmp"

TrueNAS SCALE has a Cloud Sync feature under Data Protection that supports S3, Backblaze B2, Google Drive, and more. Set up a scheduled sync task from the web UI.

Navigate to System > Alerts. Configure alert rules for:

• Pool capacity > 80%
• Drive temperature > 45°C
• SMART test failures
• Scrub errors
• UPS battery low

1. Navigate to System > Advanced > Email
2. Configure SMTP settings (Gmail App Passwords work well)
3. Under System > Alert Settings, enable email notifications

For deeper monitoring, deploy the TrueNAS Apps for Prometheus and Grafana:

# TrueNAS exposes metrics at
curl http://192.168.1.10:9090/metrics

Import community dashboards for ZFS pool health, drive temperatures, and network throughput.

1. Connect the UPS to the TrueNAS server via USB
2. Navigate to System > UPS
3. Configure:

• Driver: usbhid-ups
• Port: Auto-detect or /dev/ugenX.Y (check with upsc)
• Mode: Master if this is the only NUT server, Netserver for network clients
• Shutdown: Set to UPS reaches low battery

4. Add connected devices that should also shut down

Test the UPS connection:

# Verify UPS is detected
upsc ups@localhost

# Expected output includes battery charge, load, and status

Regular scrubs read every block on the pool and verify checksums, detecting silent data corruption (bit rot).

1. Navigate to Data Protection > Scrub Tasks
2. Click Add
3. Select the pool and set schedule to monthly
4. Enable email notification on scrub completion

# Manually start a scrub
zpool scrub tank

# Check scrub status
zpool status tank

Never skip scrubs. A monthly scrub schedule is the minimum for data integrity assurance.

# Check drive model
smartctl -i /dev/sda | grep "Rotation Rate"
# If it says "5400 rpm" but the model is known SMR, replace it

# Check app storage usage
df -h /mnt/.ix-apps

# Pool health
zpool status -v

# Dataset properties
zfs get all tank/media | grep -E "compress|atime|recordsize|sync"

# Real-time I/O stats
zpool iostat -v 1

# Find what is using space
du -sh /mnt/tank/*/
zfs list -o name,used,avail,refer -s used

# Destroy all snapshots matching a pattern
zfs list -t snapshot -o name | grep "auto-2024-" | xargs -I{} zfs destroy {}

# SMART test on all drives
for drive in /dev/sd?; do
  smartctl -t long "$drive"
done

# Check SMART results after test completes (several hours)
for drive in /dev/sd?; do
  echo "=== $drive ==="
  smartctl -l selftest "$drive" | tail -5
done

This topic covers the essential concepts and techniques related to setting up home server, including key principles and practical applications.

Key concepts include:

• core concepts and definitions
• key principles and frameworks
• practical applications
• common techniques and methods
• evaluation and critical analysis

A thorough understanding of these concepts, combined with regular practice and review, is essential for mastery of this topic.

Worked examples demonstrating the application of key concepts are covered in the detailed sub-pages linked above.