Web login and initial configuration
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If you’re accessing TrueNAS by raw IP address, the way we are here, expect the broken lock icon in the address bar—you can’t give an SSL certificate to an IP address.
Jim Salter -
On your first login, you’ll get a small, one-time splash dialog offering you links to documentation, forums, and optional paid support.
Jim Salter -
When you expand the Storage menu on the left sidebar, the top entry is Pools. Here’s where you’ll assign your disks.
Jim Salter
Once you sit down at another computer and pull up TrueNAS Core by IP address, you’ll get a nocturnal-user-friendly Dark Web interface laying out TrueNAS’s functions. There isn’t a wizard to walk you through creating your first storage pool—you’ll need to get through that solo—but it’s not too hard. After expanding the Storage menu on the left sidebar, select Pools and click the “Add” button. This is where the fun begins.
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The most important, and easily overlooked part of this dialog—particularly if you have a ton of disks—is the free-entry text box “name”. Don’t forget to name your pool!
Jim Salter -
See that big, inviting add vdev button? It likely doesn’t do what you think it does—it’s there for adding support vdevs, not storage vdevs.
Jim Salter -
If you have a lot of disks, like we did, you’ll likely need to scroll down to find the next crucial part of the create pool dialog—the “Data Vdevs” section. Click the blue right-arrow here to add the disks you checked above.
Jim Salter -
You don’t actually need to check any of these boxes, unless you want to remove disks you’ve already inserted. Note that raidz2 is selected by default—all we need to do here is click “Create.”
Jim Salter -
If you drop down the “vdev type” list, you get “stripe” and “mirror” in addition to RAIDz1, RAIDz2, and RAIDz3.
Jim Salter -
TrueNAS really does mean “mirror” as in “one big mirror vdev” here, not a pool of mirrors. Note the estimated raw capacity: it’s the same as a single disk.
Jim Salter -
“Stripe” really means “make every one of these disks a singleton vdev,” as you can see from the total capacity.
Jim Salter
ZFS pool structure isn’t that complex: a pool consists of vdevs, and a vdev consists of disks. Each vdev may be a RAIDz striped array, a mirror array, or a single disk. Unfortunately, most users aren’t accustomed to thinking in multiple levels of organization and so conflate “pool” with “vdev” into a single, messy structure.
TrueNAS attempts to make life easier for those users without obfuscating the real structure of the system too badly. For the most part it succeeds, but it’s still a bit of an adventure figuring out how the interface maps to the underlying reality on your first trip through. If you have lots of physical drives, the problems get a little worse—the “pool name” text box is visually understated, and since it sits above the list of drives, you might miss out on it entirely and wonder why TrueNAS refuses to validate your entry once you click “Create” at the bottom of the screen.
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With our eight physical drives selected, TrueNAS defaulted to creating a single RAIDz2 vdev out of them—which is what most users will likely prefer. You can change this by clicking the vdev type and selecting RAIDz1, 2, or 3, or going with “Mirror” or “Stripe.”
Selecting “Mirror” turns all eight disks into a single eight-wide mirror vdev—which probably isn’t what users who click that selection with that many drives actually want, but we appreciate the literalness of it. The existence of “Stripe” soured us again a bit, as it’s the one entry on the list that isn’t a vdev type at all. Instead, it takes all selected disks and makes individual single-disk vdevs from them.
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After changing our selection back to RAIDz2, we’re given a last chance to bail before nuking their partition tables and adding them to the pool as a new vdev.
Jim Salter -
We haz pool! Yay!
Jim Salter -
The gear icon off to the right exposes the option to add vdevs, scrub the pool, check its status, or export it.
Jim Salter
Having explored all the vdev type options, we changed back to the default RAIDz2 and clicked Create. After one final confirmation, we had our storage pool—and options to export it, add vdevs to it, scrub it, check its status, or expand it.
To create my usual preference for pool structure—a pool of two-wide mirror vdevs—we would have needed to create it one vdev at a time, selecting only two disks and creating a mirror vdev, then using the gear icon here to return and add more vdevs until we were done. Similarly, we could have created two separate four-wide RAIDz1 or RAIDz2 vdevs this way.
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Joining an Active Directory domain
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We’re going to join a Windows Active Directory Domain here, which largely avoids the need to set up individual users on the NAS itself.
Jim Salter -
Joining the domain is as simple as it can be—enter the AD domain name, a domain name and password with privileges to add a machine to AD, and check “Enable.”
Jim Salter -
Active Directory domain join completed in well under one second—so rapidly, we felt the need to check Active Directory Users and Computers to make sure it worked.
Jim Salter
Joining TrueNAS to a domain allows you to take advantage of domain single sign-on (SSO). Instead of having to laboriously set up users on the NAS to match all the users on your network, TrueNAS can just consume the existing directory structure, which also avoids the need to update passwords on the NAS separately from the passwords on the users’ PCs.
This, of course, requires that you have a Windows domain in the first place. For that, you’ll need a copy of Windows Server running as domain controller, and you will need an actual domain set up and working prior to all this. You’ll also need to make certain that the TrueNAS Core machine’s DNS source is an Active Directory domain controller.
Assuming you have all those things, the domain join process in TrueNAS Core works lightning fast; it’s enormously faster than joining an actual Windows PC to the domain. Well under one second after clicking “Save,” we were joined to the domain—so rapidly that we went and checked Active Directory Users and Computers on the domain controller. Yep, there we were, all right!