My new NAS is now “in production” … if there is something like “production” in a home office setting. At last. It’s like with many projects. At the end they take slightly longer and had a slight budget overrun. This blog entry is about some takeaways from this project.
According to plan …
… nothing went according to plan. 1 My first plan was to build a full-flash NAS filer out of of an HP Elitedesk 800 G5. It worked reasonably well in a demo setup. I did some tests with some external SSDs (a Samsung T7 i use for transporting data for example) while waiting for two M.2 SSD. Everything looked fine. Until i tried to put my new two M.2 SSD into the chassis. Physical realities … where good ideas go to their final rest …
I hit two problems. The Kingston Fury Renegade Destroyer Rumpelstilzchen WTF?2 4TB SSD is double sided. Chips at the top and bottom of the PCB. First challenge was the screw-in/support bolt for M.2 2230 drives that pressed into the lower side of an M.2 2280 SSD, which are much longer. This is not so much of a problem, when there are no chips on the bottom side of the PCB. But with a double sides SSD it surely can be a problem.
I was able to essentially pry out this screw-in/support bolt without harming the mainboard. Not by choice, i tried to unscrew it, but then it just simply sheared off. I was pleasantly surprised that the system was still working as usually system doesn’t react so kindly to brute force. I’m still not that sure if i sheared of a glued connection or if i sheared of the bolt at its weakest point. And honestly, I’m afraid to investigate it. It still works. I’m glad about it and I don’t want to prove my luck by further disassembly of the device
However, a second problem appeared. The driver carrier for the SATA SSD (currently my boot drive) can’t be reinstalled when there is an SSD in the M.2 slot adjacent to the fan/heat spreader assembly. This M.2 is a little bit raised above the mainboard. I think it’s done this way to allow an M.2 2280 SSD to get clear of the coin cell holder. However, getting clear of the coin cell holder moves it up into the area, where the SSS carrier wants to be. The SDD touched the drive carrier for 2,5” drives quite firmly. it simply physically doesn’t fit.
My takeaway at this moment:
- Brute force is sometimes a solution - when you are lucky …
- Without a Dremel the second M.2 slot in the Mini Modell of the HP Elitedesk seem to be of rather low usefulness.
My motivation to cut into the carrier was quite low at that moment. So the Dremel stayed in my tools pile.
That said, due to the problems of expanding the Elitedesk, i decided i couldn’t proceed with my plan to have an combined low power VM server and fileserver. Dang. But hey, i had an excuse 3 for even more new hardware now.
Shuffleing around
I used a Miniforum UM890 Pro as a combined desktop/server for a while. The desktop was running in an Proxmox VM. This was the first kirby4.
However as soon as i got the HP Elitedesk 800 G5, it soon came clear to me that i could easily migrate all VMs to the new server in addition to the fileserver task and would be able to save some power. Thus, the old kirby was renamed to elfilin. And the Elitedesk was promoted to be the new kirby and got the handdrawn kirby on its case. elfilin is now my bare-metal Windows system (and overflow test rig with Virtualbox).
The new citizen of my home office
So, please welcome tachikoma5. It’s an Ugreen (yeah, the cable company) NASync DXP2800.6 It’s more or less an x86 server with an Intel N100 CPU with 8 Gigabyte memory and two drive slots for hard disks (3,5” or 2.5”) and two NVMe m.2 slots. The case is quite nice, the drive carriers are screwless. The hardware seems to be well designed. There are much more powerful variants of it, but for my current set of tasks the DXP2800 is more than sufficient.
As some of the investments were unplanned, i decided to reuse some stuff: The two WD Red 2TB disks of my old fileserver went into the new server for storing Timemachine backups. I will wait with the investment into larger rotating hard disks until i have filled up the 4 TB flash disks and then opt for the largest reasonably priced NAS disks. A 4TB WD Red used for a short time to revive an old Timecapsule (bad idea, yeah … you were right) will be the backup drive for the 4 TB flash Pool (syncing it daily).
Usecases
kirby will be now my lab VM server hosting the all the VMs I’m working with to test things out. I will install Proxmox on it as soon as I’m sure I don’t need anything from the current TrueNAS installation. My Solaris testbed VMs will run there. My Oracle Database test installations will run there. And essentially it can be switched over night.
tachikoma will be my fileserver and virtualization server for infrastructure needs, like the home assistant managing all the smart home stuff here, the heating and everything else, network services for the house and so on. It will run under TrueNAS Scale. It’s for the virtual machines and containers that must run all the time.
OverRAMing
8 Gigabyte main memory was a little bit on the low side for my requirements, so I thought about expanding the memory. I was a little bit hesitant about purchasing some as the documentation (and Intel) specifies 16 GB as the maximum memory and i didn’t want to purchase a SODIMM that had a chance of being placed on the pile of hardware components that i don’t use any longer. But then it came into my mind that i had a 32 GByte SODIMM to test this.
My UM890pro has 64 Gbytes of memory in two 32 GByte-SODIMMs. I removed a 32 GByte SODIMM from my UM890 Pro and put it into my fileserver system. The reason why i acquired 64 GB for that system was the large number of testbed VMs i sometimes use. kirby and tachikoma have together still 64 GB and that’s sufficient. And for its current task elfilin has ample main memory with 32 GByte.
Despite the mentioned memory limitation in the specification, my system works with the 32 GB SODIMM. The SODIMM is significantly overspeced, as it’s from a much more powerful system, but i will change this later to give my desktop it’s full main memory back again. Currently I don’t need it at 64 GByte.
BIOS
There is a normal x86 BIOS in this NAS system. You can enter it by Control+F2, Boot device selection with Control+F12.
Watchdog timer
There is a watchdog timer in the system. It reboots the system after 180 seconds. When you try to install a different OS on the system than the UGREEN UGOS, there is nothing keeping the watchdog from triggering. You must disable it in the BIOS.
Boot disk
The DXP2800 doesn’t have a proper boot SSD like the higher end models of UGREEN. It has a boot eMMC. This is a little bit problematic, as ixSystems (the developer of TrueNAS) decided to remove the option to configure syslog to store log data in a different dataset. Thus, you have always some writes on the boot disk for logging.
I don’t have an idea how much endurance i can expect from the eMMC storage. But i didn’t want to risk it. Thus, I switched to an external SSD in an USB/SATA enclosure with an old Samsung 850 pro with plenty residual lifetime. These SATA SSD were my flashpool on the old fileserver.
I hope they reintroduce the option to move syslog, so I can absolutely minimize writing to this non-removable storage. This would enable me to remove that kludge. With Truenas it’s not possible to partition away some storage from your NVMe disks for boot and use the rest for file storage. You need separate storage for boot. So just creating a 32 GB partition for the OS on the 4 TB NVMe drive was not an option.
I was not able to boot from the SATA disks. I didn’t investigate it further as I didn’t planed it to run it in such a configuration and so finding the reason would be only of academical interest.
Electric Eel
I couldn’t install Electric Eel (TrueNAS 24.10) on the system. There were problems with the eMMC complaining that it couldn’t find partition 2. I assume this is due to the additional devices an eMMC storage provides. However, you could work around that problem, by installing Dragonfish (TrueNAS Scale 24.04) and then update to Electric Eel.
What doesn’t work
So far, the only thing that doesn’t work are the indicator lights for disks access. Instead of … well … indicating disk accesses I have a knight rider light on the front of the case currently.
Migration
I have used TrueNAS Scale for a while now7 and wanted to migrate the disks out of my old fileserver to the new one. In my youthful recklessness I thought I could export the keying material for the encrypted datasets from the system disk in the old system, while the drives of the datasets are already in the new system. Nope. Export the keys while the system is still complete and then move the disks. Prevents you to go doing the rebuild of shame. However you should really copy them and store them safely, if you don’t already have a copy of them.8
Rube Goldberg contraption
Regarding backup. I currently thinking if i should use a Shelly Plug (i have one last spare one) and use it for the power supply of the external backup hard drive. The Rube Goldberg contraption works like this:
- Switching on the backup hard disk
- Importing the pool
- Doing my Backup
- Exporting the pool
- Switching off the backup hard disk
Why? Putting this in a script including the part where I switch the disks on and off allows me to just forget about it.
I’m unsure about this idea. I could just do this manually but manually tasks often tend to be forgotten and soon a needed backup is too old, because the last 4 weeks were too stressful in delivering a project that you desperately want to restore … right now. The main problem is that everyone able to access the script could just switch on the disk import and for example encrypt it.9
On the other side, I could just use an Proxmox Container switching the Shelly plug (which is firewalled off from the Homeassistant system) on, starting the backup remotely via SSH and then switch the disk off again. But that would be close to a Goldberg recursion.
I will probably write about It in the future.
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Wait a moment … if it’s according to my plan that nothing will go according to my plan, then something went according to my plan, and thus it would be not according to my plan and thus it would go according to my plan which is not according to my plan which is according to my plan …. i don’t have enough coffee for this thought …. ↩
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Really … who the heck is responsible for the naming of consumer products? 15-year-old male adolescents? I don’t find anything infuriating over a glorified thumb drive, and the renegadeness of such a piece of storage hardware is probably infinitesimal small. Okay, obviously the last three noun were my addition. ↩
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Strange that even when I have nobody to answer for my spending habits than myself, I still think, I need an excuse for spending. ↩
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I chose
kirbyas its hostname as it sucked up all the RaspPis in my home thus eliminating the Pi sprawl in my home. ↩ -
Tachikomas are spiderlike robots in the Ghost in a Shell universe in Stand Alone Complex and Stand Alone Complex 2nd Gig. They are used as a plot device to discuss soul and sentience the overarching topic of this anime/manga. ↩
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As usual no affiliate links, they are easy to find with the search engine of least distrust. ↩
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Honestly as a glorified Timecapsule. ↩
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Well, I had a copy of the keys. The inconvenience was that this copy is in a secure location with other important documents on an encrypted thumb drive in Hamburg in case this house burns down. Roughly 60 km away. It was easier to revert the old system temporarily to its old configuration (one disk of each mirror back into the old system) than to drive to Hamburg. There is now a second thumb drive. ↩
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Computer security really messes with your mind … ↩
