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TrueNAS Testing

TrueNAS Dashboard

After my experiments with OpenMediaVault (and success) I decided to try out TrueNAS Scale. The first thing I noticed about TrueNAS is that it’s legit, and by that I mean it’s described as “Open Enterprise Storage” and on the web site it says “Award-Winning Storage Trusted by Over 60% of the Fortune 500” and lists a bunch of huge corporations. Sounds legit. We’re using the Community Edition which is to say it’s the open source version with no paid support contract or whatever…

Now, besides all of that I just wanted to try it out because I had heard good things, especially about the ZFS file system, which is more advanced than RAID. I had another old Dell Optiplex laying around from a failed client project years ago but it would not boot so I was in no rush with this TrueNAS testing. Then out of nowhere my sister messaged me with a photo of an HP Z420 Workstation and said “How do I get rid of this?” and I said “I’ll take it!” So I did.

The HP Z420 Workstation is a beast of a box with space for six drives so it seemed like a good candidate for TrueNAS… so that’s what I did. (I’ll write up a separate post about the Z420 and just focus on TrueNAS for this post.)

Because I’ve already got a fully functional NAS running this one was for testing, trying, and learning.

It took some clicking around and minimal doc reading to get a pool setup, and eventually an SMB share I could store files on. I also installed some containerized applications. And then I pulled out the three drives and swapped in two other drives and set those up. Then I added back in the original drives but just two instead of three. At this point I wanted to just test things out and see what would happen. I saw warnings about degraded pools and such. Nice to see. I haven’t quite figured out exporting a pool and re-importing again, which is what I think I might need to do someday.

In my mind the nice thing about OpenMediaVault just using an ext4 drive is that if the system dies I can just plug that drive into another computer and access all the data. (It’ll need to be a computer running Linux, but that’s okay.)

For these TrueNAS drives with ZFS it doesn’t seem to be that simple. I know you can run ZFS on Linux and I’ve even found a version for macOS but I think I basically need to learn all about ZFS before I feel confident I can rescue my data if things go wrong.

The obvious solution seems to be running two (or more) TrueNAS servers so one backs up to another, and you’ve got a second one to move drives to in case the first one fails.

I’m sure there are answers to all of this… if you have them, or other suggestions, feel free to share! Otherwise just consider this my notebook where I write things down for future me.

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OpenMediaVault Update

About a month ago I got OpenMediaVault up and running on a Raspberry Pi. It worked until the disk failed so I ended up redoing it all with a real computer and a better disk. I also added a backup disk and have an rsync job running daily to do a backup.

There’s also a computer off-site that does a daily backup to the NAS via rsync over ssh. Next on the list is to do the same with a web server I’ve got running at a hosting provider.

This post is really just a check-in to say it’s been working really well. I do like OpenMediaVault for a very simple NAS solution…

That said, I’m digging into TrueNAS Scale now and it’s… a lot. Which is fine. It’s been fun comparing the two, and I’ll have a post coming to cover TrueNAS soon.

Oh, and I’m considering building a small simple NAS using OpenMediaVault to go off-site for a bit more redundancy with the backups. Stay Tuned!

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BearExporter

Codeberg release

I released the code for a Python script called BearExporter over on Codeberg.

It’s a Python script to export all of your Bear notes to Markdown files you can use with Obsidian, read in the terminal, or whatever. I originally started on this when I started using the MintBook and realized I did not have a good way of seeing any of my notes from a Linux computer.

And yes, you can export your notes in plenty of other ways, the idea with this script is that you can automate/schedule it to run whenever you want, as often as you want, for up-to-date files wherever you might need them.

As the old saying goes “it works for me!” but I know it’s not amazingly well-written code, but it is available. I’m not exactly skilled at Python but I’ll try to improve it as time allows.

The README file probably goes way too in-depth about all the shortcomings. There are times I’m proud of the code I write, and then there are times I get something to (barely) work for me and figure others might find a use for it.

I originally tried this bear_backup script but it wasn’t what I was after. But maybe it’s what you need? I should probably steal/borrow a few ideas from it to enhance my code.

Anyway, enjoy the code, use it ignore it, improve it, or tell me what to do better. :)

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Know Your Rights – Stopped by Police

The ACLU has a great guide about what to do if your are stopped by police. (And more general guides about your rights as well.)

Here’s a printable PDF guide for what to do if you are stopped. Print one and carry it with you. Print them out and give them to people you care about (which should be everyone) so they too can know what to do.

Being stopped by police is a stressful experience that can go bad quickly. Here we describe what the law requires and also offer strategies for handling police encounters. We want to be clear: The burden of de-escalation does not fall on private citizens — it falls on police officers. However, you cannot assume officers will behave in a way that protects your safety or that they will respect your rights even after you assert them. You may be able to reduce risk to yourself by staying calm and not exhibiting hostility toward the officers. The truth is that there are situations where people have done everything they could to put an officer at ease, yet still ended up injured or killed.

Ask if you are free to leave. If the officer says yes, calmly and silently walk away. If you are under arrest, you have a right to know why.

And here’s a PDF of the whole page… as a backup. Just in case.

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OpenSCAD Springy Example

Previously on… the Fediverse! I posted about this springy thing I was designing, and I said:

I’m trying to come up with a good way of creating this in OpenSCAD… I have something using a bunch of hull’d cylinders but I’m wondering if there is a better/easier way to do it.

First of all, I love OpenSCAD. I also love sharing. I was really pleased to see people coming up with ideas. Hey, maybe we should make a weekly OpenSCAD Coding Club!

deshipu suggested Inkscape for a 2D vector and then importing.

Bryan Fink suggested rotate_extrude which I often forget about. I would have never thought to use it for this. See Bryan’s example.

Makerblock came through and wrote a whole post about this thing!

Alistair Buxton also wrote some code you should check out and used the 2D parts of OpenSCAD I usually ignore.

And oh yeah! Here’s mine:

See the code here! This also spurred me to finally make that OpenSCAD repo on Codeberg. I’d like to fill it with bit and pieces of things. I already share a bunch of designs on Printables but this repo will be more code focused and have things that are not finished projects. (Though I may also add finished projects.)

Basically I only know how to do these things because others did them and were willing to share. I’m doing my part… are you!?