Whitney Krape

Category: TrueNAS

  • Separate Docker Compose containers as an alternative to TrueNAS

    TrueNAS has running been excellently on a random collection of HDDs, 9th Gen Intel, and older NVidia GPU parts but it can be a lot to manage. Enabling and discovering apps on TrueNAS is easy but, in my experience, fully configuring the apps can be more difficult than than editing Docker Compose files. So when it came time to replace as many cloud services as possible with 1 N150 Mini PC, I decided to use Docker Compose instead of TrueNAS or another more managed solution. Currently the system is running:

    1. Samba file sharing, general file management.
    2. Anytype noting Server.
    3. LEMP Server.
    4. Kimai Time Tracking.
    5. NextCloud Contacts and Calendar Server.
    6. Plex Video Server.
    7. JellyFin Music Server.

    Everything works a treat. Need to implement backups to TrueNAS (which it excels at) but otherwise I find it much easier to manage and add services with single docker-compose.yml files rather than going through a UI. The real test is when I start to try out Kubernetes.

    Updated and Retried on Ubuntu 25.04 12/01/25

  • MemTest PSA, Run MemTest before NAS OS Setup

    Pretty much the title. TrueNAS installed, ran, and mostly worked on RAM that threw so many errors in MemTest I’m surprised the system posted at all. TrueNAS, being ZFS based, uses RAM heavily for caching, reading, and writing so data was getting corrupted in weird ways with confusing errors. What made it hard to pin down was that the system ran, created pools, and overall worked unexpectedly well where another OS probably would have failing during install; in a way, the simplicity of TrueNAS hid hardware instability. The errors only showed up when starting to work with data.

    Even if you experience issues with a long running, otherwise issue free system, memtest as a first troubleshooting step. RAM can go bad over time (though that happens less often.)

    Updated 2025/11/11