Porkchop Sandwiches

In 78 days I will hit the 5 year service mark with my Plex server! Incredibly exciting time. I’ve had plexpy, now known as Tautulli installed since day 1 so I will also get to review 5 whole years worth of viewing stats 🙂 Data science is fun and a major reason I started this whole project in the first place.

I’ll try to mark this milestone with a salute to Plex, self hosted media server enthusiasts and the FOSS community (long live open-source!) so stay tuned!

*Quick note: the text inside <> is console derived, either output or commands

Scenario: Two TrueNAS hosts; inside of a jail, hosted on Server1, mount an NFS share residing on Server2.
– Server2 exports </mnt/dozer/test> as an NFS share
– Created mount point in jail <mkdir -p /mnt/nfs>
– Tried <mount -t nfs Server2:/mnt/dozer/test /mnt/nfs> in jail

I’ve tried for quite some time now to accomplish this but to no avail… UNTIL TODAY! I sat down, thought about it good and hard and then had a crazy idea; What if I mounted that NFS share from Server2 on Server1 (proper) first then created a mount point in the jail configuration for that path?

On Server1 (proper): <mkdir -p /mnt/nfstest> then
<mount -t nfs Server2:/mnt/dozer/test /mnt/nfstest>
In jail on Server1:
<mkdir -p /mnt/nfstest> then
<mount -t nfs Server1:/mnt/nfstest /mnt/nfs>

But that didn’t frickin’ work so I thought about it some more, for about 5 seconds, then I began Google Fu’ing. With new key words in mind from the crazy idea experiment I was able to find at least a dozen posts/articles outlining the solution I’ve been searching for!

Now, this is NOT supported by iX or the TrueNAS project BUT it’s totally doable and it works exactly as it should. I had the first part right, SSH to Server1 then using the console, mount the NFS share from Server2. Here are the missing pieces;

1. When mounting the share on Server1, do it inside of an existing dataset instead of creating a new mount path (/mnt/dozer/nfstest vs /mnt/nfstest).
2. An NFS share on Server1 has to be created via the webUI, using the new console-mounted directory from above.

Finally, via the webUI on Server1, create a new mount point in the jail configuration using mount path from missing piece #1 as the source and wherever you want the destination to be inside the jail ( I used </mnt/test> ).

• Using console on Server1: <mkdir -p /mnt/dozer/nfstest> then
  <mount -t nfs Server2:/mnt/dozer/test>
• Using webUI on Server1: Create an NFS share using the path </mnt/dozer/nfstest>
• Inside jail on Server1 using console: <mkdir -p /mnt/nfs> then
  <mount -t nfs Server1:/mnt/dozer/nfstest /mnt/nfs>

And there you have it… remote NFS mounted storage inside of a jail. 🙂

RRD Summary, monthly, from Jan 1st 2021 to the present

Here’s a screeny of the RRD totals for 2020. There are two months missing… dunno what happened. And you can see that I closed out the year with a bang 🙂

I upgraded to gigabit internet from Ziply Fiber on Friday!!!

Here’s a screenshot of my firewall’s total RRD WAN summary for traffic exceeding 1TB in a month.

#reminder to write this tale

I’ll add more writing later but I wanted to post the gist right way. I setup Proxmox two nights ago and have been playing around. I realized I had a Mellanox ConnectX EN 10GbE card in there and have tried for hours to get it working, finally got it! I just ran an iperf3 test between Proxmox and FreeNAS and here’s the result…

I use a browser plugin on all of my machines (3 laptops, 2 desktops) called Group Speed Dial by Fast Addons. A gentleman by the name of Juraj Mäsiar is the sole, full-time developer there, like a one-man band. I’ve been using this extension for about 2 years and couldn’t be happier.

Recently one of my laptops began to throw an error when I would open my Group Speed Dial page. I tried a number of things to alleviate the issue but to no avail. So I copy/pasted the error message into an email and sent it off. I’ve submitted error logs and diagnostic data to quite a few projects over the years, this ain’t my first rodeo, and one maaaaybe two times have I actually heard back… a week later… from some rando who may or may not be on the project and it was usually just to say they got it or are looking into it or give me some troubleshooting steps to try (all of which I’ve probably already tried). BUT this guy emailed me back about 5 hours later, thanked me for sending in the bug report and asked for more detailed info (one or two things I hadn’t even thought of yet). THAT’S CUSTOMER SERVICE!!! And I’m only using the free version BTW. So I bought him a cup of coffee; https://Ko-fi.com/home/coffeeshop?txid=a68f36ab-4e8d-4a10-ac05-cd093806ab38&mode=public&img=ogiboughtsomeone

Developers work really hard and are stressed out a lot of the time so please be kind to them and support the work they do.

Well after almost 5 years the Samsung 850 EVO 250 GB SSD’s comprising the SAN pool in my FreeNAS server are beginning to fail. It’s been fun but so long. After much research and reflection I have decided to go for enterprise grade disks this time around. I settled on the Intel DC S3700 400 GB. Granted they’re used but I got a really good deal and they should still have plenty of mileage left (specs indicate their write endurance at 3.7 PB).