Here’s one more opinion for you.

Running a NAS on Debian is a great idea if you don’t mind being responsible for all of the details that TrueNAS abstracts away. One thing I’d consider in your shoes is to use Proxmox VE rather than vanilla Debian. I say this because PVE uses a kernel with ZFS built in, so there’s no fiddling with DKMS to get it to work; it just treats it as a first-class file system (including on root). Having said that, either is a perfectly good choice.

If you want a UI, I’d heartily recommend Cockpit, which is included in the repos (just apt install cockpit). If you go the PVE way, you’ve got a couple options. You could either virtualize your existing TrueNAS, passing through the disks or (and this is my preference) let the host handle all the ZFS stuff and create an LXC container that just deals with filesharing. You’d bindmount a directory from the host that could be shared out via SMB and this is where I’d use Cockpit to manage the shares.

The PVE route makes adding VMs and containers pretty quick. I haven’t run into any issues passing through a GPU to either a VM or LXC, which can then be used inside a docker container.

In answer to the common pitfalls question, I think the biggest thing I see is that it’s important to document exactly what TrueNAS is doing for you. Did you encrypt the ZFS pool? Make sure you have the keys to unlock it and arrange for your next OS to do so gracefully. Are you managing snapshots and replication in TrueNAS? Document and adapt that. Something like sanoid/syncoid can manage this on a Debian system. How about monitoring? Don’t forget to set up notifications for disk failures. Any other services you’re using? NFS, iSCSI, cronjobs? Take care notes of everything because that’s the stuff that’ll be easy to miss if you jump straight to overwriting your old boot disk.

The way I handle this is to have two VMs running in separate hosts, each running my reverse proxy along with keepalived. I resolve my subdomains to the keepalived shared address and then keep the reverse proxy config in git with a cron job to pull updates.

If I remember correctly, that was largely in consideration of the large corpus of docker-packaged projects that could be used as a pre-built app ecosystem. That makes a lot of sense for anyone who really wants an appliance-like all-in-one system with minimal setup.

That’s certainly true in terms of TrueNAS Core, but FreeBSD itself is quite active (15.0-RELEASE dropped this month), as are the others BSDs.

I’m not sure what it is, but Scale has never thrilled me. I’ve tested it a couple times and I just didn’t get along well with it. I’ve tested know Jim Salter (practicalzfs.com) has frequently recommended XigmaNAS as a strong (albeit less pretty) alternative to TrueNAS. I did some tests with that as well and it seemed perfectly fine. In the end I decided that when I migrate off of Core this winter, it’ll be to a bare metal FreeBSD system. I’m using it as an excuse to better learn that ecosystem and to bone up on ansible, which I’m using to define all of my settings.

There’s lots of good stuff on YouTube, including from David Bombal and Jeremy Cioara. If you’re more of a listening-while driving person, years ago the Security Now podcast did a “how the internet works” series that gives a terrific overview of the TCP/IP stack (it’s from 2006, but it’s still very applicable). And if you like to read, Michael Lucas just released a “Networking for Sysadmins” book, which is excellent.

To my thinking the most important difference would be mobility. Using the Synology app would probably make setup somewhat easier, but if you ever decided to leave the Synology ecosystem migration would likely be more complicated. That by itself isn’t a recommendation one way or another, but it should definitely factor into your planning.

If you’d like some separation, one option is to create a VM on TrueNAS for PBS that connects to an NFS export where all the data would be stored.

What I did in this scenario is an LXC container running PBS, which uses a bindmount for storage. That bindmount is populated via an NFS export from my NAS, mounted on the PVE host using autofs so that if it disconnects, it will reconnect as soon as it can.

If you haven’t already, check out the Awesome Open Source page’s Booking and Scheduling section.

There’s definitely nothing magic about ports 443 and 80. The risk is always that the underlying service will provide a vulnerability through which attackers could find a way. Any port presents an opportunity for attack; the security of the service is the is what makes it safe or not.

I’d argue that long tested services like ssh, absent misconfiguration, are at least as safe as most reverse proxies. That doesn’t mean to say that people won’t try to break in via port 22. They sure will—they try on web ports too.

I’m not sure if this what you’re after, but it sounded to me that you were describing monitoring. Might be worth your checking out librenms or zabbix or checkmk. Those would give you a good overview of the health of your stuff and keep track of what’s where.

I’m not familiar with Zurg, but the WebDAV connection makes me recall: doesn’t LXC require that the FUSE kernel module be loaded in order to use WebDAV?

I’ve also seen it recommended that WebDAV be setup on the host and then the mount points bind mounted into the container. Not sure if any of that helps, but maybe it’ll lead you somewhere.

That’s a great tip. I’d completely forgot you can use telnet for that. Thanks!

Thanks for the response. I really should just dive in, but I’ve got this nagging fear that I’m going to forget about some DNS record that will bork my entire mail service. It good to hear about some working instances that people are happy with.

Tainted in that the kernel and ZFS have different licenses. Not a functional impairment. I have no way to check to check a system not using ZFS. For my use case, Debian plus ZFS are PVE’s principal features.

I have synapse server running in docker on a VPS and it’s been pretty reliable. At my office I use it as sort of a self-hosted Slack replacement. For our use case, I don’t have federation enabled, so no experience on that front. It’s a small office and everyone here uses either Element or FuzzyChat on desktop and mobile. It runs behind an nginx reverse proxy and I’ve got SSO set up with Authentik and that’s worked very well. Happy to share some configs if that would be useful.

Have you by any chance documented your PMG set up? I’m also a very happy Mailcow user and spinning up PMG is something I’ve been meaning to tackle for years so I can implement archiving with mailpiler, but I’ve never really wrapped my head around how everything fits together.

Ceph isn’t installed by default (at least it hasn’t been any time I’ve set up PVE) and there’s no need to use ZFS if you don’t want to. It’s available, but you can go right ahead and install the system on LVM instead.

I think you can do the same with LUKS (https://www.cyberciti.biz/hardware/cryptsetup-add-enable-luks-disk-encryption-keyfile-linux/) if that’s your preferred route.

Another idea for you: if you use ZFS for the install, check Debian directions on OpenZFS or zfsbootmenu and you’ll get directions for an encrypted installation. You’ll be able to specify the path to a key file, which you can keep on a thumb drive. When the machine boots up, it’ll see the thumb drive and decrypt the zpool automatically; yank the thumb drive and it won’t (backup the key of course).