TrueNAS Scale Initial Setup
Setting up a TrueNAS Scale server on bare metal. I purchased a server from eBay and it has been sitting in my rack waiting for me to buy some new HDD. I initially installed Unraid on it, but I already have a functional Unraid server.
My first foray into the home server space was on FreeNAS back in 2011 or so. It was an ok system, but it had a clunky interface and installing applications on it through jails was a pain for me. I moved over to Unraid after that and it has been a solid solution for many years.
Recently I decided to setup a Proxmox cluster. This lead me down the path of wanting to install a TrueNAS system.
The Hardware
I purchased a used 2U Supermicro on eBay.
Supermicro 2U 12 Bay Server X9DRI-LN4F+ 2x Xeon E5-2630 V2 32GB
The 32GB of RAM is EEC, but it is 8x 4GB sticks of
The Installation
As soon as I powered on the server I knew it was going to be loud. The fans were set to full speed. That's not a problem for a datacenter, but in the home lab environment, it does not pass the wife acceptance factor. So my first task was to figure out how to tune the fans. It turns out that it isn't too hard if you can login to the IPMI, which is the only location I could source to adjust the fan speed.
My first issue was gaining access to the needed IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface). My router immediately gave it an IP, but the default username and password did not work. I followed the official guide from Supermicro by running a python script that would reset the password. I don't have much experience in running python code or even setting up an environment to execute the code.
I decided to spin up an LXC on my Proxmox server so I would have a fresh OS install to setup python and run the script provided by Supermicro. I found an easy to follow install tutorial for installing python on the Debian LXC. I updated the config files per the documentation provided by Supermicro. It seemed to work, but it still would not let me log into the web UI for IPMI.
After having to success with the Supermicro python script, even though it still provided me with a "SUCCESS" prompt, I decided to just install TrueNAS to the boot drive I just installed. Flashing the USB via Rufus was straightforward. Selecting the USB in the boot menu on the server was also simple.
As soon as I logged into the new system, I immediately found out that the HBA was in IR mode, meaning that it would not show me the individual drives, but rather just one drive.
Post Installation
TrueNAS Scale seems to be a great improvement over my initial install of FreeNAS 7 back in 2011. I would highly recommend checking it out if you are currently on Unraid and are looking for a new challenge.
