Project Overview
In the CLOIF2 (Cloud Infrastructure) module, our group of three set up and fully configured a
TrueNAS Community Edition NAS server on real enterprise server hardware. Starting from bare metal,
we covered everything from RAID controller staging, OS installation, and network configuration
through to user management, dataset creation, and client connectivity from both Windows and Linux.
Group
- Würth Eric
- Simon Max
- Kugener Sven
Hardware
We worked on an Intel SR2600URBRPR: a 2U rack-mounted server with the following specs:
- CPU: 2× Intel Xeon X5650
- RAM: 8× 8 GB (64 GB total)
- Native HDD (SATA): 2× 160 GB
- RAID HDD (SAS): 3× 146 GB via Areca RAID controller with backup battery
Software
TrueNAS Community Edition (formerly TrueNAS SCALE) is an open-source, Debian-based NAS OS
using the ZFS file system, developed by iXsystems. Free to use with the same codebase as the enterprise edition.
What We Configured
- RAID Staging: Accessed the Areca RAID controller web interface to prepare the hardware RAID array before OS installation
- OS Installation: Installed TrueNAS Community Edition on the server
- Network Configuration: Set a static IP, configured hostname, gateway, and DNS via the TrueNAS console and web UI
- Storage Pools: Created both a software RAID pool (Mirror) and a hardware RAID pool (Stripe) using ZFS
- Users & Permissions: Created SMB-enabled users and set ACL-based permissions on datasets
- File Sharing: Connected to the NAS share from a Windows client (File Explorer / SMB) and from a Linux client (Nautilus / smb://)
- iSCSI vs NFS/SMB: Studied and documented the differences between block-level (iSCSI) and file-level (NFS/SMB) storage protocols