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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • I’ve also recently built my own NAS and I’ve gone through similar considerations. One of my mayor decisions was not to use btrfs because it’s not recommended for Raid Z1/Raid 5. With that, I landed on ZFS and TrueNAS Scale. Note that RAID expansion should be landing in both very soon.

    Things with TrueNAS were pretty easy, very quick, and everything worked nicely. However, I noticed that it was constantly accessing the disks and preventing them from spinning down. I really wanted to keep the power consumption low (<20 W idle), so I eventually decided to just go with Vanilla Debian + ZFS. I can recommend that if you want to tinker with things yourself. Otherwise, I’d recommend TrueNAS Scale.

    As for migration, you might be able to create a degraded pool initially, copy over the data, and add the parity disk last. Raid expansion would ofc also help there…









  • Thanks for trying it out on your own system!

    In my case, the problem was that the disk never showed up in the Fedora installer. I’ve quickly reproduced the issue in a VM (but I originally noticed it on bare metal):

    Installation Destination

    As you can see in fdisk, the disk (/dev/sda) has been recognized correctly by the kernel and works as expected. But somehow the installer only shows the “internal” /dev/vda.

    After some further investigation, this seems to be related to the specific USB drives. I tried three different ones. It failed on a USB stick and the original external NVME enclosure. However, it did accept my USB to SATA adapter. So I guess I could install Fedora on my 10-year old HDD… 😐



  • Ah, that would put a bit of complication into things. If you want to actually accomplish this though, you should largely start with the same steps as a standard system install, using a second USB flash drive to write the distro onto the external SSD, leaving enough space to build the rest of the partitions you need.

    I’ve actually tried to install Fedora on an USB SSD to play around with it. But somehow the installer just refused to select the second USB drive as an installation target. I looked for quite some time but couldn’t find a way to do it. I ended up trying to install it manually like Arch (for fun), but never got a bootable system 😅 I was able to install Arch and NixOS on the same drive without issue.

    I’m actually not sure how OP could achieve something close to what they’re looking for… A regular installation certainly seems like the right choice, but that may require using an internal drive.










  • Nah, it’s been upstream since RHEL locked down. Rocky’s been doing some funky stuff though.

    AlmaLinux mostly ships packages that are maintained by Red Hat for RHEL, which is why I called it effectively a downstream. But maybe we can just agree that they’re related and it’s complicated 😅

    Good thing there’s flatpak, snap, appimage, nix, guix, distrobox, etc. to keep you up to date. The question is then: do you mind if your DE and drivers don’t change for years. And that’s perfectly fine for a lot of people.

    Yes, the situation has certainly improved, especially for GUI applications. But there’s always some trade-offs involved with those alternative packaging options. The nice thing is that you can freely choose if you want such a very-LTS option, or something fresher :)