I bought into the ecosystem while taking my networking cert classes back in 2017. They were much cheaper than Cisco gear for business-grade networking, and overall I’ve been happy with them.
Their security offerings are locally managed, and you can make local accounts, but I just bought a NAS from them and I had to sign in with my ubiquiti account first before I could make a local account, and it seems the cloud account has some privileges that you can’t give to local super admins.
So now I’m having second thoughts. I figure since it’s enterprise-grade stuff they can’t really make it cloud-dependent like you see on the consumer side since a lot of companies need air-gapped networks. On the other hand, on those occasions that I didn’t have internet access and hadn’t yet made a local-only account, I was locked out, so…
Regarding the NAS specifically, I use a TruNAS system at work and it works well enough on a rack server, but since it uses ZFS I don’t know it would be good for home use. What alternatives are there?
Are there any truly FOSS networking options? I figure especially on the switching side you need purpose-built hardware, right? There aren’t generic motherboards with 48 network ports you can buy.
I like my Unifi setup, I’m just scared of a rug pull.
I have an edge router and switch, and two unifi APs. All accounts running locally. Works fine for my uses, though I think if I had it to do over again I’d investigate pfsense or opnsense. Not sure about hardware tho.
TrueNAS is all I’ve used for my home for the better part of a decade. It’s been fine, what is your concern?
ZFS seems pretty RAM hungry and I don’t believe you can add new drives to an existing volume.
This is a common misunderstanding.
Short version; ZFS isn’t RAM hungry, it’s RAM aware. If your system has unused memory lying around, ZFS will use it to improve read performance. But it will give up that memory the moment anything else needs it.
No longer true
It does take time to free ram. If you need the ram for other things it is best practice to limit the arc cache
Only when you have to write out to swap. In the case of something like ZFS, it stores data in RAM, looks for it there, then looks on the disk. So freeing up the RAM is effectively instantaneous; you just mark the space as free, then the other process writes into it.
Oh hell yeah, I didn’t know about the raidz extension. That’s amazing!
It’s in the latest TrueNAS versions. https://www.truenas.com/blog/electric-eel-openzfs-23/
Does TruNAS support this feature?
Related, will TruNAS work on a mini PC with an attached DAS?
How is the DAS connected?
It’s part of ZFS 2.3.0, so it just depends what version TrueNAS is shipping with.