Infrastructure

I’m going to run TimescaleDB in Portainer to host my weather database for my yard and irrigation project. I decided to use Portainer just because it’s easier to use than the Docker CLI, in my opinion. Portainer is available as a native app within TrueNAS as well, so everything will be nice and smooth. TimescaleDB was my choice over vanilla PostgreSQL or other options because it’s great for time series data, which is what I’ll be dealing with in the weather data. It automatically creates chunks within what are called hypertables, which allows you to manage large quantities of data in a time series easily and offers features like continuous aggregates, which will be very useful for what I’ll be doing. ...

Now that the NAS is back online and has the new pool created, I’m going to dive into creating some datasets and users. In the future, I’ll create any users or groups before I create any dataset that is owned by said user or group as it’s a bit less clunky than doing what I did here. Dataset Creation I’ll start with creating a dataset for general use from endpoints like my laptop or desktop. Think PDFs, text documents, spreadsheets kind of stuff. I’ll navigate to the Datasets tab in the TrueNAS GUI, select my main pool, then select Add Dataset. This dataset will be called “docs”, I’ll select multiprotocol for the Dataset Preset and enable both SMB and NFS so it will work with both Windows and Linux. SMB name is “docs” to match the dataset name. I’m not going to set a quota (quotas would be useful for multi-user use or if I had more limited storage, but it’s just me and I have plenty of space), and I’ll leave encryption as inherited. I’ll leave the other advanced options as the default, most of them inherit from the parent pool so that’s fine by me for now and for this dataset. ...

I built a custom box to run TrueNAS a while ago but took it offline because I wasn’t really using it. Now, I’ve got a reason to bring it back online: hosting services for my yard and irrigation project. The original setup was rushed, so I wanted a plan to safely bring it back online on the new network backbone. This article mentions some IP mismatch issues, I cover that in my Network Backbone post. ...

To start my home lab journey, I decided to rebuild my network from scratch with some equipment that would allow me a bit more control than most consumer grade stuff. I thought that would be a good place to start as it supports a lot of the things I’ll be doing down the road. Hardware I went with all Ubiquiti gear for ease of use as far as pushing changes is concerned. I’ve got one control plane, and any changes are automatically applied to whatever device needs the changes applied. ...