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Installing TrueNAS on Lockerstor AS6704T NAS

I recently bought my first NAS, the Asustor Lockerstor 4 Gen 2 AS6704T. It comes with Asustor’s own OS called Asustor Data Master (ADM), which I used to set up my NAS at first. It works, and I think you can use it for the entirety of the NAS’s lifetime - but there are still some features missing that I would like to see/use.

Mainly, the following points factored into my decision to switch to TrueNAS after one day of using the NAS:

  1. The Cloud Backup app does not encrypt the data uploaded to the cloud. Personally, I need my data encrypted if it is going to be uploaded to the cloud, so this is an important aspect. I intend to use Backblaze B2 as my cloud backup, and they’ve written a helpful article on how to set up TrueNAS to perform remote backup to their B2. This approach offers client-side encryption, encrypting the data before it is sent to the cloud.
  2. No Kubernetes CSI driver for ADM exists, so you have to use SMB, NFS, or iSCSI - whereas TrueNAS has a CSI driver that allows you to use your NAS as backing storage for container workloads.
  3. I would like to use TrueNAS (and ZFS)! :)

Backing Up ADM and Disabling the Original OS Drive

This section is heavily inspired by this blog post by Jeff Geerling and follows many of the instructions therein - mainly to document my own process but also for future safekeeping.

This step is mainly just a precaution and for future safekeeping of the original OS on the NAS:

  1. Use a USB stick with Ubuntu to boot into Live Ubuntu without installing.
    1. When booting the NAS, press F2 to enter the BIOS and change the boot order to boot from the USB.
  2. Open a terminal in Ubuntu and copy the OS onto another USB:
    1. Run lsblk and verify that a device like mmcblk0 exists with 8GB of space (this is the OS). Additionally, verify that you can see the empty USB to which we’re going to copy the OS.
    2. Run sudo dd if=/dev/mmcblk0 of=/media/ubuntu/MY_USB/adm-image.img bs=16M.

Afterward, we disable the eMMC in the BIOS by going to Advanced > Intel Advanced Menu > PCH-IO Configuration > SCS Configuration and disabling the eMMC 5.1 Controller.

Installing TrueNAS

  1. Create a bootable USB with the TrueNAS installer.
  2. Plug it into the NAS and change the boot order to boot from the USB.
  3. Boot the NAS and follow the installation instructions.

Or follow this official video from Asustor.

#nas