My NAS died…

First off I want to make it clear that this video is sponsored by Pulseway – which is rather good timing (it’s as if we planned this…), because I could use some remote management right about now! This is my NAS. Well, this is one of them. One I built a number of years ago now, but it’s one that has finally kicked the bucket and I need to do something about it.

For some context, this system actually served multiple purposes. Initially I had it running FreeNAS (now TrueNAS), but quickly converted it to run ESXI, a level 1 or ‘bare metal’ hypervisor, so I could run FreeNAS in a virtual machine, alongside Ubuntu as a server.

So, what went wrong? Well, just a few days after getting my UPS battery backup running I had multiple sudden power outages. Most devices were fine, but the relatively cheap SSD I was using as my boot drive started throwing errors. Strangely, solid state drives don’t usually display any issues before they fail, they tend to just… stop working. Whereas spinning media like hard drives tend to start giving you warning signs long enough ahead to recover any data. Happily this drive did throw a SMART error, nothing so serious that the machine would never boot again, and none of the data on the FreeNAS hard drives was properly at risk, but to be safe I cloned the SSD to another drive and booted the system from that.

From there I copied all of the data to one of my other NAS units, and importantly for me, recovered the .vmdk virtual disk for the Ubuntu VM as that’s where we run some of the staging and testing for Locally Links. That ended up being a bit of a pain, but I have it out now, so let’s get it up and running on my UNRAID Overkill NAS!

First off I’ll need to get the VM running. I’ve copied the .vmdk file over, so I just need to assign a couple cores – I have 48 threads in total so I think I can spare 4 for this – alongside 4GB of RAM, and I’ll have to assign the VMDK as the primary disk in the XML view as the GUI doesn’t let you select it. And that’s it, if I log into the VNC viewer you can see it’s live and running fine. So now we can get Pulseway installed – wget the .deb package and use dpkg to install it. You can then run the registration command and ping through the setup. Everything is nice and simple, all the defaults all make sense so it’s quick and easy.

I also run a Windows VM here I use as a rendering server, so installing Pulseway on that too would be excellent! The installation process is even easier on Windows, just download in the installer, spam next, then you’ll be greeted with the configurator where you can log in and set up the frankly insane number of options. Everything from service and program monitoring, to remote desktop control and scheduled tasks. It’s worth noting you can also install their client on MacOS too!

Let’s fire up their web client. From here you can manage all your systems, like switching it on or off, run updates (especially while you are away!), or use their automation tools. You can write your own scripts, or use their built-in options, and if you upgrade using the link the description below for a full 20% off you can make use of their remote desktop tools too!

There’s also their mobile apps – if you have an iOS device you can even use voice commands to control your systems! On Android you get the same sort of controls you get on their web UI, where you can control and update your systems from anywhere. This is especially useful as you can get push notifications alerting you if something has gone wrong. For me that’d be if my docker containers crash, or if Media Encoder isn’t running on my rendering server – you can set that up in the client. On Windows that’s under “Notifications”, then “Processes”, but there’s also countless options for everything from the server being powered off to the hard drive being full or memory utilisation being too high.

You can try Pulseway for free with the link in the description, and if you want to make use of their full suite of features you can get 20% off using that link too! As for me, I’m gonna go back to making sure my data is backed up and secure… And moving my QNAP NAS to be hooked up via my UPS!