Well, the plan was to install the hard drives and SSD into the computer tower, and run an install of TrueNAS, and then spend the rest of the weekend of the 14th transferring files over and configuring my various media server programs – particularly Kavita and Jellyfin. Things didn’t go according to plan.
The first problem was twofold. First, I was using Rufus to create a bootable USB thumb drive for installing the OS, and the BIOS on this computer, which dated back to 2012, didn’t like it. GRUB would attempt to load off the flash drive, fail (without showing me an error message), and then restart. Eventually, this led me to switch to Ventoy as the boot loader. That part appears to have worked, and honestly, it should also be useful for doing the OS install on the next build down the road, but that’s down the road. Second, the computer’s BIOS was set to treat SATA as IDE instead of ACHI, so I had to flip that setting as well.
After that, I was able to run the install, and, at first glance, everything seemed to be coming up Milhouse. Except that the computer wasn’t outputting video to the monitor once it booted into TrueNAS. That’s fine, I thought, the computer’s supposed to run headless anyway. So I went into my main computer, accessed the router, and looked for the server’s IP address… and found that it wasn’t there. So I restarted the computer and checked for link lights on the switch I’d set up and on the Ethernet card on the computer itself. The link and activity lights turned on during boot, but the computer was not present on the network.
Just for the heck of it, I loaded a Debian Live USB image onto the flash drive and tried loading it, and got the same display issue. I have a laptop that doesn’t have an Ethernet port, so I’ve purchased a USB Ethernet adapter for it, and I’m going to use it to test the Ethernet connections to the office where I set up the computer. If those are active, then it sounds like I’m potentially shelling out a chunk of change for a bespoke NAS from QNAP or elsewhere.
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