Just one remark: use private VLAN’s when you use a management VLAN and consider using a (virtualised) bastion host with two NIC’s and a configured firewall on it for management work. It should be obvious but I cannot count the cases where people have defined properly VLAN’s, created firewall rules, logged everything but didn’t realise they created a giant backdoor and left it wide open.

Received it the day before we left on our annual holiday and felt like a child receiving a great gift and being told he can’t open the box for the next two weeks. :) The good: it shipped as promised, I ordered the 96 GB ECC memory but they only declared the bare metal value of the NAS so VAT was calculated on the NAS. The bad: the hardware contains only one storage controller so TrueNAS in Proxmox is out of the question for me. It is my mistake. I asked AOOSTAR if the box supports TRueNAS in Proxmox and they said yes. I wrongly concluded that the box contained at least a second SATA-controller so one could pass through the controller and the disks connected to it to TrueNAS as required (https://www.truenas.com/blog/yes-you-can-virtualize-freenas/). Unfortunately, that is not the case. You can pass through the disks without problems though. It is a pitty. Adding a dedicated supported HBA for the HDD’s costs approx 30 USD. No other complaints so for. I have installed both TrueNAS 25.04.02 (bare metal) and Proxmox 9.x on it and did some tests and everything works fine. Passing through the disks works fine so if one feels brave, it is possible to run TrueNAS in Proxmox using a shared controller but with dedicated disks. This configuration has been known to create issues so I wouldn’t recommend it. I’m currently investigating https://www.napp-it.org/doc/downloads/proxmox-aio.pdf to use Proxmox as ZFS based NAS. Napp-it for ZFS-management and cockpit with the 45 plugin https://github.com/45Drives/cockpit-file-sharing should cover my needs. The napp-it website is horrible and the documentation is not much better (there are some errors) but the product looks to be quite good and has a solid reputation since 2009. The bios is almost bare. Don’t expect a lot of options to tune power consumption. I will upload some screenshots later if you are interested but I’m on the train to work now so I have no access.

They have two options now: the Apacer memory that I received in my NAS and is quite frankly not the fastest and a Kingston option. Somewhere in the Q&A, the exact type they offer is mentioned. I looked it up and it was both faster and easily available at a lower price in Europe. I have no clue what is going in the USA with the pricing and the tariffs.