I’m now seeing a minor issue with the TrueNAS box - it’s not taking the password I have stored in my manager (though I’ve been meaning to update it and may have done so and forgotten to update my documentation).
Plugged a monitor into the box and I’m not getting a signal. So I’m going to try a blind “10, Enter” to reboot and see if the video output comes back so I can set a new password and regain control.
It’s running fine otherwise - Plex works locally and the file storage is all running fine. So I’m not rushing to try to break it.
I may try a blind password reset using online documentation of the process to just type with no video output to watch, or I may need to plug a video card in temporarily if the onboard is toast.
I’ve done a reinstall of FreeNAS before in testing, and that worked fine with no data loss but I haven’t done TrueNAS (shouldn’t be any different) and never done it with a Plex Jail container. I really don’t want to re-index all my libraries again. That takes for-frikken-ever. (I’m a digital hoarder, hence the monstrous TrueNAS array for storage.)
But in the meantime the only problem I have is a “simple” password reset, which if I don’t investigate remains true and doesn’t become a more complicated and worrisome issue.
Had some network mayhem interrupt me from some serious professional-grade ignoring of this problem. (I also recently started a new dream job so it was easy to just put things off.)
Anyway, I had to abandon the old 10.x.x.x/24 network I was on because something went entirely off the rails and the new hardware I had to shift to - for reasons that make me irrationally angry - won’t allow a /24 subnet on a 10.x.x.x network. Well of course the TrueNAS box is static’d, so I have to get control of it to fix that, and Plex not being accessible outside the network is annoying. It being inaccessible inside? Yeah, not gonna fly.
Couldn’t get a video signal from it. Pressed “11, Enter, y, Enter” and got a shutdown. Fired it back up, boom, video output and got everything back.
So long story short - if you don’t have video output on a TrueNAS box you probably need a reboot. Then you can reset the root password easily and save yourself a bunch of problems.
Oh, and the Plex instance runs properly again. No idea why - I didn’t fix anything. Just the typical “have you tried turning it off and on again” IT magic.
Ever come across ISP hardware that wasn’t wildly behind the times?
Me neither.
“You can’t use a Class C subnet on a Class A network!” Seriously? If I want to set this as a /22 network just do the F-in math. You’re a damn computer, not a network engineer from 4 decades ago. This isn’t hard.
My guess is that the ISP simply locks that stuff down to prevent stupid users from breaking their stuff by putting random numbers in. Fine, I 100% understand that. I’ve worked IT long enough to understand there is utterly no limit to the creative stupidity of end-users.
However.
You don’t let them configure the WAN port whatsoever so you, the ISP, always have access from that end. Whack the factory reset when someone does that, and let the rest of us break (or not) our stuff as we see fit.
But no. We have to live with the lowest-common-denominator.
And now I need to build an entirely redundant ridiculously resilient home network because my wife and I both work from home and I’m completely fed up with stupid equipment failures stealing half my weekend putting things back together again.
Perfect world: something breaks, system emails me something broke and the automatic failover cut everything over to the standby network. Then I can fix the offline primary at my leisure and set it as standby once it’s ready.
