Greetings fellow Farmers! As one of the guys behind TrueNAS, we opted to roll an enhanced docker image that would allow our TrueNAS farmers an easier way to run Chia containerized, but not miss out on some of the other great third-party tools. Wanted to share it here with this group, since it works perfectly well for other systems that can run containers.
What’s included? Right now the official Chia app of course, but also MadMax Plotter, Bladebit, PlotMan, farmr.net, and a few other useful Linux utilities. We’re usually pretty quick to make changes as our users request them, so feel free to ask if you need something else.
Good luck and happy Farming!
https://github.com/truepool/chia-docker
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Great that you’re doing this - and thanks for sharing - this is exactly how the community should be.
I really like TrueNAS but have to say there was one person active in the forums there that soured the whole experience. I got personal messages from others about it saying don’t worry we all think he’s a dick. I honestly don’t know what can be done about it because I don’t think he does it on purpose, but my point is I know if I come back and have reasonable questions I will be made to feel like an idiot and that makes me (and others) not want to come and support your awesome product. I have decades of tech experience and am a reasonable person, so really I should not be made to feel like an idiot.
So right now I’m conflicted, I’d love to come back to TrueNAS, but when I think of TrueNAS I know I’ll have to go through the drama of having my threads have this persons opinions thrown at them, diverting from the true spirit of the community, so I don’t come back.
I expect you’ll already know who this is anyway, but feel free to DM me.
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What’s the benefit of running these containers for someone who doesn’t know anything about docker?
Ahh, not the first time I’ve had to hand out warnings and wield the mighty ban hammer on the forums 
I’ll DM you to get details, hope to see you back there!
If you run headless (using the cli) it’s a fantastic way to get chia plus a slew of utilities all in one
place. Takes the work out of compiling or having to do upgrades on your tools separately. One other advantage of running a docker image - upgrades are super fast. I’m able to update and be running in a few seconds, don’t even miss a single block challenge
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Ahhh I see, will definitely check this out. Thanks!
Quick update on this today - We’ve added PlotNG 0.26, updated to the 1.7.1.1 of Farmr and updated the Docker images. Enjoy!
Hi all, just to close this off - the TrueNAS folk reached out to me with some positive commentary around this and I consider this matter closed. Which quite honestly is fantastic because I was and still am super excited about TrueNAS. It has a unique stability and featureset brought by a team with a long history in delivering reliable storage.
In that vein what I see as advantages for chia mining (and what I’ve been doing manually up til now)
- Confidence your plots are legit and uncorrupted via ZFS self healing
- Easy access / 1 click deployment for plotting tools / farms etc
- Can optimise storage to meet the needs of plots e.g. cached metadata and large block size for speedy performance
- Snapshot to save from ‘oops’ moments with zero disk space penalty for plots
- Read speed increases via Raidz dataset optimisation
And as @kmoore134 said, if you’re not using docker already you’ll be impressed. For example you can reinstall the application and keep your previous config in 1 click. No more wondering what else it did behind the scenes and needing to reinstall an app from scratch - it’s app paradise!
And then there’s the realisation of all the other things you can do while that is happening.
Connect to your plots via another machine? No problem!
Check health of your data? No problem!
Add storage, media sharing, backups, web hosting or whatever else you’re doing? No problem!
Chia doesn’t need a dedicated machine, you CAN and SHOULD do more with it. TrueNAS have shown their support to chia by dedicating a container with all the things you need inside it to make life easy for us - I’m in!
What did I forget?!
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