JTK – Notes and Ramblings Things we have found …

After getting TrueNAS setup I was time to create a FTP user for the cameras to record. First a local user is created. The user’s home directory is where the files go and will probably also wants to be a Dataset and configured as a Share. The user is configured with a shell of /usr/sbin/nologin.

The FTP service is then enabled. The service is configured to always chroot.

Now it is time to create a cron job to cleanup these folders. The following command is set to run each night at midnight as the camera ftp user:

find /mnt/tank1/video/// -type f -mtime +30 -print0 | xargs -0 rm -f

This should find and delete all of the files in the folder older than 30 days.

There has been an issue with some of the Amcrest camera and FTP but for now ours seem to be uploading correctly.

Unfortunately, TrueNAS Scale doesn’t natively support the Dropbox service. It does support Dropbox through Cloud Data Protection however that only provides for one way sync. The gist found at https://gist.github.com/kbumsik/b7cc243e297a3a66837151024049f43c provides an option. The gist will not survive a system update but can be re-enabled.

Make sure you create a regular user for dropbox and give them a home directory in your pool/home. For example, user dropbox with a home directory of /mnt/tank1/home/dropbox. The gist will have you the dropbox headless linux install directly from Dropbox along with the handy dropbox.py script from Dropbox before adding their service script. A summary of the commands from Dropbox and the gist:

su dropbox
wget https://www.dropbox.com/download?plat=lnx.x86_64
tar -xzf name_of_downloaded_file
.dropbox-dist/dropboxd
# this can take a long time especially on reinstallation

wget https://linux.dropbox.com/packages/dropbox.py
sudo mkdir /etc/db
sudo cp dropbox.py /etc/db/dropbox-cli
sudo chmod +x /etc/db/dropbox-cli

wget https://gist.githubusercontent.com/kbumsik/b7cc243e297a3a66837151024049f43c/raw/b339fbeee2ba1081723612bec5aacf92cc60e7c2/dropbox-start.target

# Edit the service unit for your needs - be sure user id is correct and adjust path for dropbox-cli
pico dropbox-start.target

sudo cp dropbox-start.target /etc/systemd/system/dropbox-start.service
sudo systemctl enable --now dropbox-start.service
sudo systemctl status dropbox-start.service

I have saved dropbox.py and dropbox-start.target at truenas dropbox.zip in case the gist goes missing.

UPDATE: after a short while the process gave me an error that it couldn’t monitor the entire folder structure and suggest I run the following command to resolve:

echo fs.inotify.max_user_watches=100000 | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf; sudo sysctl -p

UPDATE #2: After updating to TrueNAS Scale Dragonfish-24.04.0 /usr is Read Only. The commands above have been updated. You will need to edit dropbox-start.target with the proper path from dropbox-cli.