WireGuard on TrueNAS SCALE

DISCLAIMER: I’m not claiming to be an expert of the tools mentioned in this article, thereby, I’m not responsible for any troubles you might cause/experience on your system by executing commands found in this article. Use at your own risk and do your own research.

As the weather kinda decided to ruin my plans for today during the god damn mid-spring, I decided to make myself cozy and tinker with my 90 TB TrueNAS SCALE system.

The goal is to somehow hook it up with my WireGuard VPN tunnel that is running in a test mode on my Raspberry Pi under the desk. It will eventually end up on somewhat more stable and better performant Pi-Cluster also chilling under my desk. This will allow me to keep my NAS accessible from anywhere without exposing it to the public networks and thus, be more secure. By the way, I must say that exposing a NAS system to the public network is very dangerous business and not recommended by anyone including me. Having it behind a VPN on the other hand, is always a recommended way to achieve the same goal of having access to your precious data from anywhere - given you have the your VPN connection figured out and configured properly.

Intro

Configuring the WireGuard VPN in the TrueNAS systems used to be quite an easy task. Until they’ve released their new Linux based(as opposed to FreeBSD in case of TrueNAS Core) TrueNAS SCALE(and obviously I’ve jumped on it, like a maniac) which is going to be a big hit for people who are actively using virtualization software like Docker and Kubernetes. Now, in most use-cases people are running VPN of of their NAS directly, however, in my case, as mentioned previously, I have a dedicated system for it. So in this situation I just want to hook up my NAS to an already existing WireGuard server.

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ pivpn -c
::: Connected Clients List :::
Name          Remote IP      Virtual IP      Bytes Received      Bytes Sent      Last Seen
S22Plus       *********      10.6.0.2        3.5MiB              43MiB           Apr 02 2022
Thinkpad      *********      10.6.0.3        245MiB              48GiB           Apr 02 2022
iPad          *********      10.6.0.4        113KiB              724MiB          Apr 02 2022
MBP           *********      10.6.0.5        151KiB              413KiB          Apr 02 2022
::: Disabled clients :::

Easy, I hear you say?! Just add another configuration to the interface and copy it over to the NAS system. Not so fast…

The current state of TrueNAS SCALE

TrueNAS SCALE in fact, does have WireGuard tools(wireguard-tools) installed by default. As far as I’ve read(don’t quote me on that) so far it seems like they are using it to communicate with their TrueCommand management system. However, at this point there’s no real tutorial or manual how to setup WireGuard inside the SCALE system. Instead they kinda default to OpenVPN configuration which is noticeably easy to configure but a lot of people including me find WireGuard to be much faster than OpenVPN in general.

root@truenas[~]# wg --version
wireguard-tools v1.0.20210223 - https://git.zx2c4.com/wireguard-tools/

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