Free NAS Software

[Dave Rice]

After recycling the pile of PCs there is a Fujitsui server chassis with a Xeon e3-1200 v3 plus 16GB of DDR3 and 5 x 1TB drives left over. I’ve always meant to check out the various Linux based NAS so now seemed the time. A bit of research showed the RAID controller wasn’t exactly popular, but all the distros have software solutions of one sort or another so AHCI would be fine.

Open Media Vault is the one everyone says to go for, so I did. They said a USB drive would be ideal as a boot device so I did just that (the server motherboard has a USB port). Installation went OK but incredibly slowly. Reboot said the web interface was a certain IP address that it wasn’t.

When I found the right address it wouldn’t let me log in to the GUI. OK, there’s a CLI recovery app to do things like password resets which ended in a slew of missing directory messages. Hmm, so the installation didn’t work.

Not wishing to hang about again I installed to a spare SSD which was extremely quick. Logged into the GUI – now I knew what address it would be – and up came a load of timeout messages. Seems the cure is to restart the web server. SSH to the machine, that’s not in the First Aid app. I’m not going through a load of half arsed advice, goodbye OMV.

True NAS Core. Wow, this is clearly professional, a very slick installer. It also says never use a USB stick, SSD preferred. It’s all up and running with a good GUI but the problem is you really have to know ZFS as there aren’t any wizards. I get a RAID drive pool set up but struggle with shares and things, the ZFS descriptions of things is very different. I didn’t really want to get in this deep so it’s goodbye True NAS.

Amahi has been around since the days of Windows Home Server so must be mature by now? Strange routine involving manually installing a minimal Fedora 27 (we’re now on 35) and calling a script from the Amahi site which has a unique code. But it all works and I’m soon in the GUI.

Where are the promised apps for things like setting up drive pools? It seems there now isn’t one. Then I find most of the other apps are “free”  but you have to pay a 99 cent “convenience fee” to download them from Amahi. So I’m left with a system that needs the knowledge of True NAS but without any GUI to do the basic things. Goodbye Amahi.

So the upshot is, don’t bother, buy a Synology.

Having said that I am going back to Free NAS having found some good ZFS tutorials for setting up the basics of an SMB system. I know understand what a ZFS dataset is!

[Dave Rice]

I really did give up on True Nas too quickly, but TBH I was looking for an easier solution with some hand holding wizards.

However, if mnt, smb and acl don’t faze you, armed with this tutorial you can get a Windows accessible NAS up and running pretty quickly. Once I got my head around translating what ZFS calls things to their Windows equivalent the penny dropped, but you don’t need that to happen as for a home environment, the tutorial will do you just fine.

It also has Plugins like Plex – so you can use it as a Media Server – a sandboxed FreeBSD CLI machine and a VM host https://www.truenas.com/docs/core/gettingstarted/applications/

I have enough ram and disk space to experiment with VM hosting as long as it’s fairly lightweight. I have it in mind to create a Windows Domain Controller which for my needs would be very lightweight indeed. A VM like a PiHole would be no problem, I run mine on my Intel chipped Synology and that is nowhere near as powerful.

[keith with the teef]

Hmm. Seems you was the star in computer version of scrap heap challenge.

I can hear Robert Llewellyn now. Hmm and whats this Dave has in his hand now. Is it a semiconductor?

 

There has got to be an article in this endeavor, that you may be able to get published in one of the on line PC mags or analogue mags and make some coin?

But yeah, I agree with you. Sofology is the way forward.

OOps. Thats my bad. Synology. 🙂

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