Jayce
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Hello friends. Been a while since I posted, but figured I'd do a little brain dump of some recent tinkering I've done. In the past, I've ran Ubuntu Server on my home server. The job of this home server is to do many things. It's a centralized storage point for all of our data, namely pictures, documentes, music, videos, etc etc. Over the years I added more things, such as a torrent client, video surveillance, ownCloud, software RAID, and a bunch of other things. Since my needs seem a bit out of the realm of your everyday users, this felt justified to use a command line only distribution so I could get everything done.
While I love my command line in ways where you will risk your life if you ever try to take it from me, I'm also incredibly wow'd by modern day easy to use interfaces, such as Unity and Gnome, while also being a huge fan of easy to use web interfaces. Recently I stumbled across OpenMediaVault, which is basically a NAS specific distro. This distro is a bit different, though...
You see, in the NAS realm you have several options. You have your Synology and QNAP boxes of the world along with your FreeNAS setups. FreeNAS is a great NAS distribution, based on BSD. Recently FreeNAS dropped support for the UFS file system, thereby dictating everybody use ZFS. ZFS is pretty awesome, but it comes with a few somewhat harsh system requirements, namely a lot of RAM, decent processing power, and preferably ECC based RAM. All said and done this can scale up a little DIY home server project into financials that you're not interested in undertaking. I view FreeNAS as more of a "money is no object" solution, and/or an enterprise solution. Not to say OMV couldn't scale up to handle larger tasks, but FreeNAS seems to be more targeted at that audience to boot.
OpenMediaVault was born after the project leader of FreeNAS left around 2009 or so. He went on to create his own Linux based "FreeNAS spin". OMV is based on Debian stable, which is a pretty rock solid foundation to base a project on. The thing I loved about this distribution is... it's Debian based! Literally everything I do in Ubuntu Server I can do in OMV. If the web interface doesn't support it, I can SSH in and do things just like I did before. Likewise, OMV doesn't muck around with config files in ways that other platforms do (I'm looking at you, Zentyal). That way I can make GUI based changes and check the config files over SSH and see what changes are being made clear as day.
OMV has a series of available plugins as well. Some of them are pretty much the definition of awesome. Things like USBbackup, where you can rig up an external USB drive to be an automated backup to utilize off site. For example, I set up my external drive with USBbackup. I keep it in my desk at work. Once a week I bring it home and plug it in. Then, I wait. The system will automatically mount it, rsync all of the folders I specified before, then once done unmount it and email me that it's complete (I set up my email in the notifications field). All I do is unplug it then and take it back to work. Boom, off site backup.
There are additional plugins available through the OMV extras repo as well. By installing the OMV extras package, it enables you to install a series of additional plugins developed by the community team. Things like openmediavault-backup, which is basically Clonezilla wrapped up into a plugin, allowing you to reboot, Clonezilla your OS drive, reboot again and you're back to OMV. PHPVirtualBox is nice if you like to host virtual machines on it as well. Transmission for torrents, etc etc, the list goes on.
It's a decent solution whether you are building new or utilizing an old tower. Most Synology boxes (to pick on them for a moment here) come with a very neutered processor and often times only 512 MB of RAM. Given their price, this makes me a little "meh". For less money you can build a more powerful rig with OMV. If you have a tower sitting around, even better. A no-cost NAS. All you need to do is install it.
By default OMV will install itself across the entire drive. This is on purpose, as the developers feel the OS should be separate from the data. I fully agree with this, and always have, but it's worth mentioning that if you're using some sort of single drive unit to tinker with and RAID/multiple drives in the NAS isn't a priority, you CAN install OMV, boot up Gparted, downsize the OMV partition, and create another behind it for data. I'm doing this exact thing on an old laptop to give to my in-laws to use as their OMV NAS for handling file backups of their computer.
You can either install OpenMediaVault through their dedicated ISO installer or you can add the OMV repository on top of an existing Debian install. Either way it will get you to the same end result. It's very light on resources as well. I put it on a raspberry pi with 256 MB of RAM and it was clocking in at 19% RAM use with an all-but-idle processor (ARM, 700mhz). Hard to sneeze at that.
One thing that confused me at first was the creation of actual samba shares. Samba works on Windows, Mac, Linux, etc. It's pretty much the "go to works anywhere" file sharing platform. I was trying to create samba shares but I kept striking out. In OMV, you need to create shared folders first (you'll see 'shared folders' on the left nav). Once you create shared folders, then you can rig up those shared folders as samba shares within SMB/CIFS >> Shares. The idea is that you create a shared folder first, then pair it with the appropriate service second. You can set up privileges to dictate who can read/write as well. Very easy and very point/clicky.
So overall, we're talking about a Debian Linux based distribution that is very light on resources, extremely easy to use thanks to its web interface, yet it still retains all of the Linux fundamentals found under the hood. You can SSH in and do any "higher level" items you'd wish to do on a more complex Linux server setup. Quite a swiss army knife... hard to argue with that.
Anyway, a quick screenshot of the web interface:
http://a.fsdn.com/con/app/proj/openmediavault/screenshots/systemstatus.png
There's also a virtualized demo if you folks would like to tinker around with it before trying it on physical hardware.
OpenMediaVault - The open network attached storage solution
Hope this helps someone on the NAS distro hunt!
While I love my command line in ways where you will risk your life if you ever try to take it from me, I'm also incredibly wow'd by modern day easy to use interfaces, such as Unity and Gnome, while also being a huge fan of easy to use web interfaces. Recently I stumbled across OpenMediaVault, which is basically a NAS specific distro. This distro is a bit different, though...
You see, in the NAS realm you have several options. You have your Synology and QNAP boxes of the world along with your FreeNAS setups. FreeNAS is a great NAS distribution, based on BSD. Recently FreeNAS dropped support for the UFS file system, thereby dictating everybody use ZFS. ZFS is pretty awesome, but it comes with a few somewhat harsh system requirements, namely a lot of RAM, decent processing power, and preferably ECC based RAM. All said and done this can scale up a little DIY home server project into financials that you're not interested in undertaking. I view FreeNAS as more of a "money is no object" solution, and/or an enterprise solution. Not to say OMV couldn't scale up to handle larger tasks, but FreeNAS seems to be more targeted at that audience to boot.
OpenMediaVault was born after the project leader of FreeNAS left around 2009 or so. He went on to create his own Linux based "FreeNAS spin". OMV is based on Debian stable, which is a pretty rock solid foundation to base a project on. The thing I loved about this distribution is... it's Debian based! Literally everything I do in Ubuntu Server I can do in OMV. If the web interface doesn't support it, I can SSH in and do things just like I did before. Likewise, OMV doesn't muck around with config files in ways that other platforms do (I'm looking at you, Zentyal). That way I can make GUI based changes and check the config files over SSH and see what changes are being made clear as day.
OMV has a series of available plugins as well. Some of them are pretty much the definition of awesome. Things like USBbackup, where you can rig up an external USB drive to be an automated backup to utilize off site. For example, I set up my external drive with USBbackup. I keep it in my desk at work. Once a week I bring it home and plug it in. Then, I wait. The system will automatically mount it, rsync all of the folders I specified before, then once done unmount it and email me that it's complete (I set up my email in the notifications field). All I do is unplug it then and take it back to work. Boom, off site backup.
There are additional plugins available through the OMV extras repo as well. By installing the OMV extras package, it enables you to install a series of additional plugins developed by the community team. Things like openmediavault-backup, which is basically Clonezilla wrapped up into a plugin, allowing you to reboot, Clonezilla your OS drive, reboot again and you're back to OMV. PHPVirtualBox is nice if you like to host virtual machines on it as well. Transmission for torrents, etc etc, the list goes on.
It's a decent solution whether you are building new or utilizing an old tower. Most Synology boxes (to pick on them for a moment here) come with a very neutered processor and often times only 512 MB of RAM. Given their price, this makes me a little "meh". For less money you can build a more powerful rig with OMV. If you have a tower sitting around, even better. A no-cost NAS. All you need to do is install it.
By default OMV will install itself across the entire drive. This is on purpose, as the developers feel the OS should be separate from the data. I fully agree with this, and always have, but it's worth mentioning that if you're using some sort of single drive unit to tinker with and RAID/multiple drives in the NAS isn't a priority, you CAN install OMV, boot up Gparted, downsize the OMV partition, and create another behind it for data. I'm doing this exact thing on an old laptop to give to my in-laws to use as their OMV NAS for handling file backups of their computer.
You can either install OpenMediaVault through their dedicated ISO installer or you can add the OMV repository on top of an existing Debian install. Either way it will get you to the same end result. It's very light on resources as well. I put it on a raspberry pi with 256 MB of RAM and it was clocking in at 19% RAM use with an all-but-idle processor (ARM, 700mhz). Hard to sneeze at that.
One thing that confused me at first was the creation of actual samba shares. Samba works on Windows, Mac, Linux, etc. It's pretty much the "go to works anywhere" file sharing platform. I was trying to create samba shares but I kept striking out. In OMV, you need to create shared folders first (you'll see 'shared folders' on the left nav). Once you create shared folders, then you can rig up those shared folders as samba shares within SMB/CIFS >> Shares. The idea is that you create a shared folder first, then pair it with the appropriate service second. You can set up privileges to dictate who can read/write as well. Very easy and very point/clicky.
So overall, we're talking about a Debian Linux based distribution that is very light on resources, extremely easy to use thanks to its web interface, yet it still retains all of the Linux fundamentals found under the hood. You can SSH in and do any "higher level" items you'd wish to do on a more complex Linux server setup. Quite a swiss army knife... hard to argue with that.
Anyway, a quick screenshot of the web interface:
http://a.fsdn.com/con/app/proj/openmediavault/screenshots/systemstatus.png
There's also a virtualized demo if you folks would like to tinker around with it before trying it on physical hardware.
OpenMediaVault - The open network attached storage solution
Hope this helps someone on the NAS distro hunt!
