DIY NAS
If you have an old computer with spare hard drives, it might be useful to use it to share files with computers on your network by turning it into a NAS (network attached storage). There are several popular DIY NAS options:
- Unraid - Paid, Slackware linux based
- FreeNAS (now TrueNAS Core) - FreeBSD based
- OpenMediaVault - Debian linux based
I ended up going with OpenMediaVault due to it being Debian based and super popular. To set it up, I followed this incredibly thorough guide: link
I had a few issues that caused it to stop working after restarting.
The first issue was related to the disk being encrypted. OpenMediaVault started in emergency mode due to being unable to access the encrypted disk. Emergency mode unfortunately doesn’t allow SSH access, which means you need to plug a monitor and keyboard into it. You have to make sure you have nofail in the options section of the lines of /etc/fstab starting with /dev/disk. You also need to add nonempty and remove x-systemd.requires=<disk> from the options section of the lines starting with /srv/dev-disk-by-uuid (for mergerfs). I’ve had to redo the removing x-systemd.requires part every time I apply settings from the web UI. More information about this: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
The second issue involved losing network adapter configuration after restarting. I had to run omv-firstaid and configure the network adapter with a static IP to resolve this. This may have something to do with an empty configuration from the web UI ovewriting the existing working configuration.