My secret protip: old Fujitsu desktop/nuc PCs. At least in Germany (Europe?) they are cheap on ebay since a lot of businesses use them and upgrade on a regular schedule.
In one case I had a nuc where on Linux after enabling power saving features for the sata controller, idle usage even fell to 5W when the pdf claimed 9.
Having an actual pc instead of a random sbc ensures best connectivity, expandability, and software support forever. With almost all sbcs you're stuck with a random-ass kernel from when the damn thing was released, and you basically have to frankenstein together your own up-to-date distro with the old kernel because the vendor certainly doesn't care about updating the random armbian fork they created for that thing.
Parkytowers is site about repurposing thin clients of various kinds, it's a goldmine for finding out power consumption, Linux compatibility, possible hardware mods, etc: https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/hware/hardware.shtml
Don't share this information too far and wide, you might drive up the price for these in the second hand market, which will hurt us dirt-cheap-pc-gluts.
> I cannot say no to cheap compute for some reason.
I sympathise - for me I think it comes from growing up with early generation PCs that were expensive, hard to get, and not very performant; now you can buy something that's a supercomputer by comparison for almost nothing. Who can resist that?! I'll think of something to do with them all eventually...
I bought one of those thin Lenovo clients for about $200 and use it as a home server with Debian, it works great for pretty much everything and is a lot more bang for your buck than raspberry pi or a brand new mini-pc.
The only downside is that it doesn't have space for multiple 2,5/3,5 disks, but that is just personal preference anyway.
in my experience those come from mining and other FIFO operations that are shutting down. source: used to de-com those, wipe em, and get them ready for bulk sale to a different group.
Have had great success with this myself. Oddly resellers on Amazon seem to be the best source I have found, just search for something like "HP ProDesk" or one of the generic corporate-focused lines from other manufacturers and find one that fits your budget. Maybe filter to 100-300 dollars to get rid of the new stuff. There's also a surprisingly vast selection of recycled commodity servers and similar on there, too.
That's... Odd. I didn't click my own link yesterday after posting, but that was straight from Google and it did load just fine. Now I get the login too. But for completeness sake, another example: https://www.fujitsu.com/global/Images/wp_ESPRIMO_P758_E94.pd...
ODroid H-series SBC's are standard Intel CPUs with (at least for the H2+) Linux supported hardware for pretty much everything (haven't tried running X on them though :-P )
they are my favorite 'home server' currently...cheap, standard, and expandable - oh! And SILENT! :-)
Correct. I have a 5 node Fujitsu esprimo D756/D757 cluster that has i5-6500 CPU's and 96GB RAM and 5x NVMe + 5x HDD that usually sits around 80W total. Removing HDD and reducing RAM would drop the power usage but in my case it's not important to go after the last Watt.
I bought them them for 50 euro a piece without RAM and disks.
I was under the impression, that for most (popular) chip families, like RockChip, Allwinner, Amlogic, some assorted Broadcoms, .. the Mainline linux kernel support has mostly been sorted for, and it's only the stragglers like Hisilicon, Huawei, Most Broadcom, Qualmcomm where mainline support is not on their priority list?
If the application fits, choosing one of the BSDs with the more popular chip families can work well. In other words, if the BSD crowd likes an SoC, you'll get a good, stable system running with good kernel support. In my case it's the RockChip family, specifically from PINE64.
Examples:
- PINE64 Rock64 running FreeBSD 14.1 replaced an aging RPi3. I use this for SDR applications. It's a small, low power device with PoE that I can deploy close to my outdoor antennas (e.g. 1090mhz for dump1090-fa ADS-B). It's been really solid with its eMMC, and FreeBSD has good USB support for RTL-SDR devices.
- PINE64 RockPro64 running NetBSD 10. I have a PCIe card with a 500gb SSD M.2 slot. NetBSD has ZFS support and it has been stable. This lets me take snapshots on the SSD zpool. I generate time-lapse videos using the faster cores.
You don't get 100% HW support (e.g. no camera support for RockPro64) but I don't need it. The compromise is worth it in my case because I get a stable and consistent system that I'm familiar with: BSD.
Maybe, but regular distros on x86/x64 thin clients are even more sorted out. GPIOs are better handled through an Arduino clone over USB than with scripts running on inherently laggy desktop OS.
The cheapest computers with Alder Lake N CPUs, like ODROID H4 and many others, have only a single SODIMM socket and they are limited to 48 GB (which works, despite Ark advertising a limit of only 16 GB).
However there are many NUC-like small computers made by various Chinese companies, with AMD Ryzen CPUs and with 2 SODIMM sockets, in which you can use 64 GB of DRAM.
Those using older Ryzen models, like the 5000 series, may be found at prices between $220 and $350. Those using newer Ryzen models, up to Zen 4 based 7000 or 8000 series, are more expensive, i.e. between $400 and $600.
While there are dozens of very cheap computer models made by Chinese firms, the similar models made by ASUS or the like are significantly more expensive. After the Intel NUC line has been bought by ASUS, they have raised its prices a lot.
Even so, if a non-Chinese computer is desired and 64 GB is the only requirement, then Intel NUCs from older generations like NUC 13 or NUC 12, with Core i3 CPUs, can still be found at prices between $350 and $400 (the traditional prices of barebone Intel NUCs were $350 for Core i3, $500 for Core i5 and $650 for Core i7, but they have been raised a lot for the latest models).
EDIT:
Looking now at Newegg, I see various variants of ASUS NUC 14 Pro with the Intel Core 3 100U CPU, which are under $400 (barebone).
It should be noted that this CPU is a Raptor Lake Refresh and not a Meteor Lake CPU, like in the more expensive models of NUC 14 Pro.
This is a small computer designed to work reliably for many years on a 24/7 schedule, so if reliability would be important, especially when using it as a server, I would choose this. It supports up to 96 GB of DRAM (with two 48 GB SODIMMs). If performance per dollar would be more important, then there are cheaper and faster computers with Ryzen CPUs, made by Chinese companies like Minisforum or Beelink.
I have since years, an usb disk connected to my Fritzbox and it works amazingly well. I have a real NAS, but i ended up never using it. Fritzbox with the USB disk is enough to use as scanner dropbox, saving pictures, documents, ROMs.. Sometimes the simplicity beats the whole complication of having extra devices
You can buy a DAS (Direct Attached Storage) enclosure[1], some even support RAID. If your Nuc is multipurpose, you could then run a virtualized TrueNAS guest (BSD or linux) in QEMU and give it control of the DAS block device for ZFS pools. Being able to run a virtual NAS that actually gets security updates on demand is pretty neat - TrueNAS has an excellent API you can use to start/stop services (SMB, SSH, iSCSI, etc) as well as shutdown the vm cleanly.
1. Newer DAS devices connect using USB-C, but USB type-A/e-SATA ones can be found.
Edit: figuring out how to run TrueNAS as a guest OS was a nightmare, the first 5+ page of results will be about TrueNAS as a host.
Years ago there were auction houses specialising in selling off business recycled PCs and bankrupt stock - it was great fun to go and mooch around and see if there was a real bargain not spotted, but they seemed to vanish under the onslaught of eBay and frankly for second hand tag I struggle to trust ebay
I’ve had good luck recently (sample size: 2) buying small form factor PCs off of ebay. Way more powerful than even a new raspberry pi, and a 4 core/16G RAM/256 ssd machine can be had for less than $60 if you are patient.
I would question all these Raspberry PI-ish NAS attempts, especially when it includes some power adapters and milling out cases. It all feels so fiddly and sluggish while still being "not that cheap". Storing my important personal data on an USB-drive somewhat feels risky. It probably wouldn't burn a house down, but still...
The real benefit is the small form factor and the "low" power consumption. Paying 43 bucks for the whole thing - now asking myself if it is worth saving a few bucks and living with 100Mbit network speed, instead of spending 150 bucks and having 2.5Gig.
There are so many (also "used") alternatives out there:
No I don't. The FriendlyElec NanoPI R6C can be brought to 1W Idle including NVMe SSD and 2.5GBe (and REAL transfer rates of >200MB/s). It's more expensive, but totally worth it in my opinion. See https://www.hardwareluxx.de/community/threads/ultra-low-powe...
Since it has neither ECC nor support for common Open Source NAS Operating Systems, I still would not buy it as my daily driver. I just don't think that a difference of 5W Idle Power is worth the effort of milling out stuff, using USB-Storage and the additional maintenance effort keeping this system up to date.
Everyone is an expert at storage as long as everything is working great. It's when stuff fails that you feel like an idiot and wished you had one extra hdd in your RAID array or a secondary NAS you were backing up to or one extra site you offloaded your data to.
I don't do cheap any more. But I can see the appeal.
These are all strategies and the price point of the unit doesn’t affect it.
Need extra drives, buy extra drives. Need extra NAS for backups?, buy an extra NAS. Need an offsite copy?, buy space and get an offsite NAS and drives for an offsite copy.
Price point of the unit doesn’t change anything here.
Synology sure provides an expensive but complete package for home office and enthusiasts.
Just buy it and be done with it. It's certainly more expensive than DIY it yourself using off the shelf components and things bought out of online classifieds. But for most people that have no interest in tinkering or don't know what to do, just paying the price of a complete solution might be worth it.
I think this depends on what you're storing though.
Business documents, accounting records, family photos - sure you probably want to keep them safe.
But if my NAS is just 20TB of pirated movies and TV shows (not that I'm saying it is...) then I'm much more comfortable buying the cheapest drives I can find and seeing how it goes.
For me it's the opposite in a way: I need a proper remote backup of things like business documents and photos because they have to survive an issue with the NAS or my house not just a drive so local copies can go on "whatever" and something like cloud backup makes more sense to meet the reliability mark. Generally it's not tons and tons of terabytes which is great because the backup needs to actually be usable within a reasonable amount of time when I need to pull it.
On the other hand terabytes and terabytes of pirated content is a lot of work but not necessarily worth paying to try and to backup over the internet. I can redownload it if I need but I'd rather not do that because some crap drive or NAS I saved 20 bucks on died and now I need to spend a week rebuilding my entire collection. It doesn't need to be Fort Knox but I'll spring for a proper NAS, drives, and pool redundancy for this content.
I sync a few single external drives every week or two over good old USB. In house sneaker net. Tools like Freefilesync make this easy and fast (and give me a manual check so accidental deletes are visible too).
Very cheap, has served me for more than a decade now. Highly recommended. I dealt with dataloss through drive failing, user error and unintentional software bugs/errors. No problem.
When people set up these NAS's, how are they accessing the files? NFS? SFTP?
And how are you accessing it when away from home? A VPN that you're permanently connected to? Is there a good way to do NAT hole-punching?
Syncthing kind of does what I want, in that it lets all my computers sync the same files no matter what network they're on, but it insists on always copying all the files ("syncing") whereas I just want them stored on the NAS but accessible everywhere.
Nextcloud kind of does what I want but when I tried it before it struck me as flaky and unreliable, and seemed to do a load of stuff I don't want or need.
- On mine I use NFS and SMB which covers most possible clients.
- I use an ssh bastion that I expose via Tailscale to connect to mine remotely. So a VPN but it's wireguard based so it's not too intrusive. I have a gig up, though, YMMV.
- My NAS has 28TB of space. I'm still working on backup strategy. So far it just has my Dropbox and some ephemera I don't care about losing on it.
- Regarding other services: I use Dropbox pretty extensively but these days 2TB just isn't very much. Plus it gets cranky because I have more than 500,000 files in it.
This is my personal setup but I think it's a bit different for everyone.
Wow! What kind of data are you generating that 2TB ‘just isn’t very much’? (Video editing?) All my personal files take up around 10GB in my Google Drive.
Synology does all that.
I run two one at home one at the office, my only complaint is that it’s a bit “idiot proof”… both other times the web based GUIi is great. Also has free software that punches through NAT and dynamic IPs works great (quickconnect.to)
I use sftp, media server, primarily
I second that wholeheartedly, and I also run two 19" Synology NAS units, one at home and one at the office. All smooth sailing so far.
A colleague uses a QNAP instead, which he claims is better price/storage ratio at the expense of lesser software usability, and I'm okay paying a bit more of my own money (at home) as well as taxpayers' money (at work) on better usability, because it will likely pay off by saving time in the long run, as I currently don't have a dedicated sysadmin in my team.
The only question mark to date was when installing with non-Synology (enterprise SSD) drives I got a warning that mine were not "vendor sourced" devices, and decided not to take any risk and replace all drives with "original" Synology ones just because I can. This may be just disinformation from Synology to make their own customers nervous, and it reminds me of the "only HP toner in HP laser printers" discussion, but it would have been a distraction to investigate further, and my time is more valuable than simply replacing all drives.
Syncthing for a small collection of files I want available from all my machines - commonly used documents, photos, stuff I want quickly backed up or synced automatically.
Samba for my long term mostly-read rarely-write storage with larger files, ISOs, etc.
Same here. I have wireguard vpn for the few times i need it to tunnel my traffic through home or need to access larger files not sync’ed with syncthing.
My nas is a Synology. Vpn is also used so that i can continue sending timemachine backups back home when i’m traveling.
I usually just use SMB shares within my LAN. It serves my modest needs. I have used WebDAV or FTP in the past. Depends on the specific use. Away from home, VPN is essential. Too risky to just forward ports these days.
An easy solution for the VPN part would be Zerotier / Tailscale. IIRC Zerotier uses chacha20 for encryption which is faster than AES, especially for a power-strapped SBC.
For added security I limit my home ssh access to a handful of trusted IPs including my cloud VM. Then I set up an ssh tunnel from my hotel through the cloud VM to home. The cloud VM never sees my password / key
Its worth keeping this (from their readme) in mind though:
> However, at present SSHFS does not have any active, regular contributors, and there are a number of known issues (see the bugtracker).
Not that it is unusable or anything, it is still in widespread use, but I'd guess many assume it to be part of openssh and maintained with it, when it isn't.
An interesting alternative might be https://rclone.org/, which can speak SFTP and can mount all (of the many) protocols it speaks.
I used samba, it's supported everywhere. I also served files with HTTP server which might be convenient way for some use-cases. I also generated simple HTML-s with <video> which allowed me to easily view movies on my TV without all that nonsense.
My router has public IP so I didn't have any problems reaching it from the outside, so any VPN could work. Another approach is to rent some cheap VPS and use it as a bastion VPN server, connecting both home network and roadwarrior laptop.
No idea about any "integrated" solutions, I prefer simple solutions, so I just used ordinary RHEL with ordinary apache, etc.
Also I use SonicWall VPN to connect to my house to be in the network so it covers most of it. I also use Synology QuickConnect if I need to use the browser without VPN which also covers most urgent needs. Haven't failed me over a decade and my NAS also syncs with Synology C2 cloud which is also another peace of mind. I know it might sound unsafe a little having files stored on the cloud but it is what it is.
I won't play with half-baked library dependent homebrew solutions which cost way more time and cause headache more than commercial solutions. I won't open ports and forget them later either.
Seafile + Samba + OpenVPN is my stack. I use Seafile for a dropbox style file sync on my devices, and Samba for direct access. OpenVPN for remote access on all devices. Works quite well.
I’d replace OpenVPN with WireGuard at this point - WireGuard is a lot faster and the client software is pretty good. All of my Apple devices are set up to use VPN 100% of the time automatically if I’m not on home WiFi.
Tailscale works perfectly for remote access, I do "backups" with rsync over VPN nightly to an offsite location.
Syncthing over Tailscale is running smoothly too, it doesn't matter where my machines move, they find each other using the same internal address every time.
I have a (completely overkill) Ubiquiti Dream Wall that lets me VPN in using WireGuard. I do have a Raspberry Pi that runs (among other stuff) a script to ping a service on hosted server that keeps a dns entry updated in case my IP address changes, although that's rare.
I built the service to keep the dns entry updated myself, so I'm sure it's not as secure as it could be, but it only accepts pings via https and it only works if the body of the POST contains a guid that is mapped to the dns entry I want it to update.
IIRC they have improved the free plan over time, and even mailed users suggesting the relaxed limits might enable moving from paid to free tier [1].
I barely use my tailnet now, might have more of a case for it later, but they are near the top of my "wishing you success but please don't get acquired by a company that will ruin it" list.
Depending on the make and model - I've got a Synology NAS box and can't recommend them enough.
RAID support, NFS/SFTP/Samba support, a nice Web UI to set up access and configure sharing, and even the ability to enable sharing outside your own NAT.
Depends on what you need. I have a NAS with syncthing, and it's a combination.
- I use a lot of different folders within syncthing, and different machines have different combinations to save space where they aren't needed; the NAS has all of them.
- on the LAN, sshfs is a resilient-but-slower alternative to NFS. If I reboot my NAS, sshfs doesn't care & reconnects without complaint...last time I tried to use it, NFS locked up the entire client.
- zerotier + sshfs is workable-but-slow in remote scenarios
Note I'm mostly trying to write code remotely. If you're trying to watch videos....uh, good luck.
> The remedy is to turn UAS off via adding usb-storage.quirks=152d:0578:u to the kernel cmdline.
This is the point where I'd have thrown it in the trash and given up. I simply don't know how people have the patience to debug past stuff like this: I get that the point of the project is to be cheap and simple, but this is expensive in time and decidedly not simple.
Yeah, reading through the linked https://hub.libre.computer/t/source-code-git-repository-for-... really sours my opinion of Libre Computer - shipping with UEFI so you can just use generic images is a huge advantage, but creating your default images (and firmware! which is worse, IMO) with a proprietary process is such a big red flag that it makes me question the whole thing. If the firmware is FOSS and you can build it yourself using only FOSS inputs (which isn't obvious to me from that discussion), then you could do that and any old image (again, UEFI to support generic images is a huge win) and it would be fine, but the fact that that's not the default really makes me question the values/culture of the company.
Because they barely do anything. It's like like there's 4TB of RAM in there churning away at multiple databases. It's debatable if you even need it in enterprise servers.
You absolutely, positively, 100% need it on anything that carries data you care about. I personally consider it a hard requirement for a NAS. I don't want to lose data just because a cosmic ray flipped a bit somewhere.
That's pretty cool. Fits their use case for sure. I would probably opt to spend a little more for a gigabit port. From what I've seen watching Jeff Geerling, you can setup a pretty reasonable performing NAS on something on these small SBCs.
Any of the latest generation Arm SBCs is actually pretty adequate for NAS purposes, especially if that's all you want to run on it.
If you get a Pi 4 or Pi 5, or one of the Rockchip boards with RK3566 or RK3588 (the latter is much more pricey, but can get gigabit-plus speeds), you can either attach a USB hard drive or SSD, or with most of them now you could add on an M.2 drive or an adapter for SATA hard drives/SSDs, and even do RAID over 1 Gbps or sometimes 2.5 Gbps with no issue.
Some people choose to run OpenMediaVault (which is fine), though I have my NASes set up using Ansible + ZFS running on bare Debian, as it's simpler for me to manage that way: https://github.com/geerlingguy/arm-nas
I would go with Radxa or maybe Libre Computer if you're not going the Raspberry Pi route, they both have images for their latest boards that are decent, though I almost always have issues with HDMI output, so be prepared to set things up over SSH or serial console.
Readit News
If you care about power consumption like I do, you can Google "$model energy consumption white paper" which contains very accurate data about idle usage, for example https://sp.ts.fujitsu.com/dmsp/Publications/public/wp-energy...
In one case I had a nuc where on Linux after enabling power saving features for the sata controller, idle usage even fell to 5W when the pdf claimed 9.
Having an actual pc instead of a random sbc ensures best connectivity, expandability, and software support forever. With almost all sbcs you're stuck with a random-ass kernel from when the damn thing was released, and you basically have to frankenstein together your own up-to-date distro with the old kernel because the vendor certainly doesn't care about updating the random armbian fork they created for that thing.
I cannot say no to cheap compute for some reason.
I sympathise - for me I think it comes from growing up with early generation PCs that were expensive, hard to get, and not very performant; now you can buy something that's a supercomputer by comparison for almost nothing. Who can resist that?! I'll think of something to do with them all eventually...
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The only downside is that it doesn't have space for multiple 2,5/3,5 disks, but that is just personal preference anyway.
The Dell's coming off lease now have modern features including Intel 8th Gen CPUs with TPM and USB-C etc...
they are my favorite 'home server' currently...cheap, standard, and expandable - oh! And SILENT! :-)
I bought them them for 50 euro a piece without RAM and disks.
Examples:
- PINE64 Rock64 running FreeBSD 14.1 replaced an aging RPi3. I use this for SDR applications. It's a small, low power device with PoE that I can deploy close to my outdoor antennas (e.g. 1090mhz for dump1090-fa ADS-B). It's been really solid with its eMMC, and FreeBSD has good USB support for RTL-SDR devices.
- PINE64 RockPro64 running NetBSD 10. I have a PCIe card with a 500gb SSD M.2 slot. NetBSD has ZFS support and it has been stable. This lets me take snapshots on the SSD zpool. I generate time-lapse videos using the faster cores.
You don't get 100% HW support (e.g. no camera support for RockPro64) but I don't need it. The compromise is worth it in my case because I get a stable and consistent system that I'm familiar with: BSD.
However there are many NUC-like small computers made by various Chinese companies, with AMD Ryzen CPUs and with 2 SODIMM sockets, in which you can use 64 GB of DRAM.
Those using older Ryzen models, like the 5000 series, may be found at prices between $220 and $350. Those using newer Ryzen models, up to Zen 4 based 7000 or 8000 series, are more expensive, i.e. between $400 and $600.
While there are dozens of very cheap computer models made by Chinese firms, the similar models made by ASUS or the like are significantly more expensive. After the Intel NUC line has been bought by ASUS, they have raised its prices a lot.
Even so, if a non-Chinese computer is desired and 64 GB is the only requirement, then Intel NUCs from older generations like NUC 13 or NUC 12, with Core i3 CPUs, can still be found at prices between $350 and $400 (the traditional prices of barebone Intel NUCs were $350 for Core i3, $500 for Core i5 and $650 for Core i7, but they have been raised a lot for the latest models).
EDIT: Looking now at Newegg, I see various variants of ASUS NUC 14 Pro with the Intel Core 3 100U CPU, which are under $400 (barebone).
It should be noted that this CPU is a Raptor Lake Refresh and not a Meteor Lake CPU, like in the more expensive models of NUC 14 Pro.
This is a small computer designed to work reliably for many years on a 24/7 schedule, so if reliability would be important, especially when using it as a server, I would choose this. It supports up to 96 GB of DRAM (with two 48 GB SODIMMs). If performance per dollar would be more important, then there are cheaper and faster computers with Ryzen CPUs, made by Chinese companies like Minisforum or Beelink.
https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2024-07-02-ryzen-7-mini-...
Perhaps it can be configured to meet your requirement for "affordable"?
They look even smaller than one litre PCs.
1. Newer DAS devices connect using USB-C, but USB type-A/e-SATA ones can be found.
Edit: figuring out how to run TrueNAS as a guest OS was a nightmare, the first 5+ page of results will be about TrueNAS as a host.
Dead Comment
The real benefit is the small form factor and the "low" power consumption. Paying 43 bucks for the whole thing - now asking myself if it is worth saving a few bucks and living with 100Mbit network speed, instead of spending 150 bucks and having 2.5Gig.
There are so many (also "used") alternatives out there:
- Fujitsu Futro S920 (used < 75, ~10W)
- FriendlyElec NanoPI R6C (< 150, ~2W, https://www.friendlyelec.com/index.php?route=product/product...)
- FriendlyElec Nas Kit (< 150, ~5W, https://www.friendlyelec.com/index.php?route=product/product...)
- Dell T20 / T30 (used < 100, ~25W)
- Fujitsu Celsius W570 (used < 100, ~15W)
My personal NAS / Homeserver:
More expensive, but reliable, powerful and drawing <10W Idle.Since it has neither ECC nor support for common Open Source NAS Operating Systems, I still would not buy it as my daily driver. I just don't think that a difference of 5W Idle Power is worth the effort of milling out stuff, using USB-Storage and the additional maintenance effort keeping this system up to date.
I don't do cheap any more. But I can see the appeal.
Need extra drives, buy extra drives. Need extra NAS for backups?, buy an extra NAS. Need an offsite copy?, buy space and get an offsite NAS and drives for an offsite copy.
Price point of the unit doesn’t change anything here.
Just buy it and be done with it. It's certainly more expensive than DIY it yourself using off the shelf components and things bought out of online classifieds. But for most people that have no interest in tinkering or don't know what to do, just paying the price of a complete solution might be worth it.
Business documents, accounting records, family photos - sure you probably want to keep them safe.
But if my NAS is just 20TB of pirated movies and TV shows (not that I'm saying it is...) then I'm much more comfortable buying the cheapest drives I can find and seeing how it goes.
On the other hand terabytes and terabytes of pirated content is a lot of work but not necessarily worth paying to try and to backup over the internet. I can redownload it if I need but I'd rather not do that because some crap drive or NAS I saved 20 bucks on died and now I need to spend a week rebuilding my entire collection. It doesn't need to be Fort Knox but I'll spring for a proper NAS, drives, and pool redundancy for this content.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deskstar
"sure, grandpa, drives make noise [rolls eyes]"
Very cheap, has served me for more than a decade now. Highly recommended. I dealt with dataloss through drive failing, user error and unintentional software bugs/errors. No problem.
And how are you accessing it when away from home? A VPN that you're permanently connected to? Is there a good way to do NAT hole-punching?
Syncthing kind of does what I want, in that it lets all my computers sync the same files no matter what network they're on, but it insists on always copying all the files ("syncing") whereas I just want them stored on the NAS but accessible everywhere.
Nextcloud kind of does what I want but when I tried it before it struck me as flaky and unreliable, and seemed to do a load of stuff I don't want or need.
Most mid range routers allow SSH, and have decent CPU
A colleague uses a QNAP instead, which he claims is better price/storage ratio at the expense of lesser software usability, and I'm okay paying a bit more of my own money (at home) as well as taxpayers' money (at work) on better usability, because it will likely pay off by saving time in the long run, as I currently don't have a dedicated sysadmin in my team.
The only question mark to date was when installing with non-Synology (enterprise SSD) drives I got a warning that mine were not "vendor sourced" devices, and decided not to take any risk and replace all drives with "original" Synology ones just because I can. This may be just disinformation from Synology to make their own customers nervous, and it reminds me of the "only HP toner in HP laser printers" discussion, but it would have been a distraction to investigate further, and my time is more valuable than simply replacing all drives.
On the LAN, I just use SMB. It is adequate for my needs.
For remotely accessing my collection of Linux ISOs, I use Plex.
Syncthing for a small collection of files I want available from all my machines - commonly used documents, photos, stuff I want quickly backed up or synced automatically.
Samba for my long term mostly-read rarely-write storage with larger files, ISOs, etc.
My nas is a Synology. Vpn is also used so that i can continue sending timemachine backups back home when i’m traveling.
Tailscale/Wireguard has been such a big leap forward.
https://github.com/libfuse/sshfs
For added security I limit my home ssh access to a handful of trusted IPs including my cloud VM. Then I set up an ssh tunnel from my hotel through the cloud VM to home. The cloud VM never sees my password / key
> However, at present SSHFS does not have any active, regular contributors, and there are a number of known issues (see the bugtracker).
Not that it is unusable or anything, it is still in widespread use, but I'd guess many assume it to be part of openssh and maintained with it, when it isn't.
An interesting alternative might be https://rclone.org/, which can speak SFTP and can mount all (of the many) protocols it speaks.
I usually just use zerotier for this, it's extremely lightweight
How come ZeroTier is 10X smaller?
My router has public IP so I didn't have any problems reaching it from the outside, so any VPN could work. Another approach is to rent some cheap VPS and use it as a bastion VPN server, connecting both home network and roadwarrior laptop.
No idea about any "integrated" solutions, I prefer simple solutions, so I just used ordinary RHEL with ordinary apache, etc.
Also I use SonicWall VPN to connect to my house to be in the network so it covers most of it. I also use Synology QuickConnect if I need to use the browser without VPN which also covers most urgent needs. Haven't failed me over a decade and my NAS also syncs with Synology C2 cloud which is also another peace of mind. I know it might sound unsafe a little having files stored on the cloud but it is what it is.
I won't play with half-baked library dependent homebrew solutions which cost way more time and cause headache more than commercial solutions. I won't open ports and forget them later either.
Syncthing over Tailscale is running smoothly too, it doesn't matter where my machines move, they find each other using the same internal address every time.
I built the service to keep the dns entry updated myself, so I'm sure it's not as secure as it could be, but it only accepts pings via https and it only works if the body of the POST contains a guid that is mapped to the dns entry I want it to update.
I barely use my tailnet now, might have more of a case for it later, but they are near the top of my "wishing you success but please don't get acquired by a company that will ruin it" list.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35615848
RAID support, NFS/SFTP/Samba support, a nice Web UI to set up access and configure sharing, and even the ability to enable sharing outside your own NAT.
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- I use a lot of different folders within syncthing, and different machines have different combinations to save space where they aren't needed; the NAS has all of them.
- on the LAN, sshfs is a resilient-but-slower alternative to NFS. If I reboot my NAS, sshfs doesn't care & reconnects without complaint...last time I tried to use it, NFS locked up the entire client.
- zerotier + sshfs is workable-but-slow in remote scenarios
Note I'm mostly trying to write code remotely. If you're trying to watch videos....uh, good luck.
This is the point where I'd have thrown it in the trash and given up. I simply don't know how people have the patience to debug past stuff like this: I get that the point of the project is to be cheap and simple, but this is expensive in time and decidedly not simple.
"The distribution builder is a proprietary commercial offering as it involves a lot of customer IP and integrations so it cannot be public."
Seems like a supply side injector to me!
If you get a Pi 4 or Pi 5, or one of the Rockchip boards with RK3566 or RK3588 (the latter is much more pricey, but can get gigabit-plus speeds), you can either attach a USB hard drive or SSD, or with most of them now you could add on an M.2 drive or an adapter for SATA hard drives/SSDs, and even do RAID over 1 Gbps or sometimes 2.5 Gbps with no issue.
Some people choose to run OpenMediaVault (which is fine), though I have my NASes set up using Ansible + ZFS running on bare Debian, as it's simpler for me to manage that way: https://github.com/geerlingguy/arm-nas
I would go with Radxa or maybe Libre Computer if you're not going the Raspberry Pi route, they both have images for their latest boards that are decent, though I almost always have issues with HDMI output, so be prepared to set things up over SSH or serial console.