I recently replaced an ancient laptop with a slightly less ancient one.

  • host for backups for three other machines
  • serve files I don’t necessarily need on the new machine
  • relatively lightweight - “server” is ~15 years old
  • relatively simple - I’d rather not manage a dozen docker containers.
  • internal-facing
  • does NOT need to handle Android and friends. I can use sync-thing for that if I need to.

Left to my own devices I’d probably rsync for 90% of that, but I’d like to try something a little more pointy-clicky or at least transparent in my dotage.

Edit: Not SAMBA (I freaking hate trying to make that work)

Edit2: for the young’uns: NFS (linux “network filesystem”)

Edit 3: LAN only. I may set up a VPN connection one day but it’s not currently a priority. (edited post to reflect questions)

Last Edit: thanks, friends, for this discussion! I think based on this I’ll at least start with NFS + my existing backups system (Mint’s thing, which is I think just a gui in front of rcync). May play w/ modern SAMBA if I have extra time.

Ill continue to read the replies though - some interesting ideas.

  • one_knight_scripting@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    15 hours ago

    So, I understand this is Ian only, I will leave out NextCloud.

    I would personally say Ceph. This is a storage solution meant to be spread among a bunch of different hosts. Basically, it operates on RAID 5 principles AND replicated storage.

    Personal setup: single host 12 ea. 10TB HDDs.

    To start, it does go ahead and generates the parity data for the storage bucket. On top of that, I am running a X2 replicated bucket. Now since I am running a single host, this data is replicated amongst OSDs(read HDDs), but in a multiple host cluster it would be replicated amongst multiple hosts instead.

    One of the benefits to an array like this is that other types of services are easily implemented. NFS overall is pretty good, and it is possible to implement that through the UI or command line. I understand that Samba is not your favorite, but that is also possible. Personally, I am using Rados to connect my Apache Cloudstack hypervisor.

    I will admit, it is not the easiest to set up, but using docker containers to manage storage is an interesting concept. On top of that, you can designate different HDDs to different pools, perhaps you want your solid state storage to be shared separately. Ceph is also capable of monitoring your HDDs with smartctl.

    Proper installation does give you a web UI to manage it, if some one of your skill even needs it. ;)