OpenMediaVault

Today, I learned about OpenMediaVault and other neat tricks to setting your own NAS from a Raspberry Pi.

I anticipated being stuck here in Antipolo so I did a quick home project of sorts: I wanted to make a mini-NAS using whatever resources I had – an unused Raspberry Pi 4, and a Samsung T5 Portable SSD.

So why? Well, internet speeds are bad here (I miss Globe fiber) and having an onsite NAS lets me transfer files shared between my MacBook Pro, my Windows laptop and my iPad Pro.

The results are great. It’s a low-power NAS and I can reliably share files without relying on the internet or flash drives or clunky AirDrop. My 256GB MBP and 64GB iPad isn’t starving anymore thanks to the 1TB SSD. It serves as a media server too, so I’ll be ready to marathon Attack on Titan once the final season’s done.

Some learnings#

• OpenMediaVault is pretty nice if you want a quick network share setup without having to fiddle through configuration files and installing utilities that allows network sharing (Samba, FTP, etc). I can set everything up by hand, but I don’t want to write setup scripts from scratch and I do want some config leeway with a web GUI.

• I wanted an easy way to manage the Pi without digging often on the CLI, so I used Portainer for quick and easy Docker setup and Cockpit for simple server administration.