[kwlug-disc] NAS -- what protocol?

[John Van Ostrand]

On Thu, Jan 22, 2026 at 9:00 PM William Park <opengeometry at yahoo.ca> wrote:

> I tried OpenMediaVault and Rockstor in VM.  They are Linux distros
> (based on Debian and OpenSUSE, respectively), and seem to be geared for
> fresh disks.  Whereas, I already have data on harddisks, and I just need
> an easy gui frontend for SMB/NFS.
>

Using existing filesystems on Open Media Vault isn't as intuitive as it
could be. Under the Storage/File Systems menu, click the green arrow (looks
like a play button), it's labelled as "mount" if you hover on it. There you
can mount existing filesystems. I did that when I moved my old WD NAS disk
to it to repurpose that disk.

NFS setup is pretty easy to do via config file (/etc/expoerts on the server
and /etc/fstab on the client.) Security on a simple configuration presumes
you control logins on all the devices on the network. There are choices to
be made, like UDP or TCP transport, read/write sizes, etc. If you have a
large network you'd want a central user database, probably LDAP to make
sure accounts don't vary from system to system.

Samba is more complex, but can easy enough by editing the
/etc/samba/smb.conf file. There are a lot more parameters to choose from
and you have to decide on how to authenticate users. Going with GUEST is
simple if you trust everyone on your network or are sharing public data.
More complex Samba means setting up user authentication, which can be
manually managed  via smbpasswd for a very small number of users (like a
household) but really needs something like LDAP for a large network.

I do understand your situation, I choose Open Media Vault not for the ease
in setting up shares and authentication but for all the extra little bits
that I didn't have to worry about, like SMART monitoring and such. All
things I might be able to tackly myself, but since I stopped being a
professional admin so long ago, I've lost the muscle memory or keeping
something like that going without re-learning every time I do something.

-- 
John Van Ostrand
At large on sabbatical
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