[kwlug-disc] NAS -- what protocol?

[William Park]

On 2026-01-23 16:30, John Van Ostrand wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 22, 2026 at 9:00 PM William Park <opengeometry at yahoo.ca 
> <mailto: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.

Yes, that works.  But, it wants you to create a "directory" there.  You 
can't use the mountpoint directly.  No big deal.


> 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 got SMB working.  You have to create user from its web UI.  Then, you 
can access below the top level.  I think, it goes through "smbpasswd" 
behind the scene.  Thanks for the pointer.

I was able to export NFS and SMB from same directory.  So, you can do 
stuffs from NFS and see it from SMB, and vice versa.  Now, whether this 
is better than SSHFS, I don't know without long-term real use.

For multi-disks, your only option is BTRFS.  All other filesystems are 
for single disk.