My NAS Experiences...

About a year ago, I embarked on the learning curve needed to implement a NAS (Network Accessable Storage) Server on my home Network.  A good opportunity to put one more of those old cast-off PCs to work, and find a home for those digital photos accumulating in various places.  

System 1: NAS4Free and PIII

After reading up on the several freeware type NAS implementations available, I decided an old PIII system with 500MB RAM would be good enough.  The box was small, did not use as much power as some of the other boxes I had sitting in the corner.  I stuck an old Maxtor 40GB PATA hard drive in it for the OS and NAS software, scrounged around until I found a PCI bus SATA card to use, and installed a 1TB SATA drive for Data.  INstalled Ubuntu Server OSA, which I had some experience with, then installed my first choice, NAS4Free.  Although I got it installed okay, I seemed to have a lot of trouble setting up appropriate security to be able to see it from other Windows and Linux boxes on my Network.  Maybe it was me; others have used it successfully, but I was having lots of frustration...

Version 2: Switch to OpenMediaVault (OMV), & Pictures!

So I started over, with OMV V2.1  OMV's install ISO does a very nice job of installing Debian and OMV on the Maxtor drive, and finding and setting up the Data drive on the 1TB SATA drive I had installed.  I was able to easily setup a number of data shares, and several classes of users, and see everything easily across my network.  The web admin panel works very well.  

I started to load pictures, from my Win10 PC, and had some more learning to do.  Fortunately others have been there before, and I can refer you to Awasu Consulting's very good articles on Open Media Vault, esp. the one entitled "Configuring Open Media Vault", and the section "Uploading Files to the NAS".

- https://awasu.com/weblog/omv-bpi/configuring-omv/

Other backgrounders I found helpful include:

- https://www.howtogeek.com/176471/how-to-share-files-between-windows-and-linux/

- https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/16196/how-to-disconnect-non-mapped-unc-path-drives-in-windows/

Soon I had uploaded many thousands of pics and videos from several vacations of the past several years, and made them available across our home network, and accessible from several different kinds of devices.  I have found Kodi to be an excellent Media Server, running on inexpensive Android based OTT boxes (about $30 each), feeding from the NAS box, and connected to TVs and a stereo in several rooms of the house.  Kodi is also easily controlled either locally on the TV, with the included IR remote control, or over WiFi, from our Android or iOS phones and tablets.  A very nice arrangement!

More Data: Movies and Music

Of course, there is lots more to do after these initial successes!  I added another 0.7TB SATA drive I had on hand, configured and shared it, and started to add Movies from our in-house collection, accumulated over a number of years.  Soon there were 200 Movies online and easily accessible, complete with supporting information courtesy of the Kodi installed movie information scraper apps.  

And all those music CDs!  Some had already been ripped, but we had lots more to do... Soon there were 1000 or so music CDs online, although since some had been ripped by different people, using different tools and formats, there was a lot of cleanup of existing digital files, so all the music was presented in a common way...  The Windows Media tools, and others, help a lot in setting this up, and Kodi is very happy using the repository so produced.

Setback 1: SATA Card Failure & System 2

And then the plug in PCI bus SATA card I was using failed....  I didn't have another, but I did have lots of other PCs in the corner.  This time I picked a slightly newer, more powerful Acer box, with all the right interfaces, 1GB of RAM, and an AMD Athlon 64b cpu, running at 2.7GHz.  A bit more power hungry, but we were happy with the results of having a NAS server online.  The hard drives installed easily, and the system booted up.  Back in business!  (I ordered another PCI SATA card, just to have around for future use).

Setback 2: Power Supply Failure, and System 3

A week ago, the power went out in our neighbourhood for a few hours.  A rare occurrence, but no big deal, except the NAS server did not restart.  Upon investigation, discovered that it's power supply, a Liteon branded 250W ATX12V supply, had failed.  Some research showed that this was a not uncommon problem in Acer PCs with this supply, once you add additional SATA drives to them!!  

A search through my collection of surplus PCs showed a few had ATX12V supplies, but not with the same motherboard connections (20pin vs 24pin power connectors).  There was also the question of just how much power the mb needed, and if the extra 4 pins were needed.  Unfortunately, Acer refuses to make any tech information on their motherboards public, so there is no way to answer these questions!  A new replacement supply was going to be about $40, but I did have a surplus PC, with the appropriate hard drive interfaces, and a better power supply reputation (an IBM / Lenovo PC).  It also had an even faster cpu, and 1.5GB of RAM.

So I moved the hard drive collection over, leaving the existing CD-ROM drive in place on the IDE0 cable, adding the Maxtor 40GB OS/NAS drive to the same cable, and plugging the 2 SATA Data drives to the 2 available SATA connectors, after removing the SATA hard drive that was originally in this machine.  I was expecting an easy reboot, and back in business.  Not so easy....

GRUB RESCUE>

Well, I had never run into this problem before.  It was accompanied with the error: "hd0 read error"

The BIOS sees the hard drives okay, although it is enumerating them in a different order than the previous PC did.  Did this matter?  No idea...

  The system boots ok from the Super Grub Rescue CD Recovery disk, and sees the hard drives okay.  I try several Grub recovery methods, but no luck.  But sometimes the CD doesn't boot... and I realize the BIOS doesn't see the CD drive...

  After more googling, I finally realize I should check the jumper settings on the PATA devices, since they are both on the same cable...  Yup, two Masters. (Shows how long it has been since I had to configure IDE drives!)

After fixing that problem, I have reliable CD booting, but still no success with Grub repairs.

  On to a more general purpose System Rescue Bootable CD, and it's also time to disconnect the SATA drives, just in case...

  Gparted is happy with the partitions it is finding on the 40GB drive, as described in the OMV information.  However, other tools are not happy with the ext4 file system, complaining of a invalid superblock.

  I switched to using Testdisk, after finding several good references online describing how to use it effectively (it is a complex tool).  By this time, I am in uncharted territory wrt my knowledge of Linux and it's file system details, so this is both fascinating and frustrating territory.  I am learning a lot. I am using my "Practical Guide to Ubuntu Linux" (4th Edition, by Mark Sobell) a lot, too.

  I was able to obtain the list of backup superblocks on the disk, tried fsck repairs with most of them, but no success.

Reinstall OMV, V3.0.94

I was wary of a re-install, since I did not want to have to rebuild the contents of the data disks, if they had to be re-initialized.  However, after more research, it looked like OMV could mount and share existing populated data disks, and that turned out to be the case.  I downloaded the latest stable release of OMV, rebuilt the 40GB OS disk with no problems, added the 2 data disks to the system, and began reconfiguring the system on my network.  Although my previous NAS configuration notes were not quite complete, I had no difficulty mounting and sharing the drives and their data folders, adding the users I had previously setup, configuring services and access rights, and getting everything back to normal.  And my configuration notes are in great shape now!!

So overall a success, although it took several days to work through the details.

Next time, I will go to a full rebuild of the OS drive much quicker...