A modular, extensible DIY NAS

A NAS seems like a nice way to consolidate my photoalbums and have redundancy in terms of physical storage. But that whole cloud thingy is something I don't need, heck, I don't want!

I would say that a good router is the way to go and I think I should replace the one my ISP has given me. Can anyone point me in the direction for a guide to a hardware router and appropriate firmware, so I can be sure to control what the NAS (or any other device within the network) can connect to on "the internet"?

I think the OP means 100 MB/s and not 100 Mbps here

I've relied on hardware RAID over one hardware failure, for the first and last time.

We were running some services on a stack of older Dell servers with mostly identical hardware. The RAID controller and mainboard on one of them let the magic smoke out. We (a sysadmin team of three) promptly decided to move the RAID array to another unused server in the stack in order to avoid a lengthy reinstall and manual restoring of daily backups – this happened before the almost-one-click provisioning of devops and virtualization tools was the norm.

The other server lacked the RAID license dongle that was on a pin header on the mainboard, so we just tried to cannibalize it from the server corpse that barely had stopped smoking. The new mainboard promptly rejected the license because the service tag differed, and the only way to change it was to install Windows 95 or 98 and run the tag changer tool. In addition, we had to downgrade the controller firmware to match that of the old one. One nightlong unattended rebuild later, the server was up and running the next morning.

When we upgraded the server hardware a bit later, we migrated it over to mdraid and haven't had any problems with hardware failures since.

Moral of the story: If you are depending on certain hardware features, you need to have a cold spare available with identical hardware and firmware. If you cannot afford one, it's better to either use a software implementation, have a really good service contract with the vendor or just let a VM provider take care of your infrastructure.

> Moral of the story: If you are depending on certain hardware features, you need to have a cold spare available with identical hardware and firmware. If you cannot afford one, it's better to either use a software implementation, have a really good service contract with the vendor or just let a VM provider take care of your infrastructure.

+1 for this. Hardware raid absolutely has its place, but if you expect to be able to rebuild an array without restoring from a backup, you absolutely need to have spare parts that are tested in advance.

Also, RAID is not a backup. RAID provides high(er) availability. You need to have backups still!

So I had this QNAP TS451+ sitting and gathering dust after a move. I had no interest in dealing with the terrible QNAP OS on it and wanted to do something open source.

The only somewhat difficult part was preserving data from the old disks as QNAP has custom extensions to LVM or MDRAID which work nowhere else. So there were a few back and forth of removing a few disks from the pool, rebooting to a normal linux, formatting them without the custom garbage, booting back and copying over.

In the end I decided to go with NixOS as I've already used it on my laptop/desktop for about 5 years. I also wanted a modern CoW file system and went with bcachefs. Getting it working with NixOS takes some fiddling, especially if you also want encryption but it works. It now runs samba, matrix-synapse and soon maybe nextcloud. Not quite there yet with everything but quite happy that I went down this route.

The only thing missing from the HW side is an SSD, but the box has USB3 and UAS support so I might add an external one that bcachefs can use as a faster tier.