To be totally honest, I don't think I can live without ZFS anymore. Deduplication and snaphots in 2026 are a must.
and checksums!
How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS (2024)
121–130 of 265 posts
Re: How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS (2024)
#122Some other things I find useful on NASes:
Install avahi-daemon. Samba will automatically register with it to advertise SMB/CIFS to macOS and Linux clients over DNS-SD.
Install wsdd2 so that your server will be auto-discovered by Explorer on Windows 10+ clients with SMB 1.0 disabled, too.
Your Linux hostname is probably lower-case, but by default, Samba publishes a capitalized rendering of the hostname to NetBIOS and Avahi. If this bothers you, set “host-name=something” in the [server] section of /etc/avahi/avahi-daemon.conf, and set “mdns name = mdns” in the [global] section of /etc/samba/smb.conf.
If you have macOS clients, you should enable vfs_fruit in your Samba configuration: https://www.samba.org/samba/docs/current/man-html/vfs_fruit..... There are some compatibility reasons to do this, but mostly it means you can set the “fruit:model” so that your server has a fun icon in the Finder sidebar.
To avoid the creation .DS_Store files, you can disallow them: https://ryanoberto.github.io/blog/2015/04/01/disabling-the-c.... I think you can also set “fruit:resource = xattr” to store Finder preferences in xattrs, but I haven't tried it.
Although macOS deprecated AFP in favour of SMB years ago (and are slated to remove AFP client support altogether in the upcoming macOS 27), SMB client support in macOS is still pretty miserable. The upcoming macOS 27 is set to drop AFP support, but until then I will continue to run Netatalk side-by-side with Samba. Netatalk also registers itself with Avahi, and macOS will (tellingly) use AFP preferentially to SMB, so clients will talk to the right daemon automatically.
Re: How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS (2024)
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
With AI you don't have to think about them.
Great business opportunity there. Make a free service that sends AI generated birthday notes to people. All the user has to provide is the other persons birthday. People cannot be relied upon to provide accurate birthdays but nobody would suffer the social faux pas of an incorrect birthday congrats note. Nor would they send it to a spam catching email, but rather are guaranteed to send it to a regularly checked addre…
Then the receiver AI can thank the sending AI before deleting.
Re: How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS (2024)
#124Just yesterday I was brainstorming with ChatGPT about this. I have an ancient QNAP plus a slightly less ancient NUC running PiHole, Wireguard and other services. Both need replaced, so why not combine them? I don't know much about ZFS, but it sounds like I need to learn. Docker may have conquered the world, but I plan to stay with LXD for services. The one thing I take issue with: an appliance like this runs 24/7. It…
It also surprised me that the author said "4 Cores, Xeon Server CPU can be had for cheap". But the specs also said ECC RAM and I don't think the N100 supports that.
> But the specs also said ECC RAM and I don't think the N100 supports that.
If I remember correctly it can in theory but in practice I have never seen a N100 with ECC.
Re: How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS (2024)
#125Can anyone recommend a good server for a homelab to use for a storage purpose like this?
I'm sure there's better options now but the HP ProLiant MicroServers (used). They support ECC ram, 4 caddies, one extra PCIe slot, and to my knowledge you're not cpu limited for a zfs file server usecase. Keep in mind though, all you need is linux* support, iDRAC, ECC if you're a snob, and drive bays ... and that's basically any free server. In my extremely opinionated opinion I would only get used enterprise server…
Agreed. I have used a HP N40L ProLiant MicroServer since 2013 as home NAS and Time Machine backups via samba. Rock solid hardware, incredibly expandable, and today runs FreeBSD 15.1 with ZFS. Additional hardware modifications include; CD-ROM replaced by two 3.5" HDDs on mounts (now six HDDs of 10TB each in ZRAID1), a SAS card to add two mirrored bootable SSDs underneath CD-ROM drive space, a 2x 2.5G NIC (limited to 4GB/s slot) for dedicated NFS link, while additional internal SATA and external SATA ports unused. Next: replace PSU fan with quieter Noctua fan.
Re: How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS (2024)
#126Some other things I find useful on NASes: Install avahi-daemon. Samba will automatically register with it to advertise SMB/CIFS to macOS and Linux clients over DNS-SD. Install wsdd2 so that your server will be auto-discovered by Explorer on Windows 10+ clients with SMB 1.0 disabled, too. Your Linux hostname is probably lower-case, but by default, Samba publishes a capitalized rendering of the hostname to NetBIOS and…
For Samba, add a separate entry for the user home directory because the homes directory default triggers some sort of OCD.
Re: How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS (2024)
#127Has anybody used unraid for his Home Server? Is it worth it?
unraid.net
Re: How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS (2024)
#128I found cockpit to be incredibly useful for managing NAS and VPS. Even though any configuration is not an issue with LLMs, having a dashboard with toggles, formatted logs and such is helpful, and I can even run shell commands on phone without ssh. In the NAS case, you can easily see the results of backup/maintenance cronjobs, manage samba (which is a huge pain in the ass to get to work properly on iPhone), and monito…
> and I can even run shell commands on phone without ssh.
How do you do the authentication to cockpit, basic HTTP auth in front or something? I've always ended up making my phone SSH-capable rather than dropping down to anything else but public/private keys for authentication to my servers, guess I have a bit of conspiracism when it comes to that.
Re: How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS (2024)
#129I still pay for snooty, and the reason for that is that when a disk goes bad (not if; when) I pop its tray out, replace the disk, pop the tray with the disk back in, click a couple of widgets, and that’s it. I know it will be rebuilt properly. (And I know I have to do that, because when the disk fails it beeps and lights a led near the bad disk) It’s easy to build a NAS such as the one described in this article, but…
ZFS handles drive failures more robustly than anything else. There's a reason synology uses mdadm under BTRFS instead of the built-in BTRFS RAID features, and mdadm operates at the device level. That means that to replace a drive, mdadm has to rebuild the entire drive while zfs will only rebuild what's actually in use.
> Also, any guide like this that doesn’t guide you through “disk 3 failed, this is how you safely replace it” is imho incomplete, even if it doesn’t go through telling you how you know a disk has failed.
`zpool replace my_pool disk3 newdisk`
Re: How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS (2024)
#130Can anyone recommend a good server for a homelab to use for a storage purpose like this?
Depends on what you are after.
if you are after quietness and "power" then an old workstation is a great bet. They normally have space for at least 4 fullsized HDDs, the more modern ones have lots of PCI space for nvme-ssd cards (for space) and some have lots of lanes for speed
They also tend to come with SAS/whatever remote nvme is called/SATA expnasion options
The down side is they are not as space efficient, they also tend to have 60-120watt CPUs, so expensive to run