I recently replaced an ancient laptop with a slightly less ancient one.
- host for backups for three other machines
- serve files I don’t necessarily need on the new machine
- relatively lightweight - “server” is ~15 years old
- relatively simple - I’d rather not manage a dozen docker containers.
- internal-facing
- does NOT need to handle Android and friends. I can use sync-thing for that if I need to.
Left to my own devices I’d probably rsync for 90% of that, but I’d like to try something a little more pointy-clicky or at least transparent in my dotage.
Edit: Not SAMBA (I freaking hate trying to make that work)
Edit2: for the young’uns: NFS (linux “network filesystem”)
Edit 3: LAN only. I may set up a VPN connection one day but it’s not currently a priority. (edited post to reflect questions)
Last Edit: thanks, friends, for this discussion! I think based on this I’ll at least start with NFS + my existing backups system (Mint’s thing, which is I think just a gui in front of rcync). May play w/ modern SAMBA if I have extra time.
Ill continue to read the replies though - some interesting ideas.
truenas is cool. I’ve only used core so far, but i hear scale is taking over
this looks promising. Seems a little heavy-weight at first glance… How was it to get up and running?
It’s heavy and it doesn’t like if you tinker with the box in Non-TrueNAS ways. In the end it’s a convenient shiny gui for ZFS and NFS. But it (or ZFS) needs some RAM (minimum 8 I think), so I’m not sure about it working on your old laptop.
the GUI makes it pretty painless. it was my first real attempt at self hosting anything, my first experience with any kind of NFS/SMB setup at all. i was running it as bare metal for around 2 years before using installing as a vm on proxmox.