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.
My Windows machines seem to be just fine with the couple of NFS shares I use for easier cross-platform mounting on boot. It comes at the cost of some security, though, so I use it to share unimportant stuff I want to mount very freely, like some media libraries. I use SMB for the rest.
I’m curious, what’s the issue with NFS on Windows for you?
Oh it just doesn’t like it as much as SMB… has work mandated VPN on it for starters! I use a truenas box for most of the backups etc. and I just share the same dataset via SMB and NFS and locally only, so it is sorted, but NFS on the Win 11 box is just way flakier and drops often