Pi-NAS with Open Media Vault for Raspberry Pi 4

 Pi-NAS is an open-source alternative to a commercial NAS for your home or small business. For low operating and acquisition costs, it can handle all basic functions as well as its certified commercial rivals from companies such as Synology or QNAP. Everything without commerce, openly and safely.

What is it good for?

You will appreciate home storage or NAS for shared storage of electronic content in the home or business. The NAS is connected to the local network and the specified folders are shared via SMB / CIFS or FTP, NFS, etc. to the local network. Every user and device such as laptops, smartphones, or modern televisions, multimedia centers (KODI), etc. can see these shared folders and read/write data according to permissions. It is then possible to back up your personal data to these folders, download and share multimedia, share it with other members of the household, etc. NAS performs mainly a protective function, ie. that the disk is either mirrored to another physical disk (RAID), or better backed up to a backup disk in regular cycles(eg RSync). Security and the required read and write speed play an important role here. The price of the hardware is derived from this.

What will we need?

1. Hardware - we can use any older PC, NTB. If you want low operating costs, a mini PC with minimal consumption is best, the most common is Raspberry 4 Pi or Pine64
2. Software - we use the open-source platform Open Media Vault, which is built on the Linux distribution Debian Buster

Functionality

Multilingual language including Czech Web administration User and rights settings Task scheduler Optional plugins	Link aggregation Wake On Lan IPv6 support RAID 0/1/5/6 / ... EXT3 / EXT4 / XFS / JFS support Manage shared folders HDD power management
Syslog Watchdog SMART Email notifications	SSH FTP TFTP NFS (v3 / v4) SMB / CIFS RSync

For more information on features, go directly to the Open Media Vault project website

Installation -

install OMV by copying the script:

wget -O - https://github.com/OpenMediaVault-Plugin-Developers/installScript/raw/master/install | sudo bash

After a few more minutes, your own non-commercial NAS is ready to use. After installation, open a web browser and type in the address of your RPi. You're done.

Configuration

BASIC

The basic configuration required is simple. Log in via the web interface using the admin  account  with the default password  openmediavault . The manual assumes an English environment, it is a universal variant, but nothing prevents you from using Czech in OMV. After logging in for the first time, change the default password for the admin user again   and set  Auto Logout to  at least 60 minutes. Both options are in the General Settings tab  .

You  can set the time zone in the Date / Time tab  . In the Network> General  tab,  change any hostname - ie. the name of the home NAS on the network.

​

We have the base ready, restart the NAS and log in with a new password.

Storage

In the Discs tab   you will see your SD card, connect any number of USB disks and perform a  Scan . Additional disks such as sda, sdb, sdc, etc. will be loaded.

​

Next, on the  File Systems tab  , you will see which partitions are available. For Open Media Vault  we need the  Linux format  ext4 . If your disks are new, choose  Create , then select the desired disk and give the new partition any name / label. If the disk already contains a partition, delete that partition and create a new one with the ext4 format  . The goal is to create something similar to the image below. Valid for 2 discs.

​

Create a new user in the Users tab  . As an example, we will add the user  kodi , which will be used to play multimedia from our NAS.

​

And of course we need to create some shared folder in Shared Folders . Typical for home NAS are multimedia, ie folders such as Movies, Music, Photos, etc.

​

Finally, we need to set how we get to these folders from other devices. There are a number of standard protocols available, such as SMB, FTP, NFS, etc. For example, a simple SMB is enough for us in a home network for a television or a Kodi multimedia center. Select the SMB tab and activate the service.

​

In  Shares,  then select which shared folder you want to share via SMB and what the rights should be there.

After saving, open the File Explorer in Windows and type the RPi address, in my case the address  \\ 192.168.4.30 \   After entering the user  kodi  and the correct password, you should see the contents of the folder and you can happily start filling it. Then add this shared folder as a multimedia source on your smart TV or kodi.

​