installing openmediavault
1 installing
Write the ISO from the LXFDVD (it’s in the OMV/ directory) to a USB stick using dd or Etcher. Boot that on your soon-to-be NAS box. The interface is pretty old-school, but don’t be intimidated. Just work your way through the options and hit Go. Be aware that the installation will indiscriminately destroy everything on the target drive. 2 log in Reboot and the machine should tell you its IP address and offer a login prompt. It may instead helpfully tell you it can’t see the network, in which case log in as admin with the password openmediavault . Run ip a and hopefully you should see an IP address. Visit this address from a web browser on your network.
3 create raid
Log in to the web GUI with the previous credentials. Go to Storage > Disks and select all the drives you want to include in your RAID and select Wipe–you have installed at least three hard drives, right? Use the quick option to save time. Now go to RAID Management and select Create. Choose your RAID level and check the drives you want to involve.
4 create fs and share
Really you should wait till mdadm has synced the RAID before you do this, but it’s probably fine. Go to File Systems, and click Create. Select the /dev/md0 device and choose a filesystem. In order to use this we need to assign it a path. Go to Shared Folders, choose a name, select the RAID device and choose a path.
5 enable cifs share
We need some way to interact with our RAID array. We can do that via SSH (configured by default) or with Samba, which also lets other Oses play along and in our testing was faster. Go to Services > SMB/CIFS and enable the service. Then go to the Shares tab, select Add and configure your share and its visibility.
6 fill with data
Most file managers will let you browse Samba shares by pressing Ctrl+l and entering smb:// followed by your NAS’S IP address. You should create a user (maybe more) on OMV and log in as that user when prompted. Then you can start to fill your NAS; we managed to get about 50MB/S over gigabit Ethernet.