Build a DIY Raspberry Pi NAS
YOU’LL NEED THIS
A RASPBERRY PI Fourth generation is best; plus you need a USB hard drive.
RASPBERRY PI OS LITE Download from http://raspberrypi. org/software/operating-systems/.
ETCHER Download from www.balena.io/etcher/.
LET’S BEGIN WITH THE BAD NEWS, before you get all excited: The Raspberry Pi 4 is not the best choice as a NAS host. What is more, the Pis that came before it should probably be avoided at all costs. This isn’t some elitist sentiment, it’s a hardware issue. The earliest Pis top out at USB 2.0, have a limited controller that leans heavily on CPU power, and give their USB ports and Ethernet connection a shared bus, severely limiting bandwidth. The Pi 4 is built in a more sensible way, but it still shares each of its USB ports over a single PCIe lane with 4Gb/s bandwidth. If speed is your concern, look elsewhere. However, if an ultra-budget NAS (with room to tinker on top) sounds good, you’re in the right place. It’s certainly a clever way to put an unused Raspberry Pi to good use, and OpenMediaVault makes file sharing far easier than it would be in raw unfettered Linux. If you’re lucky enough to have an old PC kicking around, this is even more applicable, particularly because you’ll be able to use SATA-connected drives to set up a RAID configuration, something that isn’t available here—just install it on top of Debian instead of Raspberry Pi OS. –ALEX COX
1 LET THERE BE RASPBERRY PI OS LITE
We’ll spare you the usual long-winded explanation on how to install an OS on to your Raspberry Pi because it’s pretty self-explanatory; try Etcher or Win32DiskImager to get that card written, and while both tools should automatically eliminate any critical drives, do your own due diligence to make sure you’re not overwriting anything important. Although it would be nice to run OpenMediaVault inside a Docker container, that’s apparently not possible due to it getting its claws into so many of Linux’s services—you need to put it as close to bare metal as you can, so we’re going to use Raspberry Pi OS Lite as our base. Grab the latest version and write it to a microSD card. When it’s done you’ll see a “boot” partition mounted on your Windows machine; make a new (empty) text file here and name it “ssh”— this will enable us to access the Linux shell remotely.
2 IP FROM PI
Put the card in your Pi, hook it up to an Ethernet connection, and power up. Give it a few minutes to get up to speed, then let’s find the IP address of the Pi, and do so by cheating: Download Angry IP Scanner from http://angryip.org, run it, and search in the usual range your router dishes out—in our case, we need to look for 192.168.1.0 to 192.168.1.255. Run the scan [ Image A], find your Pi’s hostname, and note down its IP address.
3 OPEN THE VAULT
Time to log in. We’ll use the stone-cold classic PuTTY as an SSH client, though many versions of Windows now include a command-line SSH tool by default—this will do the job just as well. Enter the IP address you just noted down, and ensure you’re connecting to port 22 using SSH. The first time you connect, you need to accept the fingerprint of your Pi; this is fine to do, since you’re connecting to a local machine. Now enter the login details—by default Raspbian uses the “pi” user, with the password “raspberry.” Immediately change that password by typing passwd and following the prompts. Now let’s install OpenMediaVault. Start by ensuring the packages on your Pi are up to date by running sudo apt update followed by sudo apt upgrade ,
then run the following command to download and execute a script written by OMV’s developers [ Image B] to get it installed: sudo wget -O - https://github.com/OpenMediaVault-PluginDevelopers/installScript/raw/master/install | sudo bash
>> This will take its sweet time, even on a Raspberry Pi 4. Once it’s done it’ll likely kick you out of your SSH connection, because OMV will have jiggled some settings about. That’s OK, because we’re done with SSH for now—open a web browser and point it to your Raspberry Pi’s IP address, and you’ll see OMV’s web UI. Log in with the username “admin” and password “openmediavault.”
4 DRIVE TIME
Let’s quickly change another password by heading to “General Settings > Web Administrator password,” entering your new password, and clicking “Save.” Log in again with your new credentials, then plug your drive(s) into the Raspberry Pi—preferably through a powered USB hub, which will increase stability. Head to the disks section in the lefthand column, and you should see any drives you’ve hooked up listed below your Pi’s internal storage. For each one, click it and select “Wipe”—unless you’re attempting to destroy something particularly incriminating, a quick wipe suffices. Now let’s give those drives a file structure to work with by heading to the “File Systems” section, clicking “Create,” selecting your drive, giving it a label, then clicking “OK.” The default EXT4 file system will be fine, but feel free to change it if you want to experiment.
5 SHARING IS CARING
Creating the filesystem is just the start. With our drives ready, they can be mounted with the appropriate button on the “File Systems” screen. Now we can set them up as SMB/ CIFS shares by heading to the appropriate section, going to the “Shares” tab, and clicking “Add.” Click the plus symbol to set up a new shared folder, give it a name, select which drive it should be on, and type a folder name into the path box. This will be our shared folder for anyone on the network, so change the permissions to “Everyone: read/write,” then hit “Save.” Change the “Public” setting in the “Add share” window to “Only guests” so nobody requires any credentials to access the folder, then click “Save.” Now head back to the “SMB/CIFS” section, flip the switch at the top to toggle the function on, click “Save,” and apply the new configuration. You can now connect to your shared drive; your Pi will show up in Windows Explorer’s “Network” section, with the shared folder inside. Use the username “guest” with no password to gain access.
6 MIRROR, MIRROR…
Some bad news, here, to close us out: We can’t use RAID on a Raspberry Pi, because OMV does not support it over USB. That’s annoying but fair—USB is not exactly a rock-solid way to do it—but we can at least use multiple drives, and ask OMV to create an automatic backup for us. To mirror, say, the “share” folder we created earlier, head to “Rsync” in the left column, click “Add” to create a new job, select your old folder as the source, and create a new one (using the plus sign) on your second drive [ Image C] to use as the destination. If you want to synchronize the folders once an hour, flip the “Every N minute” switch. We also recommend flipping on the “Delete” option, so that files removed from the main folder are also removed from the backup to stop it filling up. Hit “Save,” apply the changes on the yellow bar at the top, then (after dropping a few files on your server) click the “Run” button to test out the transfer.