Any one use a commercial NAS system with their Slackware installation? Where files can sync automatically (via native driver/software) and not be limited to a web interface? I'm referring to units from Synology, QNAP, or someone else. I'm currently using multiple external USB drives, but want something I can setup with RAID.

So you mean using Slackware as the NAS host, or with Slackware being the client?

Slackware as the client should be easy, no matter if the NAS is commercial or not. The client just has to use a protocol supported by the NAS: that can be iSCSI, NFS4, CIFS, etc.

I am not aware, just off the top, of any commercial NAS device that uses Slackware as the base OS.

1 members found this post helpful.

I have a synology nas and I do use it's sync funtion within slackware using Synology-Drive-Client. If that's what you mean.

1 members found this post helpful.

Since many years back I have a Synology DS213 in my home network with two drives in a RAID1 configuration. It was so many years ago I configured this that I now have forgotten how to log in to its web interface. However, I am still able to log in to the NAS with ssh.

Back then, I did add some packages for the synology NAS, it is running a web server and mrtg to monitor my Slackware hosts and network equipment. It also exports some disk which my Slackware hosts are mounting with NFS v3.

regards Henrik

2 members found this post helpful.

A few months ago I picked up a Synology DS220+ and two 6 TB WD NAS drives. Configuration was pretty simple once I got past some of the weird GUI menu arrangements. Set up a admin user, a regular user, ssh, rsync and NFS. cron job pulls slackware updates every 2 days; slackpkg on each client points to the NFS shares. Getting the permissions set correctly in the GUI was a bit weird, but ssh and chmod/chown took care of that. With NFS, I use rsync to copy/archive/sync files as needed. Synolology uses a heavily customized linux (Debian?) with some nonstandard commands, so I just use the web GUI usually.

For NFS be sure you set a fixed IP or address reservation in your dhcp server. I forgot that one - the NAS ip changed when I rebooted it! Also, if you use fstab to mount the NFS shares, they will not re-mount when you reboot the slackware client since the network is brought up after the drive mounts.

Also, I'm still trying to figure out the media server. File types show supported don't always play, when cast to a device such as Roku. Probably some setting somewhere.

1 members found this post helpful.

Well, I for one I have a NAS powered by Slackware 15.0 and it looks quite "commercial"

People, there are cases for NAS and mini-ITX motherboards, mine one have 4 hotswap-able drives and another 2.5" internal. So, it's powered by some Intel "garbage" J1900 CPU with TDP of 10W and a 6 slots SATA 3.0 PCIe x4 adapter gives the supplementary SATA ports. For storage I have 4 SSD of 256GB connected in RAID5 (giving aprox 750GB storage space) and the other one is for OS, along with 8GB RAM.

I confess - it's nothing special, just a Windows Share (powered by Samba) where my sons and my wife keeps their documents in a safe and centralized way - no NFS, no fancy features. BUT, it works and personally I keep there the local "mirrors" of -stable and -current trees of Slackware used by me for further rsyncing on my boxes.

PS. the case looks something like in the attached screenshot.

Attached Thumbnails

 

1 members found this post helpful.

Most commercial NAS systems I've tried have some GUI web Login between client and server (like Cockpit) and so far I have yet to set one of those up in Slackware but no big deal since rsync works over NFS just fine and I imagine can easily be setup as a cron job. I started out with Slackware 15.0 on an old Z77 system but then decided to see what I could do and how much less power an ARM system would consume. Now I'm running Aarch64Slackware on a RockPro64 ARM device and it's pretty great. I don't bother with setting up a cron job because I simply made an entry in KDE Dolphin for the server share and just either run rsync for larger jobs or drag 'n drop for smaller ones. It's fairly effortless.

1 members found this post helpful.

Yep. Up until about 12 months ago, I had an ancient QNAP TS-409. I think my brother bought it new some time around 2008, and then he upgraded around 2012 and so the old one landed in my lap. I put 4 x 2Gb hard disks in it, and ran a RAID 5 giving me 5.4Tb of usable storage.

Well anyhow, due to its age it stopped getting security updates around 2014.

The good news is that it was running a form of Linux, which meant that I could log in via ssh. So what I did was set it up to export NFS, and then switched off all of the other services it was running. Then I mounted the NFS share from my Slackware box and set up SAMBA (on the Slackware box) to provide access to the rest of my household.

The only services that the QNAP ran were ssh and NFS. I had even deactivated the service providing the web interface.

It ran that way for years without as much as a hiccup.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks for all the answers. Yes, I will be using it to store/sync files from my Slackware desktop machine.

One more thing to think about if you connect multiple Linux machines to a NAS with NFS is that all those machines should have the same point of view of users on the machines when it comes to numeric UID.

When you add a user to a Slackware machine you probably use the command useradd which by default will use the next free numeric UID above a threshold. This will result in a row in /etc/passwd looking something like this:

In the example above, 406 is the numeric UID of user henca. On the NFS server (and also any local file system), the owner of each file is stored as this numeric UID. The same applies for the numeric GID in /etc/group.

If different machines have different points of view on which UID belongs to which user they will get different point of view on which files belong to which user.

This consistent point of view can be maintained by carefully creating users on different machines or by using some catalog service like NIS or LDAP.

regards Henrik

3 members found this post helpful.

Thank you for that. I will keep that in mind.

Hi, using a Synology DS418 with NFS with the desktop and Synology Drive Client with the laptop, everything works fine. Just use deb2txz for the .deb client file and install it.

1 members found this post helpful.