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.
NFS is the best option if you only need to access the shared drives over your LAN. If you want to mount them over the internet, there’s SSHFS.
See, this is interesting. I’m out here looking for the new shiny easy button, but what I’m hearing is “the old config-file based thing works really well. ain’t broken, etc.”
I may give that a swing and see.
I’m at the same age - just to mention, samba is nowhere near the horror show it used to be. That said, I use NFS for my Debian boxes and mac mini build box to hit my NAS, samba for the windows laptop.
What about NFS over the internet?
You can use NFS over the internet, but it will be a lot more work to secure it. It was intended for use over a LAN and performance may not be great over the internet, especially with high latency or packet loss.
NFS is still the standard. Were slowly seeing better adoption of VFS for things like hypervisors.
Otherwise something like SFTPgo or Copyparty if you want a solution that supports pretty much every protocol.
NFS is pretty good
I use NFS for linking VMs and Docker containers to my file server. Haven’t tried it for desktop usage, but I imagine it would work similarly.
I still use sshfs. I can’t be bothered to set up anything else I just want something that works out of the box.
Isn’t that super clunky ? I keep getting all kind of sluggishness, hangs and the occasional error every time I use that. It ends up working but wow, does it suck.
I mostly use samba / cifs clients and it’s fast and reliable with properly setup dns and using only the dns or IP address, not smbios or active directory those are overkill
I like the sound of that!
However it looks like has a lot of potential for a ‘xz’ style exploit injection, so I’ll probably skip it.
From the project’s README.md : The current maintainer continues to apply pull requests and makes regular releases, but unfortunately has no capacity to do any development beyond addressing high-impact issues. When reporting bugs, please understand that unless you are including a pull request or are reporting a critical issue, you will probably not get a response.
I am 100% open to exploring other equally zero effort alternatives if only I had the time CURSE being an adult (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ . Is there anything better I should use, hopefully using existing ssh keys please.
I think a reasonable quorum already said this, but NFS is still good. My only complaint is it isn’t quite as user-mountable as some other systems.
So…I know you said no SAMBA, but SAMBA 4 really isn’t bad any more. At least, not nearly as shit as it was.
If you want a easily mountable filesystem for users (e.g. network discovery/etc.) it’s pretty tolerable.
NFS is still useful. We use it in production systems now. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
And if you have a dedicated system for this, I’d look into TrueNAS Scale.
Truenas Scale works well as long as you don’t want any dockers on it. Once you want to run docker images it is easier to install a VM on Truenas and run the docker from there than it is to try to set up custom “Apps”
Wut? I’ve got a bunch of dockerhub images running on a scale box
It is doable, but it is a pain if the docker requires any special config like permanent storage. Getting nginx up and running for mTLS was especially annoying
