Maximum PC - USA (2019-10)

unreadable sectors. From the menu on the left, go to “Settings

> S.M.A.R.T.” and hit the “Enable” switch. In the “Devices” tab,

activate SMART for each of your storage drives, and optionally

for the OS drive as well. Drives slyly keep a few sectors spare,

so that unreadable ones can be reallocated, and this reallocated

sector count is one of the myriad attributes which OMV is now

diligently watching over. Should this become non-zero, or any

other drive health stat become concerning, you’ll see a red circle

in the status column, and you can investigate further with the

“Information” button [Image B]. Often these alerts are isolated

incidents and nothing to worry about, but if the bad numbers

start to increase frequently, swift action is required.

4

RAID-ON

Now go to “Storage > Disks,” and select one of the drives

you’re going to use as new storage (not the one we just

installed OMV on, or a drive that’s already got data on it). Drives

need to have their partition tables nixed before they can be safely

used in RAID arrays, so hit the “Wipe” button, and repeat this

for other new storage drives. Non-empty drives can’t readily

be enrolled in RAID arrays, but if you have the spare space, you

can copy the data to the new array, wipe the old drive, then grow

the array to include it. Go to “Storage > RAID Management,”

and click the “Create” button. OMV can handle anything from

mirroring two or more drives (RAID 1) to dual parity across four

or more drives (RAID 6), and several configurations beyond and

in between those. Striping (RAID 0) doesn’t make much sense

on a NAS box, because network bandwidth is likely the limiting

factor. Give your array a name. Choose a RAID level apropos

CD

to the number of drives you have and the amount

of redundancy you require or desire. We had three

inexpensive 1TB disks, so we made a RAID 5 array.

5

FILESYSTEM FUN

Creating the array takes a long time if you use

RAID 5 or 6 (ours took about 10 hours), but you

can start using it right away, albeit in degraded mode,

while the parity structures are initialized. Before you can

copy any data, though, you need to bestow a filesystem

upon the array. Head to “Storage > Filesystems,”

and click “Create” [Image C]. Select the RAID device,

probably labeled “/dev/md0,” and choose a filesystem.

Unless you have reason to suspect otherwise, Ext4 is a

good choice. Now go to “Access Rights Management >

Shared Folders,” and create some folders.

6

DO THE SAMBA

There are multitudes of ways you can share these

shared folders, but the most common is using

Samba, which makes your shares visible via Windows

Networking. Set up a user from the “Access Rights

Management > Users” page, so that a password is

required to see shares. Go to “Services > SMB/CIFS.”

In the “Settings” tab, you can configure cosmetic details

such as the workgroup name, and in the “Shares” tab

you can add your shared folder and make it “Public” or

“Read Only.” For more fine-grained access controls, go

back to the “Shared Folders” settings [Image D].

OpenMediaVault is very extensible, and

a number of plugins are available from

“System > Plugins.” The USB backup

tool is pretty handy for automatically

backing up folders (such as your very

important documents or photos) to a

USB drive. There are also plugins for

the Transmission BitTorrent client

or encrypted storage via LUKS. A

number of more adventurous third-

party plugins are available from the

OMV-Extras repository. To enable this,

go to http://omv-extras.org/joomla/

index.php/guides, download the .deb

file for OMV 4.x, and follow the rest of

the instructions on that page. The list

of available plugins multiplies, giving

access to (among others)

the SnapRAID and

MergerFS plugins for

more flexible storage—

conventional RAID can

lead to wasted space on

differently sized drives.

You’ll find a new

“OMV-Extras” menu

entry for adding more

repositories, including

Docker, TeamViewer,

and Plex, which can

index your media library (as long as

it’s vaguely organized), and turn your

NAS into a complete media streaming

solution. It can send video to any device

with a web browser and transcode video

on the fly. Once you’ve enabled the repo

and updated, the Plexmediaserver

plugin can be found in the list.

SNUG AS A PLUGIN A RUG

maximumpc.com OCT 2019 MAXIMUMPC 65