Build your own NAS with OpenMediaVault

Installation

Minimum Requirements

i486 or amd64 platform

1 GiB RAM

2 GiB HDD/DOM/CF/USB Thumb Drive used as OpenMediaVault system drive. Flash Drives

without static wear leveling are not recommended, without it they will have a very short lifetime!

NOTE: The entire disk is used as system disk. The disk can not be used to store user data.

1 HDD for data storage

Info

If you are not able to boot the 0.4 installation media, try to disable the serial port in the BIOS

settings.

OpenMediaVault does not support a data partition on the device where the operation

system is installed. Therefore, please note that the whole disk device is occupied by the operation

system. During the setup the device is parted into a partition used by /root and a swap partition.

All existing data on drive are deleted during installation!

Note before installing: To install OpenMediaVault without problems please disconnect all

harddisks except the one used for the OpenMediaVault operation system. After installing

OpenMediaVault shutdown the system. Then reconnect the drives and restart OpenMediaVault to

finish configuration.

During the installation process, configure the networking (do not choose to configure the

networking later). If the networking isn't configured at this time, you will not be able to access

OpenMediaVault from your webbrowser.

During the installation process the installer automatically checks for newer versions of the

installed packages, so make sure the configured NIC has access to the internet to install the latest

package versions.

Installation media

To install OpenMediaVault download the ISO image. You can burn the ISO to a CDROM or create a

bootable USB stick.

To install the ISO on an USB stick use the following command:

Warning, the dd program has the potential to cause serious data loss if you choose the wrong

device. Make sure you are certain before running the command. If you aren't, please start a thread

in the forums.

sudo dd if=xxx.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=4096

where xxx.iso is the name of the platform-specific ISO that you downloaded, and sdX is the

device name of your USB drive.

For creating the USB drive in Windows, use this program: http://www.chrysocome.net/dd

or this application: http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/

Follow the instructions on that page in order to find the proper device listing within Windows.

Unable to install GRUB in /dev/sda

1. Select

Continue

in this window and also on the next which says Installation step failed.

2. In the Debian installer main menu (which should have popped up by now), select

Execute a shell

and then

Continue

3. Execute the following commands:

# Chroot.

chroot /target

# Replace [a-z] with the drive you want to install grub to.

# This is normally the drive you've selected to install OpenMediaVault on.

grub-install /dev/sd[a-z]

# Update GRUB.

update-grub

# Exit chroot.

exit

# Exit shell.

exit

4. Select

Continue without boot loader

in the Debian installer main menu and then

Continue

5. It should now continue the installation successfully.

Login information

Once you have installed the system, these are the default access credentials.

WebGUI

User: admin

Password: openmediavault

Client (SSH, console)

User: root

Password: <set during installation>

User

Create, edit and delete users accounts.

Add, Edit, Delete: Add, edit or delete user account.

Username: The account name for the user account.

Comment: Comments to the account.

Email: Email address of the account user

Password: The asociated password

Shell: The default linux shell for the user account

Default: /bin/dash

Groups: The groups the user account is member of

Default: users

Modify account: Disallow the user to modify the account.

Default: not selected

User accounts can also be imported from a list in the format: #

<name>;<uid>;<comment>;<email>;<password>;<group,group,...>;<disallowusermod>

Settings

Specify location of home directory for user acounts.

Enable: select to specify a that a specific location of user home directories should be used. If not

set users home directories are created in the data root.

Default: not selected

Location:The location of the user home directories.

Default: not selected

OpenMediaVault Web GUI default username and password

If you come across a server running OpenMediaVault, and you aren’t sure what the web GUI password

is, give the following a try, as this is the default username and password for OpenMediaVault.

Username: admin

Password: openmediavault

Configuring storage

Getting started

After installing OpenMediaVault (OMV) you’re able to log into the main Web interface to start

configuring your storage space and services. Before you go any further I highly recommend you

change the default Web admin password from ‘openmediavault’ to something a little more secure, and

you can do this under the General settings tab.

Allocating your disks and storage space

Our next task is set up the physical disks we plan to use in OMV. You can use several of these to store

data on if you wish, including SATA/ PATA and USB connected. One great feature is read and write

support for standard NTFS volumes, so if you’re connecting a disk from a windows system there’s no

need to format and start from scratch.

OMV includes built in software RAID support for spanning, mirroring and even striping, so if you have

several drives you want to add together to form a resilient volume, there’s plenty of options there to

tinker with.

To keep things simple, in this instance we’re just going to look at creating a new volume on a dedicated

internal disk that’s already physically connected. In this example I’ll use a 100GB virtual disk.

If we look under Storage > Physical disks we can now see two devices.

The first device (/dev/sda) is the small 8GB virtual drive we’ve used as a home for the OMV

application files. Unfortunately this can’t be used for data storage so using your smallest disk, USB

flash or a small virtual disk (if like me you’re running in a VM environment) is a good idea.

The second device ( /dev/sdb) is our larger 100GB virtual disk that we want to allocate as storage so

I’ll make a note of that ID. Next under Storage > File systems lets create a new file system and mount

it into Linux.

Creating a new file system

First I choose Create > select /dev/sdb and give it the label ‘100GBXFS’. I then choose to format

using the XFS file system (you can choose a different file system if you prefer). Choose OK to format

the disk and once completed click on Mount. Once the disk is mounted you’ll be presented with a

graph showing the available space.

Allocating user storage space

The final step is to create a shared folder on this disk that we can use to store users data on. We do this

under Access rights management > Shared folders. Click on Add to create a new folder.

To keep things simple let’s call it ‘user-folders’, select the volume name ‘100GB-XFS’ that we have

just created and put it in a root folder of the drive ‘\users-folders’. We’ll leave the user rights as default

for the time being.

Once done you should have a new shared folder as per below…

Configuring SSH and Rsync

Setup a user account

The first step is to create a new user that we’ll use to authenticate the remote server and store the

backups under its home folder.

Open Access right management > User and choose Add.

Add a new user using the following details….

I have chosen a username of site1bauser and a strong password, I’ve also made sure the shell used is

changed to ‘/bin/bash’ and that the user is in both the ‘ssh’ and ‘users’

groups.

Next, under the settings tab, enable the user’s home folders and choose the ‘users-folders on

[100GBXFS]’ share.

Choose ‘OK’ to save the changes.

Enable the SSH service

to allow ssh access to the OpenMediaVault server we must enable the service under Services > SSH.

Here you should also tick ‘Enable compression’ to help speed up transfers, then you can click ‘OK’ to

save the changes.

At this point the configuration at the OpenMediaVault end is complete, so all that’s left is to set up the

BackupAssist job to rsync the backup data.

Configuring BackupAssist to run an ‘rsync over SSH’ job

Within the BackupAssist interface, simply set up a new rsync job and at the destination screen enter the

following details…

In this example I’ve used the internal IP address of the OpenMediaVault server, but if you’re

connecting to a remote server over the internet you can use a public IP address and where required, a

NAT port translation on port 22 (SSH) to point to the internal IP of the OpenMediaVault server. Also,

you may notice that I’ve chosen to put the backups in a folder called ‘Backups‘ in the root home

folder. You’ll need to click on ‘Register with the server‘ and’ ‘Test connection’ to register and check

the connection with the SSH server.

Ok, so that’s us all done! You should now be able to run the BackupAssist job to backup the data using

Rsync over SSH.

Just a quick note in case you were wondering – we haven’t needed to configure the OpenMediaVault

rsync service as this is only required for direct and unsecured connections which I generally don’t

recommend you use over the internet.

Accessing your backup data as a Windows SMB/CIFS share

Configuring the SMB/CIFS server

First open Services > SMB/CIFS and enable the service.

You can either leave the workgroup name as default or enter your own workgroup/ domain name if

required.This will help the OpenMediaVault server show up in your windows local network.

Choose ‘OK’ to save the settings then select the ‘Shares‘ tab.

‘

The next step is to name the share ‘user-folders’, enter a relevant comment and select the share folder

‘user-folders [on 100GBXFS]’ from the dropdown menu.

For simplicity we’ll tick the option to allow access without a password and also tick the option to make

the share read only to remove any possibility of accidentally deleting the backups. You can edit this

later to change access rights if required. Once you’ve completed those steps, choose ‘OK‘ to save the

settings.

You should now have a Windows share available to view by using the UNC path of the

OpenMediaServer IP address or hostname as show below.

That completes the setup steps for creating a Windows share so now if you need quick access to a large

quantity of backup data, you can do this quickly and easily by copying them direct to a USB hard drive

for example.

Install OMV-extras plugin

To install on OpenMediaVault 1.x (Kralizec):

From OMV web interface (preferred method)

1. Install all updates from the Update Manager tab.

2. Download the plugin to enable this repository at

http://omv-extras.org/openmediavault-omvextrasorg_latest_all.deb

3. Go to the plugin tab in OMV's web interface.

4. Upload the file.

5. Select the newly uploaded plugin openmediavault-omvextrasorg

6. Click on Install.

7. Refresh page.

8. Go to the plugin tab and click Check.

From command line as root

1. wget http://omv-extras.org/openmediavault-omvextrasorg_latest_all.deb

2. dpkg -i openmediavault-omvextrasorg_latest_all.deb

3. apt-get update

To install on OpenMediaVault 0.5.x (Sardaukar):

From OMV web interface (preferred method)

1. Install all updates from the Update Manager tab.

2. Download the plugin to enable this repository at

http://omv-extras.org/debian/pool/main/o/openmediavault-omvextrasorg/openmediavault-

omvextrasorg_0.6.25_all.deb

3. Go to the plugin tab in OMV's web interface.

4. Upload the file.

5. Select the newly uploaded plugin openmediavault-omvextrasorg

6. Click on Install.

7. Refresh page.

8. Go to the plugin tab and click Check.

From command line as root

1. wget http://omv-extras.org/debian/pool/main/o/openmediavault-omvextrasorg/openmediavault-

omvextrasorg_0.6.25_all.deb

2. dpkg -i openmediavault-omvextrasorg_0.6.25_all.deb

3. apt-get update