NAS writeup first draft done on stream
https://youtu.be/ntTibBgi_Fg Signed-off-by: Xe <me@christine.website>
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title: My Homelab NAS on NixOS
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date: 2021-11-29
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---
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Recently my husband and I built a NAS to store our Plex library among other
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things. Our home network has had an absurd abundance of slack compute laying
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around (to the point that I am almost unsure what I am going to do with it all),
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but the main thing that the network lacked was a good place to put a lot of
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data. Previously each of our towers had been kitted with 2 4TB rotational drives
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that we ended up sharing our media between. This worked out well enough, but it
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was kind of inconvenient to just use the storage. Things had to be mediated
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between Linux and Windows and it just became a whole mess.
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Then the biggest breaking point happened when we started to both get into
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playing roomscale VR with eachother on the internet. Most of the VR stuff works
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on Windows as its primary target, and our home Plex server was on my tower when
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it was booted into Linux. As I did more and more VR, rebooting into Linux for
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our anime nights started to become a chore. So we decided to make a NAS that
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we'd store all that stuff on as well as act as our Plex server so my tower could
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do whatever it wanted.
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[Pedantically, most of the VR stuff does work fine on Linux if your distro of
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choice is NOT NixOS. It is kind of annoying.](conversation://Mara/hacker)
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We settled on a machine we're calling `itsuki`, the 5th machine in our homelab.
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`itsuki` has a hexacore i5 10600 like the rest of the lab, but differs in the
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amount of ram at only 16 GB of ram. It is inside a Fractal Node 803 case and
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currently lives under my desk. It runs NixOS like the rest of the homelab (save
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`logos`, which runs Windows 11 and has an RTX 2060 in it for other
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experimentation), and installing it was fairly painless.
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`itsuki` has 4 8TB 7200 RPM drives in it, which when combined with raidz1 gives
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me effectively 20 TB of redundant storage on top of 32 TB of raw storage. I have
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a few parent datasets that I use for organizing this:
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* `rpool/backup` - backups from my homelab and other servers get dumped here for
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long term storage. This dataset is due to be replicated to rsync.net.
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* `rpool/local` - machine-local storage that should not be backed up to the
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cloud. This is mainly used for the Nix store because everything there can be
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recomputed as needed, making backups redundant.
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* `rpool/safe` - Files that can be eligible for cloud backups and things that we
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would rather keep than lose. Our media library is here as well as our giant
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data folder imaginatively named `/data`. Some virtual machine disk images live
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here too as well as `/`, `/home`, `/srv` and `/var`.
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[Fun fact: `itsuki` is named after the 5th quintuplet in the Nakano quintuplets
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from the anime The Quintessential Quintuplets. Itsuki's name is a pun on the
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number 5, which fits because the NAS is the 5th node in the
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homelab.](conversation://Cadey/enby)
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Installing NixOS was utterly painless. Using a combination of settings from the
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Arch Linux wiki (seriously wish I could get a printed copy of that thing, it's
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worth its weight in gold for how much weird arcane things you can learn from
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it), the NixOS wiki and copying things off of a Synology box's samba
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configuration file, I managed to trick everything into working and now all the
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machines on our tailnet can access the data on the NAS without too much trouble.
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Even iPhones and iPads thanks to the recent addition of SMB mounting on
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iP{hone|ad}OS. It also works over Tailscale too, so I can get into the NAS'
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files anywhere I have an internet connection.
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Thanks to a docker-compose manifest for Transmission shoved into a WireGuard
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network, I can also **legally acquire** certain kinds of animated media that
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aren't available in Canada and manage how much I share back over Tailscale too.
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Thanks to Tailscale's Let's Encrypt support I can also create a progressive web
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app that lets me monitor Transmission on the go and give my NAS instructions to
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**legally acquire** more of this media should I want to.
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I originally wanted to make this a post about how I set up NixOS and everything,
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but it wasn't actually that big of a deal to do it. It just worked first try
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once I managed to trick the uber gamer Aorus motherboard to shut up about Secure
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Boot and just let me boot off of a damn USB drive. Probably broke Windows
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booting on that thing in the process, but honestly I'd be tempted to consider
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that a security feature to protect the NAS data from Windows booting on the
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machine.
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This setup was boring, and honestly for the kind of thing that I was setting up,
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that's very much a good thing.
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