Comment by nominated1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nominated1 | Hacker News Reader

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These NAS targeted distros are amazing. However, my needs are simple. I just don’t need 90% of the features they have.

Maybe I’m just a simpleton but I run an rsync script each night. The beauty is that if I accidentally delete something I can easily recover it and if a drive fails I lose less than one days worth of data. This trade-off is well worth it for me.

If I had several drives I’d use SnapRAID to cut down on costs.

Oh and I’m lazy so I installed CentOS on it. In several years when CentOS reaches EOL I’ll just buy new hardware and install the newest version.

Synology type devices make me nervous. Krebs[1] recently did a piece on IoT gear being the new target for ransomware. I also wouldn’t feel comfortable exposing anything running on these devices to WAN.

[1] https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/02/zyxel-fixes-0day-in-netw...

I've had FreeNAS running on a 2U Supermicro box for a year and a half or so (I ran FreeBSD on it prior to that). My needs are pretty simple and I don't need 90% of the features either. I only use iSCSI (for the VMware servers in my lab) and NFS (for pretty much everything else); occasionally I'll rsync my workstation's files to it for an "extra" backup.

I've got automated ZFS snapshots set up and when I finally replaced a failing drive -- just two days ago, I think -- it was a fairly simple matter. I updated it to the latest version of FreeNAS and that was simple and straightforward too.

FWIW, this box isn't exposed to the Internet. In fact, it doesn't even have a default route; besides, my router / firewall filters outgoing traffic too -- not just incoming.

I could have just used FreeBSD and configured the pieces I need instead of using FreeNAS but it's been quite stable and reliable and has mostly been a "set it up and forget it" experience.

I use CentOS 7 on a Dell server with a bunch of drives, and it works well with NFS. The nice thing about a vanilla distro for it is that you can do what need a lot more easily.

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