Technology

I would recommend making your own NAS instead of buying a Synology or something similar. Check out [email protected]. Hardware will cost a bit, but it's far more worth it.

An extremely good resource to begin learning the server environment would be https://esc.sh/projects/devops-from-scratch/. He has youtube videos that are really well done, I would strongly encourage you to watch atleast the first few videos as they cover topics that you will need to learn, such as : networking, explaining how linux works, etc.

After watching a couple of his guides and learning from them, I would recommend starting a basic server using an old computer or the likes that hosts a couple of apps you will be using. Nothing important like a password manager, file storage, etc, just yet; simply the basics so you get a better understanding of using linux as a server. My recommendations of stuff to try out:

• Installing PiHole using docker / docker-compose
• Installing Wordpress using docker / docker-compose
• Setting up a Wireguard server (there are also docker images, such as wg-easy) so you can connect to your home network from wherever, and use whatever services you are hosting (important if you wish to use your future NAS while not at home)
• Installing Nginx Proxy Manager and learning how to reverse proxy your services to a hostname

After that I would recommend you transition to Proxmox as your OS, learn from there, and then start hosting file managers/file storage (Network Attached Storage part), zoneminder/frigate for the camera system, etc. Patience is key with this type of learning.

For the hardware part it's all up to you: amt. of storage, amt. of ram, how big the chasis will be, power-efficiency, motherboard with features you want (ex. more pcie for 2.5gbps network card), cpu depending on how much processing power you need, ... You will need to do your research on this, but I recommend getting a NAS after you understand how docker and the works function, and to tailor to your needs.

If you have any questions let me know, hopefully you can understand what I was trying to say, not the best at conveying this type of information lol.

On one side of the spectrum you have the likes of Synology: you pay premium for the software that does what it says in a nice compact enclosure. Good documentation, easy UI, potentially limiting flexibility.

On the other side, you can make a linux box and declare it a NAS. Run whatever storage you want with whatever filesystem. Any enclosure and form factor you can imagine. Infinitely scalable, but also you’re absolutely on your own in configuring and managing it.

I'd suggest figuring a budget first, and then figuring how much of a hands-on approach you want to have.

I’ve spent the time building and maintaining a pi NAS and I prefer a Synology DiskStation. If you have the budget for it, you’ll get a device that’s super easy to set up, is bursting with features just waiting to be added, and there’s no maintenance on it. My NAS runs a plex (streaming video) server, an email server, file server for my local network, it does DHCP and DNS for my network, it stores my IP camera footage, it hosts a small web server, and an audio steaming server. All this functionality was gained by just clicking “install” on the package manager on DiskStation. Unless you have gobs of time to spend learning and fiddling, I’d always go with a DiskStation over a home brewed solution. I guess it boils down to your goal. is your goal to learn more and make something yourself? Or do you just want the seamless features of a consumer level NAS?

"I finished setting up Arch Linux" 😎

If you decide to go down the Synology route, make sure it supports docker. Their cheaper models don't support it, and it's the gateway to self-hosting all the services that are not available directly from the package manager.

I'm a proponent of a do it yourself NAS using FreeNAS or Unraid. I had a standalone NAS and got burned by a ransomware attack due to a vulnerability in the software for a feature I had "disabled". There was zero way for me to know it was an issue without checking the vendor's forums and seeing everyone else who had the same issue. Upon looking into it a bit more, it seemed like most standalone commercial NAS companies had been hit at least once.

Doing it myself means that I know how it is setup and can control what has access to the internet. As a benefit, the old computer I used performs way better than the standalone NAS and is way more stable (my old NAS "lost" docker containers multiple times). I can definitely recommend Unraid as being easy to use which has a ton of resources on their website and forums, as well as many videos on Youtube on recommended setups. It was definitely a good learning experience and overall not too difficult to do.

I got an Odroid HC4 last year and put Armbian on it, with 2 HDDs in RAID1 via mdraid, and can connect to it using either SMB or NFS. Works great, and since it can run Docker containers nicely I use it for pretty much all my home server needs.

Add some more specific requirements, e.g. budget, OEM vs DIY, storage space you expect to need, number of drive slots you want. Generally try to overshoot a bit when buying because a NAS is a relatively long lived device.

My recommendation before you set up your website and cameras to be accessed from outside your network (internet facing), VLAN them off. If your cameras or website become compromised, they will be isolated from the rest of your home network.

Whatever you do, don't buy a QNAP. I have no idea whether Synology is similar, but I am having a hell of a time recovering data off my dead QNAP TS-453 Pro because they make it almost impossible to repair without specialized tooling and the on-disk format is using a custom version of LVM that's incompatible with standard Linux. The reason why it died was because of a manufacturing defect in the onboard Intel J1900 chip that QNAP knew about, didn't do a recall for, and refused to provide proper support for. The disks themselves are fine, I am just forced to buy another QNAP just to access the data. After this experience, I swore off using turnkey NAS boxes. If your data is stored in a proprietary box that's unrepairable and using a disk format that's non-standard, that data is not safe.

Now I have a self-built DIY NAS that I've setup with Arch Linux and OpenZFS and I am pretty happy with the results. Sure, going SSD over HDD is an expensive choice, but given that I had to replace each hard drive in my QNAP 2-3 times each over the span of 7 years, I think the cost balances out and the extra performance is sooo worth it (80MB/s vs 700-1000MB/s).

One thing people often overlook is size. You’ll probably want something that’s Lil.

One thing about buying older Synology boxes is make sure the thing is 64-bit. I goofed and mine can't run docker which limits features.

I saved $50 and bought DS420+ instead of DS920+

Don’t do this

I’d kill to have the quad core at this point, it’s CPU limited with all my Docker apps

Traditionally, a NAS just used iSCSI to look like a hard drive connected over Ethernet cables. This is the bread and butter of the whole NAS thing.

Website hosting, and other features (Samba, NFS, or other storage methods) are optional... Different ways of doing things.

Whatever you do, stick with one methodology. Focusing just on iSCSI should help you simplify your setup and specs.

SAMBA / Windows shares are an alternative, popular approach. It works too but it's different network stuff. If you are a Windows trained IT guy, you might find this path easier.

I guess there are S3 clones or self hosted cloud techs too. But they're all just different ways to attach hard drives to a network. There are pros / cons to each, but you'll only learn the pros/cons by doing it yourself and playing with it.