homelab log

My NAS with OpenMediaVault 7

Why build a NAS at all? And why OpenMediaVault?

When I launched this site in the autumn of 2025, it was, in a way, its own demonstration of what it describes — the pages originally ran directly on the machine they're about. Shortly after, on ChatGPT's recommendation, I moved the files over to Cloudflare Pages — there's no point running simple static pages 24/7 on my own hardware at home, even if it only draws a few watts.

I want to share my experience building, configuring, and running a home data storage server (NAS) that runs on the Linux-based OpenMediaVault 7 (Debian). I've been running a NAS on OpenMediaVault for several years now, but I only got around to building this site once I'd picked up Cloudflare and Tailscale configuration for study reasons — both services can expose a home server to the internet without a public IP, i.e. even behind an ISP's CGNAT. It took several days of experimenting and tuning, and ChatGPT helped a lot along the way — without it, as a hobbyist, I'd have struggled to get not just this site, but several other server services, running at all.

I can't recall the exact moment I switched from an external drive as my only backup to storing data directly on a NAS — but it was still on OpenMediaVault 5. It first ran on a spare mini-ITX motherboard I had lying around, with data on two identically sized drives in RAID 1 (mirroring). Only later did I go looking for a more power-efficient board and picked up an ASRock AT3IONT-I with a passively cooled CPU for a few hundred crowns on a Czech auction site. Both the power draw and the speed satisfied me at the time — and incidentally, that board still works today, just not in my rig anymore.