homelab log

My NAS with OpenMediaVault 7

The history of this domain

When I launched this site in the autumn of 2025, it was, in a way, a bit self-referential — the pages originally ran directly on the machine they described. I put it on spare hardware I had lying around at home, and purely out of curiosity about whether I could get it running with zero prior experience, I bought the cheapest domain I could find and, after a few steps with some AI help, got the site live. Shortly after, on ChatGPT's advice, I moved the files over to Cloudflare Pages. It actively pointed out that a static site like this doesn't need to run 24/7 on my own hardware at home, even though it only drew a few watts. Later on it felt more meaningful to change the content so the site would be about something more useful than just the hardware behind a simple website.

So: why a NAS at all? And why OpenMediaVault specifically?

Most people today park their data in the cloud — Google Drive, iCloud, OneDrive. It's convenient, but a decent amount of storage isn't free, your data sits on someone else's server, and as the volume grows (photos, backups, movies) the subscription gets pricey fast. A NAS of your own flips that trade-off: a one-time hardware investment (secondhand, in my case), your data physically at home under your own control, and capacity you scale by adding a drive whenever you need it — not by whatever tier your provider sells you.

The second reason is purely personal — it's fun!!! Building it, configuring it, tuning the RAID array, troubleshooting failures — that's a hobby for me, not unlike building a gaming PC, just aimed at a different goal. If I just wanted "some storage," I'd buy a Synology box and be done in an evening. Boring! :-D

As for the software, I basically weighed three paths:

• Ready-made commercial solutions (Synology, QNAP) — the easiest start, but you're locked into their hardware and pricing, and once the vendor stops supporting an older model, you lose updates.
• TrueNAS — powerful, built on ZFS, but ZFS is RAM-hungry and really wants proper server hardware. On my low-power mini-ITX build it would have been overkill.
• OpenMediaVault — built on Debian, so it runs on practically anything, including the old power-efficient boards I pick up secondhand. It has a web UI for administration (RAID, shared folders, users, plugins), but underneath it's still just Debian — so whenever the web UI falls short, I can drop into a terminal, lean on some AI help, and do it my own way.

OpenMediaVault sits exactly between "I want this done with one click" and "I want to build everything by hand on bare Linux" — and that's precisely the trade-off that makes sense on low-power home hardware.

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.