Hi there, On Mon, 23 Mar 2020 Rick Thomas wrote:
... I've ordered a Raspberry Pi 4 ...
I hope that it doesn't turn out that you were impetuous. I know that I was, when I bought my first 4B, and tried to use it instead of my desktop machine for browsing, mail, and a bunch of X sessions. It was an unqualified disaster.
I'd like to use it for a NAS for the home network, so my family can share files without resorting to sneaker-net. We have a full range of clients -- Mac, Win, Linux (mostly debian, but also CentOS and Ubuntu) and I'd like to be able to serve all of them if possible. Can anybody suggest a good NAS package? Debian based is preferable, but almost any Linux will do.
You don't need a 'NAS package' to make a server provide network attached storage, you can just use NFS. I use it a lot, including with several each of the Raspberry Pi Zero, A+, 2, 3B+ and 4B, some of which both boot from the remote NFS shares, and also have their root filesystems on the same NFS shares. It takes a bit of tweaking of configurations but it does the job. I prefer NFS V3 over NFS V4.
Anybody using something they have had good experience with?
Having said that I use 4Bs a lot I don't have good experience of them. I recommend that you don't try to use a 4B in this way unless you can be sure that you will NOT be wanting to mess around with it while it's running, that you're comfortable with occasional reboots and repairing or replacing the filesystems if they get thoroughly trashed, and that (it goes almost without saying) you have good backups SOMEWHERE ELSE. To give you an idea of what I consider "reliable", a while back I built a firewall using an Alix 2D3 system board and the fli4l distro. Recently I reconfigured it, after it had been up continuously for just shy of 831 days. The 4B seems particularly unreliable. I gave up trying to use it as a NFS server. The 3B+ is much more reliable. The main NFS server here is now a 3B+, which never really breaks a sweat even when it provides the storage for a 4B which is running Nagios, Smokeping and Motion with between eight and ten video cameras (PiCams and ZeroCams) which are streaming to the LAN at their full resolutions. Typical CPU load on that 4B is around 50% of the full capacity of its four cores; the 3B+ NFS server providing storage runs at around 20%. All run 24/7. I have issues with cameras occasionally going down at the moment but I'm gradually getting on top of those. I'm not sure if there's a problem with the WiFi on the 4B or not, it might be on the ZeroW, but whatever the cause I keep losing the link between a 4B access point and a ZeroW but not with another ZeroW using the same 4B as its access point. However the main problem with the 4B (as I see it is) in the design of the USB circuitry. If you so much as touch the shell of the four USB sockets with the shell of the USB connector of an 'active' device such as a powered hub or USB disc drive, then the 4B will probably hang, crash, reboot, or do something else you won't like very much. Power for the USB connectors is supposed to be individually switchable, but it isn't, so you can't power cycle one USB device without doing the same to all the others. The 4B USB3 problems are well known. Apart from the USB issues I've had enough 4Bs go down, and trash filesystems often enough, that I refuse to use them for anything half-way serious with 'local' storage of their own. The always-on backup server here is on another Pi3B+ - I moved it from the 4B to the 3B+ three months ago, after the 4B went down for the second time in a month. That 3B+ has never gone down, and I'd been using it for other video things for more than a year before that. The next thing that I'll move from the 4B to the 3B+ will be Nagios, since the things I'm monitoring for reliability are more reliable than the thing that's monitoring them with is, to put it politely, daft. -- 73, Ged.
