Build a NAS for Affordable Storage – The Complete Guide

Users, Groups, and Shares

The following will be some basic configuration that will get you started. At this point, you already have your RAID array and filesystem, but we have no users, groups, or Shares. I like to do things in an organized fashion. With that, I like to create an administrator group and add myself to it before I do anything else.

Under Access Right Management, select the option for Group and then the menu option f0r Add. A window will display allowing you to name your group, add a description, and add members (we don’t have any members yet).

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Adding Users follows the same idea and is also under Access Right Management.

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Now that we have a user, we can enable SMB/CIFS to give us access to NAS shares from Windows over the network. Under Services, navigate to SMB/CIFS and tick the box for Enable. You can customize the settings as you wish, but we will stick to the defaults for now.

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Once the Service has been enabled, select the tab at the top for Shares and click Add. This will bring up a window that allows us to configure some basic settings for the share. Name your share “Documents”.

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Click the + sign at for Shared Folder. Here, we need to name the share, select the volume, and type the name of the path as the name of the share we are creating. This will automatically create the folder for us. The permissions, at this point, we want to leave. OpenMediaVault allows us to control permissions more specifically after a share has been created. Once the Shared Folder has been created, you will be brought back to the previous window where you can select the path you just created in the dropdown box.

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Test it out! The default Hostname for a first time setup is “openmediavault”. You can change the Hostname by navigating to System and choosing the menu option for Network. Hostname is under the General Tab.

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If you created more users and wish to have more granular control over who has write access, read access, or no access to a share mosey on over to Access Right Management and click on Shared Folders, click on your share, and select ACL at the top.

About Joe D

I have always had a passion for everything computing. In early 2000, I decided to take my passion to the web. Thus, C.O.D. was born. Through the years we have made many great friends at C.O.D. and hope to continue our journey for years to come.

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Just when I thought I had it all figured out, Microsoft drops another one on my lap. I had already covered what I thought was Windows Storage Server 2012 R2 and its functions and flavors when I learned about Essentials. Essentials is still built for a NAS device, but it adds some fantastic functionality to the platform. Some of these include Active Directory Services, Computer Backups, and IIS.

6 comments

  1. Save some cash, use nas4free and find a motherboard with enough onboard slots and use ZFS. You wont have to buy an SSD (just a usb stick as it runs in RAM), nor will you have to buy a controller card that. If the controller card dies, it will be hard to replace or get your data back. Whereas with ZFS, you can just plug into any other motherboard and re-import.

  2. I just happen to have 8x2Tb drives sitting around, poor mans build my a$$

  3. would like to know about the 40TB build as i’ve recently filled my 9.5TB QNAP 659Pro+ and want to go homebrew

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