I’ve had it in mind to start learning linux for a while, and now I’ve found the perfect project to help me do just that: building my own NAS.

Until November I was perfectly happy with my business grade Draytek router. I bought it about 6 years ago, particularly because it could host its own VPN, instead of just passing through to a Windows PC. It has served me well. I was also reasonably satisfied with my Western Digital EX4 NAS unit in most respects. Then Gigabit FTTH was installed in my area, and I got a free trial – all hell broke loose (very much in a Fist World Problems sense).

The first thing which became apparent is that my ‘nice’ router was outdated. Its best WAN to LAN topped out at 93Mb, while its LAN to WAN maxed at 73Mb (incidentally this also means that I already wasnt getting the benefit of my old 250Mb connection). My new connection is a Gigabit, symmetric line which realistically gives me up to about 700Mb in either direction. Not wanting to go back to relying on the equipment provided by ISPs, I went out (well, I went online) and found myself something which can cope with over 900Mb in either direction (Netgear Nighthawk R7000 if youre interested). ‘”Excellent”, I thought, “now I’m all set”… but no. The knock on effect of getting such fast internet soon became apparent in my NAS. After adding just a few torrents to Transmission, the speed steadily rose until it was approaching 10MB/s, at which point all interfaces to the device practically stopped responding. I surmised that the cause was likely the limited 512M of RAM inside the poor thing, and so went in search of a replacement.

As I looked around, it quickly became clear that most of the available devices on the market were out of my price bracket. While I would have liked to get myself something like a Synology, it just wasn’t going to happen. A friend of mine pointed me in the direction of an HP Gen 8 Proliant Microserver (http://compadvance.co.uk/en/item/323618/HP-Proliant-MicroServer-Gen8-G1610T-4GB) which he has, and after some extra checking around, I decided it looked good. I also decided to up the 4GB of RAM to 16GB, and add an SSD for the OS in the ODD bay.

Now the fun really started. Naturally I didn’t want to put Windows on this thing (although this is what my friend has done), I obviously wanted to run linux. And as its intended to sit quietly, (apparently) minding its own business for the most part, I wanted to keep as much RAM as possible free by not running a GUI. Ubuntu Server seemed like the perfect choice; except I have practically no experience setting up servers, working in command line (Basic ls, cp and rm don’t really count), or using Ubuntu or linux for anything at all (I’ve tinkered, but thats about it).

Well, no time like the present to learn.

Next Up:

Learning and testing on VMs

This post, re-published here with permission, was originally published on Nathanael’s site here.