I looked for a new NAS and once again I was not happy with the available solutions. I bought a UGREEN 4800 Plus which is a upgradable x86 4-bay NAS with a propitary OS installed on it.

The OS is quite good and will work for most people. But I wanted to take the chance to test TrueNAS. So I just disabled the Watchdog in the EFI BIOS and replaced the OS. TrueNAS is okay, but for a small NAS too much IMHO.

I didn’t wanted to use ZFS, the NAS should work without any caching devices or huge RAM demand.

On the way back to the UGREEN OS I found out, that I need to request a installer ISO from UGreen Support which is unqiue for my Hardware and only works once. Crazy. What when the NVME dies in a few years and UGREEN ends support for this Model?

So I decided to create my own very simple but feature-rich NAS solution.

The Plan

• Just use the latest Debian
• Configuration with Ansible
• NFS for Services like Jellyfin
• Samba and HTTPS for Access from PCs
• Simple Permission system based on read-only and read-write groups per share
• Permissions must work on all file transfer protocols

Later:

• rsync Server to replicate Files to other storage systems
• WebDAV for mobile devices?

And all this just with tech which is part of Debian. No custom scripts, services or software, if possible.

Presenting: LiNAS

The Core of LiNAS is a Ansible Playbook which expects a installed Debian Linux and mounted storage. Setting up a RAID is explicitly not part of the Playbook, since I didn’t wanted to disk data loss because of a bug in the Playbooks code.

You can find the Code on Codeberg at pery/linas.

The Ansible code works, I use it on my NAS at home, but it is definitely Alpha and should only used by people with Knowledge in Linux and Ansible.

I would be very grateful if you could test it in a VM and give me Feedback on Codeberg or via Email.

Thanks!

The next posts in this series explain all the small tweaks to create a good experience on all transfer protocols. Enjoy!