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Ansible-NAS currently assumes you know your way around a server. This page is an overview for absolute NAS beginners so they can decide if it is right for them.
The big picture
To start off really simple: A NAS (Network Attached Storage) is a server mostly for home or other small networks that offers file storage. It's usually a small box that sits in the corner and runs 24/7. These days, a NAS doesn't just only handle files, but also offers other services, for instance video streaming with Plex or Emby. You can buy consumer NAS boxes from various manifacturers where you just have to add the hard drives, or you can configure your own hardware and use open-source software as the operating system.
One example of the second variant you'll see mentioned here is
FreeNAS. It is based on
FreeBSD, which like Linux belongs to the family of
Unix-like operating systems. One strength of FreeBSD/FreeNAS is that it
includes the powerful ZFS file system
(OpenZFS, to be exact). However, it
does not support the Docker containers the way Linux
does. Also, the Linux ecosystem is larger. On the other hand, very few Linux
distributions include ZFS out of the box because of licensing issues.
Ansible-NAS in its default form attempts to have the best of both worlds by using Docker on Linux with ZFS. This is possible because the Ubuntu Linux distribution supports both technologies. As the name says, Ansible-NAS uses Ansible server automation which is usually deployed on big multi-machine enterprise systems, not small home servers the size of a breadbox.
Before you take the plunge
The commercial NAS vendors try to make setting up and running a NAS as simple and painless as possible - for a fee, obviously. The open-source NAS software providers have lots of resources to help you get started with your own hardware. FreeNAS for instance comes with extensive documentation, good introductions to ZFS and other topics, and a large community to lean on.
With Ansible-NAS, at this point at least, you're pretty much on your own. Though there is a Gitter chat room (see support), you're expected to have some familiarity with the technologies involved and be able to set up the basic stuff yourself.
As a to-do list, before you can even install Ansible-NAS, you'll have to:
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Choose, buy, configure, and test your own hardware. Note that ZFS loves RAM - it will run with 1 GB, but it won't be happy. The ZFS on Linux (ZoL) people recommend at least 8 GB for best performance, but the more, the better. As robust as ZFS is, it assumes the data in memory is correct, so very bad things happen to your data if there is memory corruption. For this reason, it is strongly recommended to use ECC RAM. ZFS also prefers to have the hard drives all to itself. If you're paranoid (a good mindset when dealing with servers), you'll probably want an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) of some sort as well and SMART monitoring for your hard drives. See the FreeNAS hardware requirements as a guideline.
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Install Ubuntu Server, preferably a Long Term Support (LTS) edition such as 18.04, and keep it updated. You'll probably want to perform other basic setup tasks like hardening SSH and including email notifications. There are various guides for this, but if you're just getting started, you'll probably need a book.
-
Install ZFS and set up storage. This includes creating data sets for various parts of the system, some form of automatic snapshot handling, and possibly automatic backups to another server or an external hard drive. Currently on Linux, it is something of a hassle to use ZFS on the root file system. If you are completely new to ZFS, expect a brutal learning curve. There is a slightly dated (2012) but extensive introduction to ZFS on Linux by Aaron Toponce to get you started, or you can watch this video that introduces the philosophy and big picture of ZFS.
After that, you can continue with the actual installation of Ansible-NAS.
How to experiment
The easiest way to take Ansible-NAS for a spin is in a virtual machine, for instance in VirtualBox. You'll want to create three virtual hard drives for testing: One of the actual NAS, and the two others to create a mirrored ZFS pool. Note because of the RAM requirements of ZFS, you might run into problems with a virtual machine, but this will let you experiment with installing, configuring, and running a complete system.