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When people set up these NAS's, how are they accessing the files? NFS? SFTP? And how are you accessing it when away from home? A VPN that you're permanently co

When people set up these NAS's, how are they accessing the files? NFS? SFTP? And how are you accessing it when away from home? A VPN that you're permanently connected to? Is there a good way to do NAT hole-punching? Syncthing kind of does what I want, in that it lets all my computers sync the same files no matter what network they're on, but it insists on always copying all the files ("syncing") whereas I just want them stored on the NAS but accessible everywhere. Nextcloud kind of does what I want but when I tried it before it struck me as flaky and unreliable, and seemed to do a load of stuff I don't want or need.

sleepybrett 2y ago
Mostly CIFS, I use tailscale to put my laptop inside of my home network wherever I go.
adastra22 2y ago
Depends on your use case. I just use scp and access the NAS box through Tor when traveling, so I don’t have to open up any ports.
universa1 2y ago
Regarding the connectivity: tailscale... So far I am happy with them and the free plan hasn't been kneecapped afterwards (so far).
- stavros 2y ago
  Even if it is, you can run Headscale on a server somewhere (or just pay).
- BXlnt2EachOther 2y ago
  IIRC they have improved the free plan over time, and even mailed users suggesting the relaxed limits might enable moving from paid to free tier [1]. I barely use my tailnet now, might have more of a case for it later, but they are near the top of my "wishing you success but please don't get acquired by a company that will ruin it" list. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35615848 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35615848
nomius10 2y ago
An easy solution for the VPN part would be Zerotier / Tailscale. IIRC Zerotier uses chacha20 for encryption which is faster than AES, especially for a power-strapped SBC.
- jnovek 2y ago
  I tried to build a setup like this with OpenVPN years ago and OMG. Tailscale/Wireguard has been such a big leap forward.
Vrondi 2y ago
I usually just use SMB shares within my LAN. It serves my modest needs. I have used WebDAV or FTP in the past. Depends on the specific use. Away from home, VPN is essential. Too risky to just forward ports these days.
jnovek 2y ago
Answering your questions in order: - On mine I use NFS and SMB which covers most possible clients. - I use an ssh bastion that I expose via Tailscale to connect to mine remotely. So a VPN but it's wireguard based so it's not too intrusive. I have a gig up, though, YMMV. - My NAS has 28TB of space. I'm still working on backup strategy. So far it just has my Dropbox and some ephemera I don't care about losing on it. - Regarding other services: I use Dropbox pretty extensively but these days 2TB just isn't very much. Plus it gets cranky because I have more than 500,000 files in it. This is my personal setup but I think it's a bit different for everyone.
- Tijdreiziger 2y ago
  Wow! What kind of data are you generating that 2TB ‘just isn’t very much’? (Video editing?) All my personal files take up around 10GB in my Google Drive.
  - Koffiepoeder 2y ago
    One example: If you take picture with a decent camera in raw format, your storage gets filled ridiculously fast. A short travel with a mere 200 pictures can easily be like 25M*200=5G. Another example: if you're doing any kind of AI training (especially picture based), the training materials can easily amount to many terrabytes.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - galkk 2y ago
    Google takeout of my personal pictures from Google photos takes 600gb+ alone. And I'm not avid picture taker (that's the archive since 2000s, I did upload a lot of my old dslr photos to google photos when it was unlimited). I guess if people make more personal videos, they will use more space easily
    - Tijdreiziger 2y ago
generalizations 2y ago
Depends on what you need. I have a NAS with syncthing, and it's a combination. - I use a lot of different folders within syncthing, and different machines have different combinations to save space where they aren't needed; the NAS has all of them. - on the LAN, sshfs is a resilient-but-slower alternative to NFS. If I reboot my NAS, sshfs doesn't care & reconnects without complaint...last time I tried to use it, NFS locked up the entire client. - zerotier + sshfs is workable-but-slow in remote scenarios Note I'm mostly trying to write code remotely. If you're trying to watch videos....uh, good luck.
sockaddr 2y ago
> And how are you accessing it when away from home? I usually just use zerotier for this, it's extremely lightweight
- aborsy 2y ago
  I use Tailscale, but I’m amazed that the size of the ZeroTier app is 2.6 MB versus 23MB for Tailscale. How come ZeroTier is 10X smaller?
  - avtar 2y ago
    Tailscale uses Go https://tailscale.com/security#tailscale-is-written-in-go https://tailscale.com/security#tailscale-is-written-in-go which might explain the larger sizes. A cursory look through https://github.com/zerotier/ZeroTierOne https://github.com/zerotier/ZeroTierOne shows more C++ and some Rust. Not sure how much static linking is involved here.
system2 2y ago
NFS + SMB. Also I use SonicWall VPN to connect to my house to be in the network so it covers most of it. I also use Synology QuickConnect if I need to use the browser without VPN which also covers most urgent needs. Haven't failed me over a decade and my NAS also syncs with Synology C2 cloud which is also another peace of mind. I know it might sound unsafe a little having files stored on the cloud but it is what it is. I won't play with half-baked library dependent homebrew solutions which cost way more time and cause headache more than commercial solutions. I won't open ports and forget them later either.
486sx33 2y ago
Synology does all that. I run two one at home one at the office, my only complaint is that it’s a bit “idiot proof”… both other times the web based GUIi is great. Also has free software that punches through NAT and dynamic IPs works great (quickconnect.to) I use sftp, media server, primarily
- tgv 2y ago
  Synology can even serve as a macOS Time Machine.
- jll29 2y ago
  I second that wholeheartedly, and I also run two 19" Synology NAS units, one at home and one at the office. All smooth sailing so far. A colleague uses a QNAP instead, which he claims is better price/storage ratio at the expense of lesser software usability, and I'm okay paying a bit more of my own money (at home) as well as taxpayers' money (at work) on better usability, because it will likely pay off by saving time in the long run, as I currently don't have a dedicated sysadmin in my team. The only question mark to date was when installing with non-Synology (enterprise SSD) drives I got a warning that mine were not "vendor sourced" devices, and decided not to take any risk and replace all drives with "original" Synology ones just because I can. This may be just disinformation from Synology to make their own customers nervous, and it reminds me of the "only HP toner in HP laser printers" discussion, but it would have been a distraction to investigate further, and my time is more valuable than simply replacing all drives.
  - Tijdreiziger 2y ago
    https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/zhwif2/my_new_nas_thinks_its_4_compatible_hard_drives/ https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/zhwif2/my_new_nas...
    - Aeolun 2y ago
      It seems a bit weird they’d disable the SMART fields just because the drive is not on their list. Those fields should work perfectly fine…?
pmontra 2y ago
SFTP for my other Linux devices, SMB by Samba for the rest of the world (mainly Android.)
joeyrobert 2y ago
Seafile + Samba + OpenVPN is my stack. I use Seafile for a dropbox style file sync on my devices, and Samba for direct access. OpenVPN for remote access on all devices. Works quite well.
- ein0p 2y ago
  I’d replace OpenVPN with WireGuard at this point - WireGuard is a lot faster and the client software is pretty good. All of my Apple devices are set up to use VPN 100% of the time automatically if I’m not on home WiFi.
  - josh64 2y ago
    Could you please share how you went about configuring your Apple devices to automatically switch to VPN? Thanks!
    - ein0p 2y ago
      When you install WireGuard client, there's "On Demand" option there that you can enable. That option has two additional settings - it can turn WireGuard only for a particular list of SSIDs, or it can _not_ turn it on for a particular list of SSIDs. So you just add the SSID of your home WiFi to the list for which WireGuard will not be turned on. On macOS client there is an identical option. This works really well.
- accrual 2y ago
  Has anyone compared Seafile with Syncthing? I'm quite happy with Syncthing but always interested in trying out new setups.
theshrike79 2y ago
Tailscale works perfectly for remote access, I do "backups" with rsync over VPN nightly to an offsite location. Syncthing over Tailscale is running smoothly too, it doesn't matter where my machines move, they find each other using the same internal address every time.
loeg 2y ago
I just use NFS on the LAN. No remote access.
rcarmo 2y ago
SMB + Tailscale and SyncThing for me. Both combos just work, although admittedly SMB over mobile connections _and_ a VPN can be iffy.
ssl-3 2y ago
I use Syncthing to synchronize my smaller datasets between my laptop, my phone, and my NAS. This covers all of my productive and creative scenarios. On the LAN, I just use SMB. It is adequate for my needs. For remotely accessing my collection of Linux ISOs, I use Plex.
- accrual 2y ago
  This is pretty much my setup as well! Syncthing for a small collection of files I want available from all my machines - commonly used documents, photos, stuff I want quickly backed up or synced automatically. Samba for my long term mostly-read rarely-write storage with larger files, ISOs, etc.
- xiwenc 2y ago
  Same here. I have wireguard vpn for the few times i need it to tunnel my traffic through home or need to access larger files not sync’ed with syncthing. My nas is a Synology. Vpn is also used so that i can continue sending timemachine backups back home when i’m traveling.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
lizknope 2y ago
I use sshfs. If you can login via ssh then you can mount the remote server through ssh as a local drive. https://github.com/libfuse/sshfs https://github.com/libfuse/sshfs For added security I limit my home ssh access to a handful of trusted IPs including my cloud VM. Then I set up an ssh tunnel from my hotel through the cloud VM to home. The cloud VM never sees my password / key
- matrss 2y ago
  Its worth keeping this (from their readme) in mind though: > However, at present SSHFS does not have any active, regular contributors, and there are a number of known issues (see the bugtracker). Not that it is unusable or anything, it is still in widespread use, but I'd guess many assume it to be part of openssh and maintained with it, when it isn't. An interesting alternative might be https://rclone.org/ https://rclone.org/, which can speak SFTP and can mount all (of the many) protocols it speaks.
vbezhenar 2y ago
I used samba, it's supported everywhere. I also served files with HTTP server which might be convenient way for some use-cases. I also generated simple HTML-s with <video> which allowed me to easily view movies on my TV without all that nonsense. My router has public IP so I didn't have any problems reaching it from the outside, so any VPN could work. Another approach is to rent some cheap VPS and use it as a bastion VPN server, connecting both home network and roadwarrior laptop. No idea about any "integrated" solutions, I prefer simple solutions, so I just used ordinary RHEL with ordinary apache, etc.
efxhoy 2y ago
Samba and tailscale.
turtlebits 2y ago
SMB and Tailscale.
heavyset_go 2y ago
I use NFS over WireGuard. That way I can mount my resources wherever I go and it's encrypted whether I'm at home or out.
Simon_ORourke 2y ago
Depending on the make and model - I've got a Synology NAS box and can't recommend them enough. RAID support, NFS/SFTP/Samba support, a nice Web UI to set up access and configure sharing, and even the ability to enable sharing outside your own NAT.
tallanvor 2y ago
I have a (completely overkill) Ubiquiti Dream Wall that lets me VPN in using WireGuard. I do have a Raspberry Pi that runs (among other stuff) a script to ping a service on hosted server that keeps a dns entry updated in case my IP address changes, although that's rare. I built the service to keep the dns entry updated myself, so I'm sure it's not as secure as it could be, but it only accepts pings via https and it only works if the body of the POST contains a guid that is mapped to the dns entry I want it to update.

sleepybrett 2y ago

Mostly CIFS, I use tailscale to put my laptop inside of my home network wherever I go.

adastra22 2y ago

Depends on your use case. I just use scp and access the NAS box through Tor when traveling, so I don’t have to open up any ports.

universa1 2y ago

Regarding the connectivity: tailscale... So far I am happy with them and the free plan hasn't been kneecapped afterwards (so far).

stavros 2y ago
Even if it is, you can run Headscale on a server somewhere (or just pay).
BXlnt2EachOther 2y ago
IIRC they have improved the free plan over time, and even mailed users suggesting the relaxed limits might enable moving from paid to free tier [1]. I barely use my tailnet now, might have more of a case for it later, but they are near the top of my "wishing you success but please don't get acquired by a company that will ruin it" list. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35615848 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35615848

nomius10 2y ago

An easy solution for the VPN part would be Zerotier / Tailscale. IIRC Zerotier uses chacha20 for encryption which is faster than AES, especially for a power-strapped SBC.

jnovek 2y ago
I tried to build a setup like this with OpenVPN years ago and OMG. Tailscale/Wireguard has been such a big leap forward.

Vrondi 2y ago

I usually just use SMB shares within my LAN. It serves my modest needs. I have used WebDAV or FTP in the past. Depends on the specific use. Away from home, VPN is essential. Too risky to just forward ports these days.

jnovek 2y ago

Answering your questions in order: - On mine I use NFS and SMB which covers most possible clients. - I use an ssh bastion that I expose via Tailscale to connect to mine remotely. So a VPN but it's wireguard based so it's not too intrusive. I have a gig up, though, YMMV. - My NAS has 28TB of space. I'm still working on backup strategy. So far it just has my Dropbox and some ephemera I don't care about losing on it. - Regarding other services: I use Dropbox pretty extensively but these days 2TB just isn't very much. Plus it gets cranky because I have more than 500,000 files in it. This is my personal setup but I think it's a bit different for everyone.

Tijdreiziger 2y ago
Wow! What kind of data are you generating that 2TB ‘just isn’t very much’? (Video editing?) All my personal files take up around 10GB in my Google Drive.
- Koffiepoeder 2y ago
  One example: If you take picture with a decent camera in raw format, your storage gets filled ridiculously fast. A short travel with a mere 200 pictures can easily be like 25M*200=5G. Another example: if you're doing any kind of AI training (especially picture based), the training materials can easily amount to many terrabytes.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- galkk 2y ago
  Google takeout of my personal pictures from Google photos takes 600gb+ alone. And I'm not avid picture taker (that's the archive since 2000s, I did upload a lot of my old dslr photos to google photos when it was unlimited). I guess if people make more personal videos, they will use more space easily
  - Tijdreiziger 2y ago

generalizations 2y ago

Depends on what you need. I have a NAS with syncthing, and it's a combination. - I use a lot of different folders within syncthing, and different machines have different combinations to save space where they aren't needed; the NAS has all of them. - on the LAN, sshfs is a resilient-but-slower alternative to NFS. If I reboot my NAS, sshfs doesn't care & reconnects without complaint...last time I tried to use it, NFS locked up the entire client. - zerotier + sshfs is workable-but-slow in remote scenarios Note I'm mostly trying to write code remotely. If you're trying to watch videos....uh, good luck.

sockaddr 2y ago

> And how are you accessing it when away from home? I usually just use zerotier for this, it's extremely lightweight

aborsy 2y ago
I use Tailscale, but I’m amazed that the size of the ZeroTier app is 2.6 MB versus 23MB for Tailscale. How come ZeroTier is 10X smaller?
- avtar 2y ago
  Tailscale uses Go https://tailscale.com/security#tailscale-is-written-in-go https://tailscale.com/security#tailscale-is-written-in-go which might explain the larger sizes. A cursory look through https://github.com/zerotier/ZeroTierOne https://github.com/zerotier/ZeroTierOne shows more C++ and some Rust. Not sure how much static linking is involved here.

system2 2y ago

NFS + SMB. Also I use SonicWall VPN to connect to my house to be in the network so it covers most of it. I also use Synology QuickConnect if I need to use the browser without VPN which also covers most urgent needs. Haven't failed me over a decade and my NAS also syncs with Synology C2 cloud which is also another peace of mind. I know it might sound unsafe a little having files stored on the cloud but it is what it is. I won't play with half-baked library dependent homebrew solutions which cost way more time and cause headache more than commercial solutions. I won't open ports and forget them later either.

486sx33 2y ago

Synology does all that. I run two one at home one at the office, my only complaint is that it’s a bit “idiot proof”… both other times the web based GUIi is great. Also has free software that punches through NAT and dynamic IPs works great (quickconnect.to) I use sftp, media server, primarily

tgv 2y ago
Synology can even serve as a macOS Time Machine.
jll29 2y ago
I second that wholeheartedly, and I also run two 19" Synology NAS units, one at home and one at the office. All smooth sailing so far. A colleague uses a QNAP instead, which he claims is better price/storage ratio at the expense of lesser software usability, and I'm okay paying a bit more of my own money (at home) as well as taxpayers' money (at work) on better usability, because it will likely pay off by saving time in the long run, as I currently don't have a dedicated sysadmin in my team. The only question mark to date was when installing with non-Synology (enterprise SSD) drives I got a warning that mine were not "vendor sourced" devices, and decided not to take any risk and replace all drives with "original" Synology ones just because I can. This may be just disinformation from Synology to make their own customers nervous, and it reminds me of the "only HP toner in HP laser printers" discussion, but it would have been a distraction to investigate further, and my time is more valuable than simply replacing all drives.
- Tijdreiziger 2y ago
  https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/zhwif2/my_new_nas_thinks_its_4_compatible_hard_drives/ https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/zhwif2/my_new_nas...
  - Aeolun 2y ago
    It seems a bit weird they’d disable the SMART fields just because the drive is not on their list. Those fields should work perfectly fine…?

pmontra 2y ago

SFTP for my other Linux devices, SMB by Samba for the rest of the world (mainly Android.)

joeyrobert 2y ago

Seafile + Samba + OpenVPN is my stack. I use Seafile for a dropbox style file sync on my devices, and Samba for direct access. OpenVPN for remote access on all devices. Works quite well.

ein0p 2y ago
I’d replace OpenVPN with WireGuard at this point - WireGuard is a lot faster and the client software is pretty good. All of my Apple devices are set up to use VPN 100% of the time automatically if I’m not on home WiFi.
- josh64 2y ago
  Could you please share how you went about configuring your Apple devices to automatically switch to VPN? Thanks!
  - ein0p 2y ago
    When you install WireGuard client, there's "On Demand" option there that you can enable. That option has two additional settings - it can turn WireGuard only for a particular list of SSIDs, or it can _not_ turn it on for a particular list of SSIDs. So you just add the SSID of your home WiFi to the list for which WireGuard will not be turned on. On macOS client there is an identical option. This works really well.
accrual 2y ago
Has anyone compared Seafile with Syncthing? I'm quite happy with Syncthing but always interested in trying out new setups.

theshrike79 2y ago

Tailscale works perfectly for remote access, I do "backups" with rsync over VPN nightly to an offsite location. Syncthing over Tailscale is running smoothly too, it doesn't matter where my machines move, they find each other using the same internal address every time.

loeg 2y ago

I just use NFS on the LAN. No remote access.

rcarmo 2y ago

SMB + Tailscale and SyncThing for me. Both combos just work, although admittedly SMB over mobile connections _and_ a VPN can be iffy.

ssl-3 2y ago

I use Syncthing to synchronize my smaller datasets between my laptop, my phone, and my NAS. This covers all of my productive and creative scenarios. On the LAN, I just use SMB. It is adequate for my needs. For remotely accessing my collection of Linux ISOs, I use Plex.

accrual 2y ago
This is pretty much my setup as well! Syncthing for a small collection of files I want available from all my machines - commonly used documents, photos, stuff I want quickly backed up or synced automatically. Samba for my long term mostly-read rarely-write storage with larger files, ISOs, etc.
xiwenc 2y ago
Same here. I have wireguard vpn for the few times i need it to tunnel my traffic through home or need to access larger files not sync’ed with syncthing. My nas is a Synology. Vpn is also used so that i can continue sending timemachine backups back home when i’m traveling.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

lizknope 2y ago

I use sshfs. If you can login via ssh then you can mount the remote server through ssh as a local drive. https://github.com/libfuse/sshfs https://github.com/libfuse/sshfs For added security I limit my home ssh access to a handful of trusted IPs including my cloud VM. Then I set up an ssh tunnel from my hotel through the cloud VM to home. The cloud VM never sees my password / key

matrss 2y ago
Its worth keeping this (from their readme) in mind though: > However, at present SSHFS does not have any active, regular contributors, and there are a number of known issues (see the bugtracker). Not that it is unusable or anything, it is still in widespread use, but I'd guess many assume it to be part of openssh and maintained with it, when it isn't. An interesting alternative might be https://rclone.org/ https://rclone.org/, which can speak SFTP and can mount all (of the many) protocols it speaks.

vbezhenar 2y ago

I used samba, it's supported everywhere. I also served files with HTTP server which might be convenient way for some use-cases. I also generated simple HTML-s with <video> which allowed me to easily view movies on my TV without all that nonsense. My router has public IP so I didn't have any problems reaching it from the outside, so any VPN could work. Another approach is to rent some cheap VPS and use it as a bastion VPN server, connecting both home network and roadwarrior laptop. No idea about any "integrated" solutions, I prefer simple solutions, so I just used ordinary RHEL with ordinary apache, etc.

efxhoy 2y ago

Samba and tailscale.

turtlebits 2y ago

SMB and Tailscale.

heavyset_go 2y ago

I use NFS over WireGuard. That way I can mount my resources wherever I go and it's encrypted whether I'm at home or out.

Simon_ORourke 2y ago

Depending on the make and model - I've got a Synology NAS box and can't recommend them enough. RAID support, NFS/SFTP/Samba support, a nice Web UI to set up access and configure sharing, and even the ability to enable sharing outside your own NAT.

tallanvor 2y ago

I have a (completely overkill) Ubiquiti Dream Wall that lets me VPN in using WireGuard. I do have a Raspberry Pi that runs (among other stuff) a script to ping a service on hosted server that keeps a dns entry updated in case my IP address changes, although that's rare. I built the service to keep the dns entry updated myself, so I'm sure it's not as secure as it could be, but it only accepts pings via https and it only works if the body of the POST contains a guid that is mapped to the dns entry I want it to update.