Building a Storage Server

Proven on:

12 (bookworm)

Developed as a LXC

We will be creating our storage server as an LXC under Proxmox with dedicated physical drives on the physical server.

With a bit of thought, you'll note that most of these instructions apply just as well without the dedicated drive(s) involved.

(NOTE: any file/folder names in bold & italic here are examples of what I'm doing on a local system & may be different depending on YOUR needs...)

Building the LXC under Proxmox

Configuring the LXC

Configure this as a Privileged container.

Under Options / Features, turn on Nesting, NFS & SMB/CIFS.

It will simply your life if you can set up local users matching each network user that will be accessing this server. On my network, there are only 3 users that match this criteria. But, you may want to look into kerberos or some such.

For our purposes here, we'll simply create each user in the simplest way

(Done while logged into the LXC)

• sudo adduser user1
• sudo adduser user2
• sudo adduser user3

(And, of course, simply fill in the appropriate information for each user...)

Setting up dedicated drives

(Done while logged into the server itself)

See: Adding a new drive from the command line

Personally, I like to handle my drives by label to make them easier to find & move around if needed.

In this case, I'm adding 5 drives to the LXC...

This section is to be done while logged into the Proxmox server as root.

Create mountpoints for the drives:

• mkdir /mnt/Storage-0
• mkdir /mnt/Storage-1
• mkdir /mnt/Storage-2
• mkdir /mnt/Storage-3
• mkdir /mnt/Storage-4

Mount your dedicated drives on the Physical server itself. To do this at the command line:

• mount -L Storage-0 /mnt/Storage-0
• mount -L Storage-1 /mnt/Storage-1
• mount -L Storage-2 /mnt/Storage-2
• mount -L Storage-3 /mnt/Storage-3
• mount -L Storage-4 /mnt/Storage-4

Of course, you'll need to make these mounts persistent

• sudo vi /etc/fstab

LABEL=Storage-0     /mnt/Storage-0    ext4   defaults 0 0
LABEL=Storage-1     /mnt/Storage-1    ext4   defaults 0 0
LABEL=Storage-2     /mnt/Storage-2    ext4   defaults 0 0
LABEL=Storage-3     /mnt/Storage-3    ext4   defaults 0 0
LABEL=Storage-4     /mnt/Storage-4    ext4   defaults 0 0

Then you can use bindmount to attach them to your LXC.

• pct set 10020 -mp0 /mnt/Storage-0,mp=/mnt/Storage-0
• pct set 10020 -mp1 /mnt/Storage-1,mp=/mnt/Storage-1
• pct set 10020 -mp2 /mnt/Storage-2,mp=/mnt/Storage-2
• pct set 10020 -mp3 /mnt/Storage-3,mp=/mnt/Storage-3
• pct set 10020 -mp4 /mnt/Storage-4,mp=/mnt/Storage-4

At this point, I would recommend rebooting the LXC, either through the GUI or:

• pct reboot 10020

The shares

The actual share setup is a fairly subjective & complex subject. It will vary a fair bit depending on your circumstances & needs. I'll be writing up as generic a layout as I can, but you may wish to expand on it.

This storage server will be setup to make available the following tree of shares:

• Backups
  • Backups/Machine1
  • Backups/Machine2
  • Backups/Machine3
• Media
  • Media/Music
  • Media/Movies
  • Media/Photos
• Documents
  • Documents/User1
  • Documents/User2
  • Documents/User3
  • Documents/Shared

Prepping the shares

This section is to be done while logged into the LXC.

Create the starting points

(All of these bind mounts are done to manage how the shares appear to client machines and help separate things from their physical drive descriptions.)

• sudo mkdir /Backups
• sudo mkdir /Media
• sudo mkdir /Documents

Create the folders to be shared (I've created subfolders on the drive(s) through the usual methods...)

• sudo mkdir /Backups/Cecil
  • sudo mount -o bind /mnt/Storage-3/Cecil-Backup/ /Backups/Cecil
• sudo mkdir /Media/Photos /Media/Music /Media/Movies
  • sudo mount -o bind /mnt/Storage-3/Photos /Media/Photos
  • sudo mount -o bind /mnt/Storage-4/Music /Media/Music
  • sudo mount -o bind /mnt/Storage-4/Movies /Media/Movies
• sudo mkdir /Documents/tinker
  • sudo mount -o bind /mnt/Storage-2/tinker /Documents/tinker
• etc, etc, etc...

Of course, you'll need to make these mounts persistent

• sudo vi /etc/fstab

/mnt/Storage-3/Cecil-Backup/ /Backups/Cecil none defaults,bind 0 0
/mnt/Storage-3/Photos /Media/Photos none defaults,bind 0 0
/mnt/Storage-4/Music /Media/Music none defaults,bind 0 0
/mnt/Storage-4/Movies /Media/Movies none defaults,bind 0 0
/mnt/Storage-2/tinker /Documents/tinker none defaults,bind 0 0

• sudo systemctl daemon-reload
• sudo mount -a

A potentially useful addition I'm working on...

NFS (Network File System)

See: Setting up NFS for file sharing

Configuring the NFS shares

• sudo vi /etc/exports

...WIP...

• sudo exportfs -a
• sudo /etc/init.d/nfs-kernel-server restart

SMB (Server Message Block (Windows file sharing...))

See: Installing Samba from the command line

Set up Samba Users

(Because Samba STILL can't just use the authentication built into the system... :| )

• sudo smbpasswd -a USER
• repeat...

Configuring the SMB shares

• sudo vi /etc/samba/smb.conf

...WIP...

• sudo systemctl restart smbd

FTP (File Transfer Protocol)

See: FTP Serving

Configuring the FTP shares

...WIP...

• sudo service proftpd restart

tFTP (TRIVIAL File Transfer Protocol)

See: tFTP Serving

Configuring the tFTP shares

...WIP...

• sudo systemctl restart tftpd-hpa.service

SyncThing

See: Cloud Servers - Syncthing

RSYNC as a daemon

...WIP...

From the rsync man page:

STARTING AN RSYNC DAEMON TO ACCEPT CONNECTIONS
       In order to connect to an rsync daemon, the remote system needs to have a daemon already running (or
       it needs to have configured something like inetd to spawn an rsync daemon for  incoming  connections
       on  a  particular  port).  For full information on how to start a daemon that will handling incoming
       socket connections, see the rsyncd.conf(5) man page -- that is the config file for the  daemon,  and
       it  contains  the full details for how to run the daemon (including stand-alone and inetd configura‐
       tions).

       If you're using one of the remote-shell transports for the transfer, there is no  need  to  manually
       start an rsync daemon.