Disk Carousel

You must configure the existing mass storage for OpenMediaVault to function as a NAS system. Select Storage | Physical disks menu for a list of the devices connected to the system storage and their key technical parameters. It does not matter whether you are using hard disks or SSDs. However, the system does initially sideline mass storage devices that are connected via external USB interfaces. You must manually click on Search at the top of the list area to enable these devices.

The routine displays the disk drives in an overview table, along with technical specifications such as filesystem and memory usage. Drive-specific options such as the write cache or the power management settings can also be changed with a left-click on one of the drive letters, followed by Edit at the top of the list view.

You will find the S.M.A.R.T. menu item on the left under the Physical Disks entry (Figure 2). This item allows you to adjust the hardware monitoring for hard drives so you can anticipate and detect defects and secure the data saved on the drive in good time. However, please note that some external hard drives have their own controller electronics and will not fully implement the SATA interface commands. This phenomenon occurs especially frequently in external hard drives that offer further connectivity options in addition to the USB interface. Because these devices do not usually transfer any S.M.A.R.T. values to the host, checking routines do not run.

Figure 2: Choose configuration options in the tree view in the left pane of the OpenMediaVault main window. S.M.A.R.T. and RAID Management appear in the Storage folder.

Activate the slider in the Settings tab of the S.M.A.R.T. menu, sliding it to the right and then clicking Save. Then select the drives to be monitored by means of the S.M.A.R.T. daemon in the Drives tab. The aim of this process is to manually activate monitoring for any mass storage devices connected; click on Edit and then confirm the activation rule. Your next move is to specify automated checking routines after clicking on Add in the Scheduled tests tab.

It is worth creating a fault-tolerant disk array via the RAID Management menu item on a system with two or more hard disks. Click on Create in the display pane and define the RAID level, drives, and designation for the array in the resulting window. OpenMediaVault can allow the drives from a selection list by checking a box (with the exception of system drives). If there are too few physical mass storage devices for a particular RAID array, the software displays a note to this effect.

Click on Save after completing the RAID configuration. At this point, the system creates the disk array (as shown in Figure 2), which can consume quite some time, depending on the size of the mass storage device. You then generate a filesystem for the data carriers in the next menu item: File Systems. Select the array or the desired drive in the corresponding dialog and mark a suitable filesystem from the selection list. OpenMediaVault supports the Linux default filesystems Ext3/4, JFS, and XFS. You can close the dialog with OK; writing the filesystems takes some time.

Users and Groups

The next task is creating more users in OpenMediaVault by means of the Access Rights Management | Users dialog, which is accomplished by clicking on Add and defining your settings in the dialog box. After you have saved and applied the configuration, you can go on to create your own home directories for the newly-created users in the Settings tab. If you later wish to change the settings you defined, click Edit at the top above the application window's list view.

Users on OpenMediaVault belong to different groups. There are numerous out-of-the-box groups available on the system; you must select one or more of these groups when defining new users. If the existing group structure does not meet your needs and you want to add new groups to the system, use the Access Rights Management | Group dialog box.

Sharing

The final step is to define sharing and enable some services so that users working from desktop computers can access existing drives and directories in OpenMediaVault. Open the Shared Folders entry from the Access Rights Management menu and create a new shared folder by clicking on Add in the Shared Folders tab.

The configuration dialog allows you to specify a name and path. You can also assign permissions (for which the system clearly explains the various options). The button panel offers several other options for customizing the shared folder.

The most important of these options is the ACL button. A detailed dialog accessed lets you define specific access control lists (ACLs) for every single share, allowing fine-tuned allocation of rights (Figure 3).

Figure 3: You can assign very detailed permissions with ACLs.

After completing all the settings for sharing drives and folders, you can finish by setting up the desired background services (daemons) on Services. OpenMediaVault will only unlock access via SSH by default, so if you use the OpenMediaVault Rasp Pi in a heterogeneous network, you must enable Windows workstations access to the Rasp Pi through SMB/CIFS. A more complex dialog allows extremely detailed settings for SMB access.

You have the option of enabling other services, such as the ClamAV virus scanner. However, you must first install ClamAV via System | Plugins. The Anti-Virus entry will then appear in the left sidebar, which also branches out into a detailed settings dialog. OpenMediaVault allows actions from this box, including detailed scanning of various content and file types for malware.