Setup your own NAS on a Raspberry Pi.

• Hardware
• OS
  • SSH
• SMB Shares
  • Format Drives
  • Mount Drives
    • Prepare Disks
    • Mount Disks manually
    • Mount Disks automatically
  • Setup SMB Server
  • Setup TimeMachine Share
  • Other useful things
    • HD-Idle
    • Log2Ram
    • Check Disk Utilization
• Docker Setup
  • Install Docker
  • Prepare Docker Environment
    • 1. Clone Repository
    • 2. Configure your Setup
    • 3. Run Compose-Stack
    • 4. Try it out
  • Components
    • Configure Pi-hole
• CloudflareD

• Raspberry Pi 4 4GB
• SD Card 32GB (Silicon Power)
• QNAP TR-004 RAID Storage (RAID 5)
• SEAGATE IronWolf 4TB (ST4000VN006)

If you want to use a software based RAID setup instead, you need to format your drives first. You can use the following guides to setup a RAID 5 with Btfs:

• RAID 5 with Btfs
• New documentation

• 64 bit Raspbian
• Vanilla Rasbperry Pi OS Bullseye (e.g. Raspberry Pi OS LITE 64 bit) Installation guide

More documentation to enable SSH or generate Keys.

# Enable SSH
sudo systemctl enable ssh
sudo systemctl start ssh

# SSH Keys
ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C

# List Disks
sudo fdisk -l

# Open Disk (replace X with the disk letter)
sudo fdisk /dev/sdX 

# Create Partititon
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default
default
default
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# Check Table
sudo fdisk -l

# Format the partition (replace X with the disk letter)
sudo mkfs -t ext4 /dev/sdX1

More documentation can be found here.

In order to identify the disks with a descriptive name, we need to add a label to the disks. This can be done with the following commands.

# List Disks
sudo fdisk -l

# Goal state
# /dev/disk/by-label/qnap (8TB)        | LABEL="qnap"

# Add Label to Disks: (replace X with the disk letter)
sudo e2label /dev/sdX1 qnap

# Create Mount Points
sudo mkdir /mnt/qnap

# Check Permissions
stat /mnt/qnap

# Change Owner (replace $USER with your username)
sudo chown -R $USER:users /mnt/qnap/*

# Change Permissions
chmod -R 775 /mnt/qnap/*

# Mount Disks
mount /dev/disk/by-label/qnap /mnt/qnap/

# (Optional) Mount Disks with User Permissions
mount -o user=$USER /dev/disk/by-label/qnap /mnt/qnap/

More documentation can be found here.

# Identify UUIDs or Labels of the disks
sudo blkid
# Edit /etc/fstab
sudo nano /etc/fstab
# Add the following lines to /etc/fstab
LABEL=qnap /mnt/qnap ext4 nofail,x-systemd.device-timeout=1ms 0 0

More documentation can be found here.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

# Install Samba
sudo apt-get install samba samba-common-bin

# Setup Shares
sudo nano /etc/samba/smb.conf

# Add Configuration to smb.conf (replace $USER with your username)
[nas]
    path = /mnt/qnap/nas
    writeable = Yes
    create mask = 0775
    directory mask = 0775
    public = no
    force user = $USER
    force group = $USER

[timemachine]
    path = /mnt/qnap/timemachine
    writeable = Yes
    vfs objects = catia fruit streams_xattr
    fruit:time machine = yes
    public = no

# Setup SMB User (replace $USER with your username)
sudo smbpasswd -a $USER

# Restart Samba service
sudo systemctl restart smbd

More documentation can be found here and here.

sudo nano /etc/avahi/services/samba.service

# Add Configuration to samba.service
  <?xml version="1.0" standalone='no'?><!--*-nxml-*-->
  <!DOCTYPE service-group SYSTEM "avahi-service.dtd">
  <service-group>
    <name replace-wildcards="yes">%h</name>
    <service>
      <type>_smb._tcp</type>
      <port>445</port>
    </service>
    <service>
      <type>_device-info._tcp</type>
      <port>9</port>
      <txt-record>model=Xserve1,1</txt-record>
    </service>
    <service>
      <type>_adisk._tcp</type>
      <port>9</port>
      <txt-record>dk0=adVN=timemachine,adVF=0x82</txt-record>
      <txt-record>sys=adVF=0x100</txt-record>
    </service>
  </service-group>

# Restart Avahi service
sudo systemctl restart avahi-daemon

More documentation can be found here. After modifying the samba.service file, the TimeMachine share should be visible in the Finder.

Setup HDD spin down times to save energy and increase lifetime of the disks.

# Install hd-idle
sudo apt install hd-idle
# Configure hd-idle
sudo nano /etc/default/hd-idle

# Change line according to your available disks. Replace X with the disk letter.
# The following line will set the default to 0 and the custom idle time for disk sdX to 8 minutes. Save File afterwards.
HD_IDLE_OPTS="-i 0 -a sdX -i 480 -l /var/log/hd-idle.log"

# Restart hd-idle
sudo systemctl restart hd-idle

# Check if hd-idle is running
systemctl status hd-idle

# Check if disks are spinning down
cat /var/log/hd-idle.log

More documentation can be found here

sudo apt update
sudo apt install log2ram

# Check if log2ram is running (after reboot!)
systemctl status log2ram

More documentation can be found here.

df -h

I recommend to install it yourself following a simple guide.

All following commands need to be run from your Raspberry PI. Either connect via SSH or direct access.

git clone https://github.com/timoknapp/rpi-nas.git
cd rpi-nas

Replace Placeholders in docker-compose.yml file:

• ${PATH_TO_DISK} with related Path on your PI

• Execute the following command on your PI: id `whoami`

  • Replace ${USER_ID} with the integer value of uid.
  • Replace ${GROUP_ID} with the integer value of gid.

• Set password postgres user

docker-compose up

Opening a browser with the IP of your PI should show now the Heimdall dashboard. A configured dashboard would like like one on top. (e.g. http://IP-OF-YOUR-PI)

Following show all the applications of the docker-compose.yml related to their exposed ports on the host.

Optional means that the application is not necessary for the NAS to work properly. It is just a nice to have. If you want to use it, you need to uncomment the related lines in the docker-compose.yml file.

(1) In order to expose your external devices using Zigbee/Z-Wave dongles to the Home Assistant container, you can read this guide

• Open http://IP-OF-YOUR-PI:8080/admin and login with the password you set in the docker-compose.yml file.

• Go to Settings -> DNS -> Interface settings and change the setting from Allow only local requests to Permit all origins -> Save. (This could already be set by the environment variable DNSMASQ_LISTENING in the docker-compose.yml file)

  • This will add the following line in /etc/dnsmasq.d/01-pihole.conf:

  except-interface=nonexisting

  Since the Pi-hole is running in a docker container, it is not possible to use the Allow only local requests setting as its only considering the local network of the container.

• Go to Settings -> System -> Disable Query Logging.

  Since we want to use the Pi-hole as a DNS server only, we don't need to log any queries. This will reduce the amount of writes to the disk and will allow us to run Pi-hole in anonymous mode.

• Add the following lines to /etc/pihole/pihole-FTL.conf:

  PRIVACYLEVEL=3 #; 0=show everything, 1=hide domains, 2=hide domains and clients, 3=anonymous mode
  #; MAXLOGAGE=24.0 #; up to how many hours of logs to show in pihole web interface
  MAXDBDAYS=7 #; delete entries older than 30 days. Setting this to 0 will disable the database.
  DBINTERVAL=60.0 #; write to the pihole-FTL.db file every 30 minutes (lets the HDD spin down)
  #; DBFILE=/etc/pihole/pihole-FTL.db #; path to the database file. Setting this to DBFILE= disables the database altogether

• Restart Pi-hole container!

Tdb.

• Add your Cloudflare API Token to the TUNNEL_TOKEN variable in the docker-compose.yml file.

More configuration options can be found here or here.