This is the part two of “Building a home server”. The first part can be found here: Building a home server - The hardware.

Now that we have the hardware, we must install something on it. Because the main reason of build a home server was to keep private files on site, the first piece of software that I needed was something that can act as a NAS.

After some research, I came up with two options. It was either openmediavault or FreeNAS. Both solutions were good, so I don’t have a strong opinion inclined in the favor of either of them. You can find a good comparison here.

In the end I went with openmediavault because it is based on Debian, and I am much more familiar with it than FreeBSD.

After the installation I took the following steps:

1. Create Mirror level RAID with my two HDDs(this step can take a while);
2. Create the file systems on the newly created device from the previous step;
3. I’ve added some shared folders that can be accessed from outside the server;
4. Enable Samba: It will be used for easy access from LAN;
5. Enable SSH: It will be used for maintenance only;
6. Install OMV-Extras plugin: This will give the ability to install Docker and Portainer;
7. Install Docker from OMV-Extras plugin: I don’t just want to use the server as a NAS, and I also do not want to mess up the host OS by installing other things directly. Docker will help decoupling the NAS from any other tools and servers that will be installed.
8. Install Portainer from OMV-Extras: It is necessary if we want to manage the docker containers without using SSH.

This concludes my initial setup. Because I installed Docker and Portainer, now the options are limitless. There are a lot of tools that you can easily install using Portainer. If you don’t have any idea of what exactly can be installed, you can check linuxserver.io. They are maintaining a lot of cool images for all kinds of uses. These are some of the images I use:

• Pi-home: DNS sinkhole that lets you block ads for your entire network.
• Plex: Media server with a huge library of free movies and shows. You can also watch your own movies.
• OpenVPN
• Nextcloud: Self hosted cloud.
• iSpy: Video surveillance solution, if you have security cameras.

Have fun:)