Scary Cabin

One of my backup drives failed. This is the drive that is primarily backing up the media (music, photos, etc.) so it’s pretty important. The drive was set up as a TimeMachine drive and the media files reside on a USB disk attached to a Mac Mini.

Since I need at least a new drive, this seems like an opportunity to look into replacing the Mac Mini with a NAS device. Looking at some of the low-end NAS devices, it seems like they’ve come a long way since I last looked at them many years ago. They have well thought out user interfaces and some seem to have very good application support.

So maybe this is an opportunity to consolidate and improve a number of the home network functions.

The Mac Mini holds the media, web, and other various archives and serves these out to other machines.

The Linux desktop has database files, and runs the web server, the media server, and a crashplan server so it’s handling a lot different tasks.

There’s also a RPi set up as a VPN server.

Those are all things that a NAS can do, but what should it do?

#1 is file serving. So move all the file serving functions from the Mac Mini to the NAS.
#2 is backups. If possible, run CrashPlan headless on the NAS and point all the other machines at it.
#3 is TimeMachine backups. It should be able to handle local data from each of the Macs
#4 is media server. Maybe even an iTunes server and possibly a Plex server
#5 is a web server.
#6 is a VPN server.
#7 is running the MariaDB database service
#8 What about creating a calendar server?
#9 Would it make sense to make it a mail server too?

Some considerations. While running Crashplan and sending all backups to the NAS seems like a good idea, Crashplan can be a resource hog. Handling the data from the Windows machines is probably easy, but what about the Linux home directory? Some testing is needed. Would it make any sense to move the Linux home directory to the server too?

Media servers can also be a bit resource intensive. Does it make sense to run more than one? There’s a built-in one and there’s Plex. Should only one be run? Is there any advantage to running an iTunes server?

Running the web server on the NAS and the database on the Linux box may cause additional network traffic and performance issues for the web applications that want a database. Of most concern is the power monitoring app as that updates the database frequently. Would it make any sense to run two database servers, one on the NAS handling web applications only and one on the Linux box for the power monitoring.

The biggest concern with hosting all the databases on the NAS is the power monitoring. Would it be possible to run the power monitoring data collection on the NAS? It would need a USB port dedicated for that.

Moving the VPN service over seems like a no brainer.

Hosting a family calendar on the NAS is an interesting idea. It may make a shared calendar between ios and android devices possible.

Moving the mail processing over doesn’t seem to have any advantage or disadvantage. If the NAS isn’t bogged down by everything else, it might be nice to have it handle this too.

The real benefit to using the NAS seems to be that it could free up resources on the Linux box. How much it can handle, we’ll see.

And what NAS am I going to use? A Synology DS216j. This is a dual bay, low end NAS. If it works out well, it’s possible to move up to a more powerful NAS down the road.