Basically, you should install Fedora Server Edition and include Windows Fileserver option. It includes a nice Web based admin interface for easy going. If you just want filesharing then you are done. You have just to add your users and organise where to store what files. When you want additional capabilities, e.g. share ebooks library or local mail storage, you must install additional software depending on your wishes. The Dell / Fedora combination gives you a lot more options as any commercial NAS device I know (including hight end Synology or Qnap).

On 15Mar2021 17:54, Tom Horsley <horsley1953(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Our home NAS is also our local Ubuntu server (pick whatever distro you like). It's got a pair (well, 2 pairs) of big drives in RAID-1 - there live our media and other large things. It shares via NFS and SMB/CIFS. I do recommend, if you have the $s, to RAID your storage - it gets you redundancy on drive failure. While this means things stay up of you lose a single drive, more importantly it means you don't need to restore from backup after you lose a single drive; that is a huge boon. We like RAID-1 because either drive is standalone. Any can be dropped into a cradle or other machine without the RAID for recovery. We just use the md RAID stuff, no LVM etc. Our machine is an HP Proliant G8 - cheap, 4 3.5" SATA drive bays (not hot swap alas), a SSD up the top for /home and swap, and the OS on an SD card on the mainboard. How I wish we could still buy them. Plex: I keep toying with plex. I find it very frustrating. a) you need a Plex account b) it infers metadata (movie names, what have you) from filenames, which forces a particular naming scheme on you. A schema I hate. I have a whole script to make a parallel Plex link tree for that reason. c) No decent way to add (or present) better metadata. Once there were plugins but these days they seem unsupported. I've got metadata, but the best I can do is plex friendly filenames. I'd love to hear about your setup. We still play media on our PVR, which has the server's media tree NFS mounted on it. Cheers, Cameron Simpson <cs(a)cskk.id.au&gt;

On Tue, 2021-03-16 at 19:04 +1100, Cameron Simpson wrote: +1 I had a NAS (Iomega) for many years. Over time I had to replace both Seagate hard drives with WD units and lost nothing. The NAS itself finally died a few months ago after about 10 years service, and after connecting the drives via a USB dock Fedora immediately recognised them as RAID-1. I'm toying with the idea of replacing the MD RAID with BTRFS RAID, given that it's now supported in Fedora, but haven't decided yet. I use Plex and also have a script to rename media files. Trouble is that if you do that it interferes with Plex's ability to find online subtitles, so I've essentially stopped doing it. I guess I could use a parallel link tree, but I can't really be bothered. poc