Archive web access

[Gob]

Our media business is migrating all of our active production work to a high performance cloud storage solution. Given the relatively high storage costs of that service I am looking to build an on-premise archive solution out of some of our current production hardware. End of life projects will get transferred from cloud to on-prem archive but will remain online and accessible.
I happen to have at my disposal an iX Systems X20 plus 24 disk expansion shelf (36 disks in total), so have a great footing to kick off this project.
The archive will be shared across several offices and not all sites will have dedicated private (VPN) access to the archive server.

Where I am undecided is how to interface the storage solution with and easily accessible (and secure) web interface where specific approved staff can browse the archive and retrieve files if necessary.
All staff have Azure AD accounts so perhaps something that will use Microsoft's SSO & MFA to authenticate would be ideal.

I thought about Nextcloud using external storage on the TrueNAS but not sure how performant that is with indexing external storage.
I have run NC in a TrueNAS jail at home but do not trust the updating of that package vs a dedicated Install on Linux.

Any suggestions gratefully received.
Thanks

 

[jgreco]

What sort of external storage are you looking to index?

 

[Gob]

The TrueNAS archive dataset would be mounted in NextCloud as External storage.
NextCloud would be running on a standalone web server

 

[jgreco]

So if I understand what you're saying, you want to have an external server do an NFS mount of the TrueNAS and then offer up the NFS mount contents via NextCloud running on that external server.

I haven't done this, but assuming NextCloud supports that, it should work. Note that you might need to give NextCloud an empty dataset and fill it via NC upload/import functions. OwnCloud worked that way, and definitely works with NFS.

You would certainly be limited to network speed, so the obvious question comes up, is running NextCloud on the TrueNAS host an option, or is there a reason you don't want to do that? Just the "dedicated install" vs package updating?

The thing servers have on their side is time. Lots. Of. Time. I run Plex with many terabytes of FreeNAS-backed storage, but for similar reasons to your listed ones, I run it separately. This means all content access happens over NFS. It works. It's slower. I suspect that the Plex media analysis stuff would go lots faster with direct access. But so what. Your main pain point will be initial population and indexing. If you can deal with that, I suspect it'll work out for you.

No promises, I haven't done it.

 

[Gob]

Thanks for your thoughts / suggestions @jgreco
I'm not sure NextCloud does support an NFS mount, but it certainly does work with SFTP and SMB for external storage.
My experience with running Nextcloud in a jail on top of TrueNAS is that updating to the latest version doesn't seem to work, or breaks regularly.
Having this publicly exposed to the internet I would want to ensure I am able to patch the server regularly without problems.
Network between TrueNAS and NextCloud would be 10GBE so shouldn't be much of a bottleneck there.