help to get started with sharing a HDD

[paulskirk]

Hi, I have some programming experience on microcontrollers, but new to cloud storage. I have a home router to which I can attach a HDD for NAS.

I'd like to be able to access the NAS for myself and a few other remote users (up to 5) and started looking at nextcloud. I visted the 'run nextcloud at home' page and got to 'run nextcloud on truenas'-> get started, but I couldn't work out my next step from the help pages. Could anyone give me a few pointers to get started?
thanks.

 

[sretalla]

I have a home router to which I can attach a HDD for NAS.

I visted the 'run nextcloud at home' page and got to 'run nextcloud on truenas'

That's not a compatible set of options...

TrueNAS won't run on your home router.

Some home routers may be able to run third-party OS like Tomato/OpenWRT/dd-wrt (typically un-supported by the manufacturer and carries possible risks of "bricking" the router if not done properly), which provide such options (although maybe not a whole install of Nextcloud... more like CIFS/SMB shares, which would be OK for your home network side, but really discouraged for Internet-facing without some serious understanding of what you're doing with a firewall and probably a reverse proxy). natively in the product on compatible hardware. Other options are baked into the routers' factory OS, like for some ASUS and Synology routers.

If you just have a random whatever router that was supplied by your ISP, you may be out of luck.

 

[danb35]

Could anyone give me a few pointers to get started?

The next few steps that would be relevant to this forum would be to buy or build a computer that's suitable to run TrueNAS (see https://www.truenas.com/community/resources/hardware-recommendations-guide.12/), then read enough of the docs (https://www.truenas.com/docs/, https://www.familybrown.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=fester112:intro, https://www.truenas.com/community/resources/introduction-to-zfs.111/) to understand how it and ZFS work. Then install it, create a storage pool, and install Nextcloud in a jail (if using TrueNAS CORE) or an App (if using SCALE).

An alternative (which wouldn't be at all relevant to this forum) would be to buy something like a Raspberry Pi and use NextcloudPi (https://docs.nextcloudpi.com/) to install Nextcloud on there.

 

[paulskirk]

Thanks very much for replies, much appreciated. It's made me realise it's probably too complex for me with my current limited knowledge and skill around networking and internet interfacing.