Setting up a NAS server

A NAS (network-attached storage) server is very useful for storing and distributing data on a local network. In this post, I am going to show you how you can create your own ubuntu NAS server.

Prerequisites

In order to run our own NAS server we obviously first need a server. Go ahead and install the an ubuntu server on a free device. The ubuntu install instructions are very simple, you should be able to follow them and have a running server in less then an hour. I suggest using the non GUI server, at least that's what I am assuming you will have in this tutorial. It does work with the desktop server as well though.

Once that is all set up, we are going to install some packages we will need to for the NAS server. First, let's go ahead and install a better package manager called nala. 

sudo apt install nala

Once that is done, we call nala instead of apt to install packages. Let's go ahead and use it to install a text editor. 

sudo nala install vim

You should see a much cleaner visual for the installing process. While it would be totally fine to use apt, you benefit from using nala as it not only looks a lot better and is more readable, but it also has quite a few features (like undoing installs and properly purging packages).

Setting a Static IP Address

With all of this setup complete, we can finally begin to setup our NAS server. To start we will make our private IP address static. Every device in your local network has a private IP address which your internet router uses to know which data package needs to go where. These private IP addresses can change when you for example change your router. This is not a problem for most cases, but when using a NAS server we will access our server through the private IP address. So we are going to need to make the private IP address static.

First of all we will need to figure out the private IP address of our server. We do this by simply running the following command. 

ip addr | grep inet

This should output something similar to this. 

inet 127.0.0.1/8 scope host lo
inet6 ::1/128 scope host 
inet 192.168.178.98/24 metric 100 brd 192.168.178.255 scope global dynamic enp3s0
inet6 fd00::226a:8aff:fe28:7bce/64 scope global dynamic mngtmpaddr noprefixroute 
inet6 fe80::226a:8aff:fe28:7bce/64 scope link

My server has a private IP address of 192.168.178.98. Yours will be different but will probably also start with something like 192.168.

We are also going to need to know the network interface of our server. To achieve this, simply run this command. 

ip link

Something like the following output should be displayed. My network interface is enp3s0, yours will be similar. Note that en stands for ethernet here, so if your server is using that it should start with the prefix en. If you are using wifi (on a laptop for example), then it will start with w, in my case I have the interface wlp6s0b1 which is indeed a wifi port (I am using a laptop as a server). 

1: lo:  mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN mode DEFAULT group default qlen 1000
    link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
2: enp3s0:  mtu 1500 qdisc mq state UP mode DEFAULT group default qlen 1000
    link/ether 20:6a:8a:28:7b:ce brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
3: wlp6s0b1:  mtu 1500 qdisc noop state DOWN mode DEFAULT group default qlen 1000
    link/ether 18:f4:6a:be:c4:d7 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff

Now we can use our private IP address and turn it into a static one. To do this, we will create the file /etc/netplan/01-network-manager-all.yaml with the following content. 

network:
  renderer: networkd
  ethernets:
    enp3s0:
      addresses:
        - 192.168.178.98/24
      nameservers:
        addresses: [192.168.178.1, 8.8.8.8]
      routes:
        - to: default
          via: 192.168.1.98
  version: 2

Here you obviously need to replace the private IP address and the network interface with your own. Note that 8.8.8.8 is a public google domain used as a fallback. The only thing left to do is to update the netplan. 

sudo netplan apply

Configuring Samba

Next we are going to use samba to handle the actual connection of users to our server storage. We start off by installing samba. 

sudo nala install samba
sudo systemctl status smbd
  
smbd.service - Samba SMB Daemon
     Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/smbd.service)
     Active: active (running) since Sun 2023-10-22 12:46:40 UTC

...

Running this command should show you that samba is now active. I cut out the rest of it as it's not important, but if nala is inactive or there were some errors then you should check the rest of the output. You may need to reboot your server, nala will tell you in that case.

Once you made sure samba is running we are going to configure it. Open the file /etc/samba/smb.conf with the editor of your choice (I am gonna use vim which we installed previously). 

sudo vim /etc/samba/smb.conf

Place the following content at the end of the file. Allow me to explain what these terms mean. 

[first-nas-folder]
   comment = My very first nas folder
   path = "/home/user/folder"
   guest ok = no
   browseable = yes
   create mask = 0777
   directory mask = 0777
   writable = yes
   read only = no

You can configure as many entries as you want. Let's say you would like to create another entry just for movies, then you could add the following to your smb.conf. Note that the mask 0777 means that everybody that has access to the server has read and write access. 

[movies]
   comment = Movies Only Share
   path = /home/user/movies-folder
   guest ok = no
   browseable = yes
   create mask = 0777
   directory mask = 0777
   writable = yes
   read only = no

Settup up Samba Users

The final step we need to do is to add samba users. This will allow users to connect to our server using the credentials we will specify now. First, create a new user. 

sudo useradd my-new-user

Then we will add the user to samba. It will prompt you to create a password for this user. Note that the person who is going to use this account on their desktop OS will need this password in order to connect to the NAS server. 

sudo smbpasswd -a my-new-user

Finally let's apply our changes to samba by running the following two commands. 

sudo ufw allow samba
sudo systemctl restart smbd

That's it! Your NAS server is all set up now. The only thing left to do is to connect to it from your desktop OS. I created a separate tutorial for that as this one is already quite long, you can read it here.

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