this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2023
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Linux beginner, want to install OS on my NAS (self.linux)
submitted 2 years ago by MonkCanatella to c/[email protected]
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Hi all,

I'm currently experimenting with different distros using virtualbox. My set up is Workstation PC - QNAP TB to 10g NIC - 10g switch - Synology 1621+ NAS. The connection between the NAS and the PC is equal to about a gen 3 SSD. I do see one particular place where there may be an issue: the qnap adapter needs drivers of some sort to able to act as a nic. But maybe there's a way to still tell my bios to boot into my nas? or maybe I could make a little partition that only activates the nic and from there boot into the nas? I also can just connect a 2.5g directly between my computer and nas, but that would end up being really slow, slower than many of the single hard drives I have in my nas.

What I'd like to do is run my chosen distro(s) from my PC but have them install on the NAS itself. Essentially I'll all the storage for the OS on the NAS, but have access to my workstation's more performant ram, cpu and GPU.

Is this possible?

Also, I'm looking at nobara, endeavour, mint, mx linux. May look into opensuse and alpine at some point as well.

Primary purpose will be for general browsing/research and programming. Some gaming if it's possible. my long term goal is, once gaming is stable enough on linux, switch entirely over to linux and only use windows for games/media creation/music production that can't be done on linux, but daily drive linux.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Something like iSCSI as you already have to 10gig card, or fibre channel SAN, apparently qnap supports both, however I've never used a qnap or iSCSI For booting https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/ISCSI/Boot For the qnap https://www.qnap.com/en/how-to/tutorial/article/how-to-create-and-use-the-iscsi-target-service-on-a-qnap-nas

The general idea is a small boot partition to load kernel and most importantly the drivers for the nic, then mount the Nas over iSCSI and finish loading the os

To be honest a 1TB SATA ssd isnt that much, you could have 10 distros @ 100gb each with extra storage mounted on the nas. 100gb is loads for a Linux OS. I think most of the virtual machines I spin up without a GUI use a 20GB disk

You can also boot directly over the network with pxe/netbootin etc but I'm not sure how that works with an add in network card, as it's usually a feature of the bios itself

[–] MonkCanatella 3 points 2 years ago

To be honest a 1TB SATA ssd isnt that much, you could have 10 distros @ 100gb each with extra storage mounted on the nas. 100gb is loads for a Linux OS. I think most of the virtual machines I spin up without a GUI use a 20GB disk

You know, that is a really good point, I could have a few distros installed and have that take up less space than call of duty lol. I'll do some more research into the resources you've shared with me, just because I think it'd be cool. But I should be able to easily make space on one of the ssds on my main workstation.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

The thing that comes to mind is setting up a block device as an iscsi target on your NAS. That would present the storage to you as though it’s another hard drive that you can format and map in windows. Then you can save vms there as though it were directly connected.

[–] MonkCanatella 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Well I do have a folder on my nas mapped to a lettered drive on windows. That's where I'm installing the VMs right now. I want a non VM installation, on the NAS itself, so I can basically boot up my PC from an installation that lives on the NAS.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Oh, gotcha. In that case, maybe a PXE boot server would be worth checking out.

[–] MonkCanatella 1 points 2 years ago

Oh, awesome suggestion. I actually just went ahead and cut up one of my nvmes to play around with different distros, trying out refind to allow booting into whichever.