I am soon to acquire a Raspberry Pi 5 8Gb and am hoping to turn it into a "simple" LAN-only network file server with read-only files, using overlayfs.
I have around 8 NTFS externally powered usb3 disks ranging in size from 2Tb to 8Tb and each has folder trees full of files.
I'd like to
1. present the folder trees on them as a single "merged" folder tree, probably using overlayfs and fstab
What makes you think you need to use overlayfs? It's likely to cause as many problems as it solves, for example, if a file exists on two drives with the same path (relative to the partion's root) only the one for the last filesystem added to the overlay will be visible.
2. share "merged" folder tree with SMB/CIFS and NFS and DLNA if I can get these to work with overlayfs.
(I do not want to use OpenMediaVault or plex because they connect to the internet and I don't want gear which does that, and I want to use the Raspberry Pi 5 for other things as well)
Not sure how Samba copes with sharing an overlayfs. NFS can be problematic - it's supposed to be supported with the correct version of overlayfs and NFS and with the correct options on both but I've never managed to make it work.
For DLNA, I use miniDLNA and that doesn't care. It can have mutliple media source and presents a unified list to clients.
TBH, given the drives contain data and are formatted to NTFS I wouldn't bother with NFS. The main advantage of using NFS is that it is native to Linux (SMB/CIFS originated on Windows) and has full support for Linux owner, group, and permissions which NTFS doesn't have.
ChatGPT tells me it's possible and that I could still copy new/updated files directly to individual disk's folders (infrequently), or temporarily pop disks over onto a win11 PC for that since they are all NTFS which win11 can deal with.
So ... I now have 2 new TP-Link UH400 unpowered USB3 hubs https://www.tp-link.com/au/home-network ... ory/uh400/ with say 4 externally-powered USB3 disks to be attached to each unpowered USB3 hub.
The unpowered USB3 hubs will plug into the two USB3 ports of the Raspberry Pi 5, with overlayfs to present them as one folder tree.
Everything on Linux present as one folder tree. Drive letters are a Windows thing.
If you mount the first drive at, say, /foo/bar, the second at /foo/baz then share /foo clients will have access to both (subject to permissions set inthe filesystem).
Hence, will a Raspberry Pi 5 running latest (Bookworm) OS be able to handle those 2 USB3 hubs in term of powering them and recognising them as separate usb3 hubs with attached externally-powered usb3 disks ?
Whilst asking about the Pi 5, do you reckon a Pi4B 8 Gb would be able handle it ?
A 4B has half the bandwidth for USB that the Pi5 has. If you can live with that (it's still roughly four times the ethernet bandwidth) it should work.
[shameless self promotion]
You might find the following to be of interest:
Building A Pi Based NAS
Using fstab A Beginner's Guide
[/shameless self promotion]
Statistics: Posted by thagrol — Fri Jul 12, 2024 1:47 pm