I recently replaced an ancient laptop with a slightly less ancient one.
- host for backups for three other machines
- serve files I don’t necessarily need on the new machine
- relatively lightweight - “server” is ~15 years old
- relatively simple - I’d rather not manage a dozen docker containers.
- internal-facing
- does NOT need to handle Android and friends. I can use sync-thing for that if I need to.
Left to my own devices I’d probably rsync for 90% of that, but I’d like to try something a little more pointy-clicky or at least transparent in my dotage.
Edit: Not SAMBA (I freaking hate trying to make that work)
Edit2: for the young’uns: NFS (linux “network filesystem”)
Edit 3: LAN only. I may set up a VPN connection one day but it’s not currently a priority. (edited post to reflect questions)
Last Edit: thanks, friends, for this discussion! I think based on this I’ll at least start with NFS + my existing backups system (Mint’s thing, which is I think just a gui in front of rcync). May play w/ modern SAMBA if I have extra time.
Ill continue to read the replies though - some interesting ideas.
If it’s for backup, zfs and btrfs can send incremental diffs quite efficiently (but of course you’ll have to use those on both ends).
Otherwise, both NFS and SMB are certainly viable.
I tried both but TBH I ended up just using SSHFS because I don’t care about becoming and NFS/SMB admin.
NFS and SMB are easy enough to setup, but then when you try to do user-level authentication… they aren’t as easy anymore.
Since I’m already managing SSH keys all over my machines, I feel like SSHFS makes much more sense for me.