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)
you and perhaps @curbstickle@lemmy.dbzer0.com, may I ask if you use samba with portable devices, like laptops?
I do and my experience is that programs that try to access it when I don’t have network access tend to freeze, including my desktop environment, but any file managers too if I click the wrong place by accident. but it occurs enough without user action too.
oh and it breaks all machines at once if the server or network is down. which is rare but very annoying.
did you experience this too? do you have some advice? is SMB just unsuitable for this?
honestly I would prefer if the cifs driver would keep track of last successful communication, and if it was long ago instantly fail all accesses. without unmounting so that open directories and file handles keep being valid.
and if all software on this world wouldn’t behave as if they were doing IO on the main thread. honestly this went smoother with windows clients but I’m not going back.
Only windows devices (laptop I use for work stuff). The other laptops are Linux (NFS) or Chromebooks (for the kids, no access).
Devices don’t really leave often (aside from mine), so not much of an issue. If the NAS is offline, not much else would be going on either.