DIY NAS build

[lhamilton1807]

Table of Contents

1. Hardware (below in post #1)
2. Assembly
3. Installing Unraid (OS) and PiHole (ad blocker)
4. Configuring a domain, reverse proxy, web application firewall (CloudFlare), and NextCloud. Migrate photos from Google to NextCloud
5. Install Ark: Survival Evolved server

Hardware
I decided to build a NAS instead of buying one from a manufacturer. It’ll have a larger footprint but will be more upgradable and have more options, such as running docker containers and VMs. A Synology 4-Bay DiskStation DS923+will run ~$600 USD without disks on Amazon. I built mine with three disks and room to grow to 6 for about that price, plus I’ll be able to have apps, VMs, and docker containers served on the same machine, consolidating some hardware at home.

Parts are below. Some items I had on hand or found at work in the e-waste cabinet. Lots of excellent freebies where I work. My cooler was found without a bracket, so I had to purchase one.

Part	Make/Model	Qty	Total Price
Motherboard	Gigabyte GA-H97N	1	$70, eBay
CPU	Intel Xeon E3-1265Lv3	1	$35, eBay
RAM	Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600MHz, 8GB sticks	2	$0
Cooler	Intel 120mm liquid cooler, made by Asetek	1	$0
Array Drives	Western Digital 6TB Red NAS drives	3	$300, Amazon
Case	Fractal Node 304	1	$100, Newegg
Power supply	Enhance ATX-0250GA 500W	1	$0
SATA cables	pack of 6, 18” long	1	$7.50, Amazon
Cooler bracket	Corsair H80i bracket for Intel 115X sockets	1	$11.50, Amazon
OS	Unraid, basic license for up to 6 drives	1	$60
Cache drive	Crucial MX500 2TB SATA III SSD	1	$0
Grand Total			~$580

I chose this motherboard because (1) it has 6 SATA III ports, the max # of drives the case will hold and (2) it has dual 1G NICs. I may bind them together for a 2G uplink. There’s a mSATA port that is used for wireless cards on other motherboards. Might be a good place to use my old 256GB SSD if I can get it to be recognized.


Pro tip: if your motherboard supports Xeon processors, they’re often cheaper than their PC counterparts. An Intel i7-4770T has the same specs but was $120 or more on eBay.


I will use this mSATA drive for cache if it is recognized by the system.
Edit 1/7/2023: No dice. I think the mSATA port is present but disabled on this motherboard. Used the MX500 I was given instead.

[lhamilton1807]

You can look for PC build videos if you want to learn how to do this. I’ll just give you my notes and some pics.

The big challenge here is space. This case is pretty tight, so I had to be OK with a slightly cramped, messy interior. As long as there’s decent airflow, I’ll be happy. There’s no window, so it’ll never be looked at.

Power supply installed. The air intake is on the bottom of the case. All intakes - front panel, power supply, and long GPU intake - have removable dust filters. The case also comes with three fans - two 92mm intake fans on front and a 140mm exhaust in back. I replaced the 140mm fan with the 120mm water cooler radiator and fan.


Top view of the motherboard. The water cooler was a challenge because the hoses were made for a bigger case. Got them to fit just fine.


The disk brackets are kinda cool. They have rubber grommets to reduce vibrations and support both 3.5” and 2.5” drives. 2 drives per bracket max, but I’m installing 1 drive per bracket for now, leaving space between for air flow.


Its alive! 6TB drives are all recognized. Will have to wait for the OS to be installed to see if the mSATA drive is available.

[lhamilton1807]

To get started with Unraid, I used the Flash Creator to install the OS on a 4GB USB stick. Just follow the instructions - super straightforward. I also ensured all my BIOS settings were as I wanted them. VT-d and VT-x were configured for virtualization, I used the built-in XMP profile for my RAM to get it to operate at full speed, I ensured all SATA drives were in AHCI mode (NOT RAID!!!! Unraid does that for you!) and were all hot-swappable. I also ensured that USB drives were at the top of the boot order to ensure the USB stick with Unraid would boot first. Wake on LAN was turned on as well - I may use it for remote maintenance, etc. just because I'm lazy and might sit upstairs and tell my router to turn on the Unraid server for me instead of walking over and pushing the button 😂

Once I booted the machine and connected it to the network, I figured out which IP address it was using with a trusty tool: pinginfoview. Just enter the range of IP addresses for the subnet it's on and it'll ping ALL of them at the interval I set (5 seconds). I found it without too much trouble.

I used a web browser on another machine to hit http://<server-IP> and set a new root account password at the prompt. I haven't purchased a license yet, but the trial gives you 30 days, so I'll enter the license key later.

Drive time! I made one of the 6TB drives a parity drive, and the other two were assigned to the array.

The SSD was added to the cache pool.


By default, XFS is the file system for arrays and BTRFS is used for pools. I kept the defaults.
I started the array, then checked the box to format unmountable drives and hit the FORMAT button. All three storage drives were formatted, then the parity drive did a parity copy of the new drives. It essentially backed up nothing, since they're new drives, but it's part of the process. It'll take a long time (after 3hrs, mine was ~33% done), so in the meantime I decided to get a docker container running: PiHole for ad blocking.

Switch to the App tab and search for "pihole" and select the official build. It'll have "Official" in a burgundy triangle in the corner instead of "Installed" as below


On the pihole container configuration page

1. Click the switch in the top right corner to enter "Advanced View"
2. In the Extra Parameters field, append (i.e. add to the end) --hostname=<hostname-of-your-server>
   1. Example: --cap-add=NET_ADMIN --restart=unless-stopped --hostname=pihole
3. Set Network type to Custom: br0
4. Set Fixed IP address (optional) and ServerIP to an unused IP address on the subnet(since I'm replacing my current pihole server, I set this to a new unused IP on my network so they don't conflict with each other)
5. Set Timezone to America/Los_Angeles since I'm on the left coast. Find your TZ code here.
6. Set Web Password to a password of my choosing. Note that this isn't a VM, and the password is part of the initialization string.
7. Set PIHOLE_DNS_ to 208.67.222.222;208.67.220.220 (I use OpenDNS as an upstream filter for things like porn, conspiracy sites, and other things I don't want my kids getting into. Pihole handles the ads, and if it can't find an entry for the hostname/domain it sends the query to the OpenDNS servers.)
8. All other settings were left at their defaults.

After the container and packages downloads, hit DONE and the container will start. Log into the WebUI by clicking the container's icon > WebUI using the password you set.

In the Pihole app WebUI, go to Settings > DNS

1. Ensure all four boxes in the OpenDNS row are checked (if you're using OpenDNS)
2. I'm using my router for DHCP (to hand out IP addresses on my network) so I enabled conditional forwarding, filling in the fields with the info from my home network

If you want to configure more lists of blocked domains, follow this guide. I suggest seeing if things work well with the default list + OpenDNS and then move on from there.

Test your new DNS settings

1. Figure out what your current IP address is (at a command prompt, enter ipconfig)
2. On your PC, change your network settings from Automatic/DHCP to Manual/static
3. configure the IP address you found in step 1 above, set the prefix length (probably 24), default gateway, and then the IP of your PiHole server as the DNS server
4. Save the settings
5. Use a browser to browse to public websites like microsoft.com or another website you haven't visited recently.
6. Check your PiHole server query log. It should show your IP address and the requests it's made.
7. If it all looks good, then set your PC back to Automatic/DHCP

Finally, go to your router and point your DHCP clients to use the IP address of your Pihole server as the DNS server, and apply the changes.

[Grendel]

Thanks for the walk thru on the setup. I was not familiar with UNRAID before, you now have me thinking! My NAS is getting a little long in the tooth this might be a good direction to move. Now to do some more reading! I am just getting back into building systems again it's been better part of 6 years since I did my last build of any PC for fun. Most of my current computing is done with company provided hardware but my home computing is sorely needing upgrading [i.e. wife is complaining about her laptop and media steaming performance]

[lhamilton1807]

GOING PUBLIC to Replace Google Photos with Self-Hosted NextCloud

I'm going to simplify my notes here by linking some video tutorials that I found incredibly helpful, as well as any modifications I made to the instructions.

Register a domain name: https://youtu.be/y4UdsDULZDg (Credit: Spaceinvader One)

• Instead of godaddy.com, I used namesilo.com because (a) it was cheaper for both registration & annual renewal and (b) it offers free WHOIS anonymization.
• Changing the nameservers as mentioned in the video took just a minute to update via namesilo.com. I tested whether they were updated by putting my new domain name into https://lookup.icann.org/en/lookup. CloudFlare also emailed me when they had found the appropriate changes had propagated.
• Bonus: He mentions using BitWarden as a password manager. I highly recommend this as well - been using it for some time now.

Cloudflare + Nginx Proxy Manager - Easy SSL: https://youtu.be/GarMdDTAZJo (Credit: Raid Owl)

• I wanted to make my reverse proxy easy to manage, and I knew I wouldn't remember the commands after I got things set up if I used a really lightweight, command-line only reverse proxy. Nginx Proxy Manager will allow me to set up a reverse proxy using a GUI instead.
• Raid Owl doesn't use Unraid as his docker host, but finding the correct app is easy in Unraid. Just search "nginx" in the Apps tab in Unraid and find the correct icon with the name Nginx-Proxy-Manager-Official:
  
• Docker settings as follows:
  • Network Type: Bridge
  • Change the ports for WebUI, HTTP, and HTTPS by prepending a number. The video used 4000xxx, but you can use something shorter like "881" and "880" and "8443" if you'd like.
  • The rest of the default settings are fine
• Use the CloudFlare account that was set up by following the previous video for all CloudFlare configs
• I'm using NextCloud as a Google Photos (and everything else "Google") replacement. There's a docker for that You can use this video (another great video by Spaceinvader One) to get NextCloud set up (he used a proxy configured only through command line, which you could do instead of the one I used)
• Be sure to also enable HSTS in Nginx Proxy Manager, as NextCloud will complain about it when you look at security recommendations if you don't.
• Test your connection when done. It worked on mine, BUT I saw that my self-hosted NextCloud didn't trust the connection because I wasn't connecting from a "Trusted Domain." I've also added other items below that I've found helpful over time. See this page for other parameters you can set - the explanations are pretty clear.
  • Open a command window in Unraid (click this icon on any page: )
  • Enter the following command to locate your config.php file: find /var -name "config.php"
  • Mine was at /mnt/user/appdata/nextcloud/www/nextcloud/config/config.php
  • Edit the file by entering nano /path/to/file/config.php
  • Add entries to the file per the official documentation. Mine looked like this (but with my domain at spot #1):
    'trusted_domains' =>
    array (
    0 => 'localhost',
    1 => 'nextcloud.yourdomain.one',
  • Add a new line to configure your default phone region, substituting your code (see here to find yours):
    'default_phone_region' => 'US',
  • Enable the knowledgebase (i.e. "help") in the app
    'knowledgebaseenabled' => true,
  • And allow users to change their display names. I'm enabling this because this is used at home, not an organization.
    'allow_user_to_change_display_name' => true,
  • Add support for HEIC (read: photos taken on Apple devices) and other less common filetypes.
    'enabledPreviewProviders' =>
    array (
    0 => 'OC\\Preview\\PNG',
    1 => 'OC\\Preview\\JPEG',
    2 => 'OC\\Preview\\GIF',
    3 => 'OC\\Preview\\HEIC',
    4 => 'OC\\Preview\\BMP',
    5 => 'OC\\Preview\\XBitmap',
    6 => 'OC\\Preview\\MP3',
    7 => 'OC\\Preview\\TXT',
    8 => 'OC\\Preview\\MarkDown',
    9 => 'OC\\Preview\\OpenDocument',
    10 => 'OC\\Preview\\Krita',
    ),
  • Ensure the LAST line of the file has the following (in general, you also need to make sure all open parentheses have a closing pair, and the last one needs a semicolon to signal the end of the file). It should be there already - just make sure you didn't leave it in the middle or overwrite it somewhere:
    );
  • Use ctrl+O to to "write out" the changes to the file, then ctrl+X to exit the nano text editor
  • In Unraid on the Docker tab, restart your NextCloud docker container
  • Reload your web page for nextcloud.yourdomain.com - you should be set
  • I also tested using the mobile app - worked just fine

Configuring NextCloud Users and Transferring Google Photos files to NextCloud
Set up email notifications from the admin account using Gmail. When users are added or something important (or disastrous) happens on your server, you'll get notified.

1. Configure 2-factor authentication for your Google account
   1. Click on your avatar > Manage Account
   2. Security > Signing in to Google > 2-factor authentication
   3. Follow the prompts to set up 2-factor authentication using your phone number/Gmail app
   4. Back to Manage Account > Security > Signing in to Google > App passwords
   5. Select app > Other (Custom name)
   6. <enter a name> Ex: nextcloud
   7. Click the Generate button to create a unique login for your NextCloud instance to send email notifications to your users
   8. Save this password in a safe location! I suggest BitWarden.
2. Set up email notifications in NextCloud
   1. Log in with your Admin account
   2. User avatar > Administration settings > Administration > Basic Settings > Email server
   3. Enter the following:
      1. Send mode: SMTP
      2. Encryption: STARTTLS
      3. From address: user@subdomain.domain.TLD (example: admin@nextcloud.mydomain.com - base this on your domain)
      4. Authentication method: Login (check the box for requiring authentication!)
      5. Server address: smtp.gmail.com
      6. Port: 587
      7. Credentials: yourgmailaddress@gmail.com, <enter your app password from above>
   4. Save
   5. Send email

NextCloud is set up with an admin account, but users for my family members (and myself - best not to use the admin account for daily use) need to be made.

1. Click on the administrator's avatar in the top right and select Users
   
2. Click the New user button on the top left of the next screen
3. Enter the Name, display name, email, and an initial password.
4. Notify your user in person, but they'll also receive an email.

Transfer Google Photos to NextCloud
Method 1: Manually via Google Takeout

1. Note: This separates all metadata (location, timestamp) into separate .json files. You'll need to join them again using exiftool. Tool is located here. I used the instructions here to reinsert the metadata. Because I have an iPhone, I added -ext heic -ext mov to the end of the commands.
2. Go to takeout.google.com and sign in if you haven't already
3. Select only the boxes next to the app data you wish to download. The more you select, the bigger the files and the longer it'll take to download.
4. Click Next Step
5. Since I'm moving everything to a local server and not another cloud account, I chose Transfer to: Send download link via email
6. Frequency: Export once
7. File type: .zip
8. File size: 2GB (to download the pictures and other data in manageable chunks)
9. Create Export (this'll take a while... wait for the email)
10. When you get the email, read the instructions and click the link 😁

Method 2 (recommended): Automation/Background
SYNC Google to Nextcloud - Data Migration Tool and Backup/Restore Guide: https://youtu.be/HQOQ2NCUuVQ (Credit: TechHut)

• Skip to 2:30 to get past the message from his sponsor.
• Watch the video and configure it as you go!
• Photos, calendar, mail, and much more can be sync'd down to NextCloud automatically in the background.

[XEMON]

I want to put one on tine once I figure out all my firewall settings, please let us know how you do it 😅

[lhamilton1807]

Let me know if you want help. I’m a network engineer by trade 😉

[XEMON]

Thanks for the offer, Ill definitely reach out, im more a hardware guy than software ... 😁

[lhamilton1807]

XEMON did you eventually get your firewall settings to work?

[RAZRBAKK]

Placeholder for excitement.

[goofyman23]

Nice! I need to convert my OMV server to Unraid at some point. What are you using for the parity drive? Using any cache drive?

[lhamilton1807]

Parity will be one of the three 6TB drives, so 12TB of storage for now. Should be plenty for the time being, and I can always expand later. Once our 2TB drives from the old 2-bay NAS is decommissioned, I will move them here for a smaller 4TB storage pool. If I can get the 256GB mSATA drive to show up in the OS, I’ll use that for cache. Otherwise I may need to purchase an adapter for either the PCI-E slot or mSATA-to-SATA or just bite the bullet and get a 2.5” SATA drive.

[goofyman23]

Unless you have a specific need for the perceived write speeds to cache, I wouldn't go out of your way to buy additional hardware.

[lhamilton1807]

I’m looking at the use cases and figuring out what my wife wants to use it for. I may just use the cache drive as an off-box gaming hard drive as I have a Skull Canyon NUC that only has a few small M2 drives currently. I use a Thunderbolt enclosure for my gfx card.

[Seajay]

Are you also running this as a router, PFSense box?
I'm not sure how unraid works, but is it requiring the motherboard Raid to run. I've got a 3770k and Asus motherboard I was thinking of doing this too, but if it requires "Software" raid off the motherboard I'm not sure how reliable that is as a dedicated NAS.

[lhamilton1807]

Unraid uses a proprietary software RAID that works on pretty much any hardware. You choose one disk that’s at least as large as your largest storage disk for parity and the rest can be a mix & match set of drive sizes. I have separate hardware for my network- I don’t want to use the same hardware for my network edge and storage because the firewall is exposed directly to the outside world. Having my files on the same machine just isn’t good security practice. But I do have a few virtual machines running on another box that can consolidate to this machine. The Xeon processor (4 cores, 8 threads) will handle virtualization on top of storage just fine and won’t be pushed that hard.

[lhamilton1807]

To clarify, you don’t need to configure any kind of hardware RAID on the motherboard through BIOS. Unraid software takes care of the whole thing. If you need more drives than your motherboard supports, you can buy a pci-e SATA card for super cheap (see eBay or Amazon) to add more capacity. Unraid does require a license, and it’s based on the number of drives you install (not including the USB stick it boots from). I got a case that supports 6drives because I don’t think I’d need more than that in the next 5-10 years and when/if I do larger drives should be easy enough to purchase instead of a larger license & case.

[Seajay]

Cool thanks!

[RAZRBAKK]

I love the look of that case.

Great build! Definitely some inspiration for the eventual homelab upgrade over here.

[Grendel]

Nice to see someone else do this, I've been using an old PC for several years as a NAS (4 - Seagate Iron Wolf 4TB NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD) setup at RAID 1+0 currently. Looking at building a new PC so expect some parts off my current rig will be used to build a new NAS with some expansion of storage. This NAS is primarily for my entertainment media leveraged by my PLEX server. I get told at work to just go cloud services but I'm a little old school and like to have my data on my premise and the side advantage, loss of Internet and I still have access to a lot of entertainment media on demand.

I used to use a dedicated Buffalo NAS but it started giving me fits and just did not seem worth it to repair/replace it when I had a PC laying around I could leverage.

[Grendel]

S3 might seem like a deal but the rates are by GB so for standard that is $0.023 per GB and I am getting close to 8 TB on my NAS (time for some upgrade) and then there is by routine backups for my computers. So for 8TB of standard S3 storage that is $184/month. Now if I was to go to Glacial storage the rate drops to $0.004 per GB so around $32/month, that is a little more doable but would have to see if that is how I really want to off site store based on how I leverage backups. Something to think about but Standard storage is definitely more then I would want to spend. Plus I am a hardware/technical geek and love to build things for myself. Like I used to have a Beowulf Node built that I would organically grow just for the fun of it.

[lhamilton1807]

I wanted to build a Beowulf cluster years ago, but then I couldn’t figure out what I’d do with it so I moved on to other projects. They were mostly used for complicated physics calculations IIRC.

[Grendel]

My Beowulf node was connected to the internet and was used by SETI@home for crunching numbers most of the time. Later on before I tore it down I was doing weather calculations on BOINC.

[lhamilton1807]

A friend of mine needed some laptop work done (new SSDs and batteries in his old Macbook Pros) and he was reluctant to dive in himself. As payment he gave me a 2TB SATA III SSD that he had purchased, thinking his MacBooks would use it. Of course Apple used proprietary M2-like drives, so his SSD was useless to him. It'll go into my NAS as a cache pool drive, to be used for high-speed transfer, and then it'll be copied daily over to the regular array.

I updated the 3rd post with Unraid installation and initial configuration plus setting up a new Pihole docker for blocking ads and the table in the first post with the new SSD.

[lhamilton1807]

Added info to post #4 for getting NextCloud running & publicly available. This will replace Google Photos, which is the main driver behind this project. More to come - I still need to transfer all photos to my server.

[lhamilton1807]

And it's off to the races... I have one account set up to dump via the manual method (takeout.google.com) because it's an old student account that has the needed APIs locked down. Our main account was able to use the automated method, and it's churning through photos and videos now. Many GB left to go... I'll let it chew on that overnight

[redsquirrel]

Are you doing the manual takeout method? I’m curious how you’re going to join the metadata with the actual image file. Doesn’t takeout split it into a separate .json?

[lhamilton1807]

I added this above, but I'll put it here to make it easier to find.
Tool: https://exiftool.org/
Brief tutorial for using with Google Takeout: https://exiftool.org/forum/index.php?topic=12361.0

[redsquirrel]

Sick, appreciate it.

[lhamilton1807]

I’ve found that Nextcloud requires hitting the “migrate data from Google Photos” button a few times to suck everything in. It does warn that geolocation data doesn’t get pulled over, and that seems to be the case. Just fyi. We don’t use that data so it’s not a big deal to us.

[lhamilton1807]

Ark: Survival Evolved Server
OK, enough work. Time to play some My family all downloaded Ark: Survival Evolved a few months ago when it was free on Epic. I had created a Windows-based server, but it was a resource hog and was finicky, never staying online for very long.

You know the drill: install the app in Unraid!


Here's the dockerhub repository: https://hub.docker.com/r/ich777/steamcmd/
For a list of server parameters and arguments, go here.

The first setup will take a LONG time. Downloading the server scripts is really quick, but the Ark server files take quite a bit of time to download, validate, and then get running. The second run can also take a long time.

For my own custom parameters, I set Game Parameters to ?AllowFlyerCarryPvE=true?serverpve=true?MaxPlayers =30 to make it a cooperative server just for family/friends. See the above link for all available parameters.

To enable play on both Epic and Steam clients, add -crossplay in the Extra Game Parameters field. Tested and working with an Epic client!

Since this application requires many ports to be open and they aren't http(s) traffic, you'll need to configure port forwarding on your router. Three ports for your server are required. I've listed them below with the default values - you may change them to whatever you wish. Simply forward them from your router to <ip-of-Unraid>:<port>

UDP 27015	Query port for Steam's server browser
UDP 7777	Game client port
UDP 7778	Raw UDP socket port (always Game client port +1)
TCP 27020	RCON for remote console server access (optional)

[cellophane]

This is a sweet looking project! I bought a Synology 918+ a couple years ago and it has been great. Next time I do something like this I'll probably roll my own. Being able to expand memory easily is amazing!

re: HDDs- I've seen it recommended to mix & match your drives, or at least buy from different sources.

That way if the model of drive ends up having a massive failure. The entire SAN doesn't go down. Just that class of drive.

https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/75q28s/comment/do95wma/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

https://www.reddit.com/r/freenas/com...rom_different/

re: piHole- I have one set up and love it, other than when I don't. Some of the lists are pretty draconian on what they block and I've had to disable it to get attachments from GMail, Google Maps Street View, and a few websites (bad coding on their end imo), among other things. But overall it is amazing.

[Seajay]

That's a reasonable idea. I tend to buy family of drives that have been in market for 2 or 3 years, that way you know the history. Just gotta watch out for stealth updates.

I also love the irony of backup systems... since of course the more drives you have the higher the failure rate. :P

[lhamilton1807]

Hmmm, I hadn’t specifically thought of that. But I do plan to configure a backup job to a friend’s unraid. Only pics/video. We should both have more redundancy that way.