Hi all;
First time using OMV, been a long time NAS4Free user, still happy with that setup, but thought I'd try something different for a new system, because why not? The more experience with more OSs the better.
Anyway, I'm setting up a backup NAS, which I'm using OMV on. Last night I finally dusted off some hardware I've been setting aside to do this with and powered it up. After a bit got OMV installed and working. I just have the OS installed on a USB drive right now, no storage drives as of yet. I just wanted to take a look at the OS itself and get a feel for it. It seems like a light weight OS that should serve my needs, but time will tell. There's a lot less on the surface than N4F, but I'm ok with that, I hardly used what was available in N4F anyway.
Anyway, one setting that I didn't recall seeing in N4F (it is there, just never noticed it before looking through OMV) is Local Master Browser. I have tried looking up definitions for this and haven't found anything that explains it well enough for me to understand what it does or how EXACTLY I should set this.
What I can infer from reading up on it some is that it some how controls what computers see as far as other devices on the network, more specifically, their shares. If I understand it, the (Local) Master Browser creates a list of all of the shares on the network and tells the other devices on the network what the shares are and on what device they are on. Is this at least in some way correct?
If I understand the setting correctly, I would probably want to turn this setting off on my OMV NAS, and let my N4F NAS be the Master Browser, correct? I'm thinking that my N4F NAS will be the "main" NAS and is what is used by other devices on the network, such as the media players and PCs to read from and write to, and then setup Rsync (or some sort of auto backup addon) in the OMV NAS to copy the files on the N4F NAS as a back up. So basically the OMV NAS wouldn't necessarily be interacted with by anyone directly as far as direct file access goes. I suppose if I want to get real fancy I could use a second NIC in the N4F NAS and have the OMV NAS isolated from the main network, and connected to only the N4F NAS so that the only thing the OMV NAS can do IS backup the N4F NAS... if that makes sense... Though that would make access of the GUI more difficult... I might also setup the OMV NAS to only turn on at certain times to just do the back up, if that's possible with OMV. If scheduled power on and off isn't possible in OMV, then I might reverse the setup, and set OMV as the main NAS and the N4F NAS as the backup NAS, since N4F can definitely do scheduled power on and off.
Ultimately, if I can, I want to have the backup NAS offsite, which I know is possible, just not at a level where I understand how to make that work yet... yet. lol
Anyway, sorry for the long winded post, but if there's a good explanation out there of what the Local Master Browser is, does, or works that I haven't found yet, a link to it, or an explanation would be much appreciated.