Hi everybody,
As a long time reader I've just registered to this forum a moment ago. Since a while I'm planning a complete rebuild of my home network. The NAS will only be a small piece of it, but even if I don't have great demands I think it's important enough to take some time in planning. My old QNAP TS-219P running Debian stretch, runs for more then a decate, time to say goodby.
To give you an idea of my project here's a small summary:
Beside the NAS that will run as a "legacy" intall, there will be a number of Docker hosts holding the different service in my home. High Availabilty is an issue, but after a long time of wighting pros and cons, I decided for a special approach. In my opinion, real HA is far to expensive and not necessary in my situation. As soon as one problem is solved the next one will occur and in the end it would result in clustered file systems, redundant switches and other crazy stuff.
So what I will do then?
My Internet access is LTE only, no other possibilities available. For now a single Router connects to the Internet providing far enough bandwith, more then I ever had with physical connections before. Here I will possibly but an Unifi USG between the Internal Network and the Router and connect a second router (both in bridge mode of course) to the USG for load balancing. Not because I have the need for it, just because I have some SIM cards at no extra cost available and because it's fun to see how far I can go with increasing the bandwith to the Internet. No HA at all as the USG can fail and I'm out of Internet. So I will connect a third router to the network, this one in cold standby same IP as the USG but powered off. AS soon as the USG fails I have just to cut the power from the the USG and to fire up the spare router. This can even be automated.
DHCP, DNS, PiHole and so on, even HomeAssistant when I find a solution todo so, will run in Docker Containers two Instances of each at least on different Hosts with no network attached storage, so the services don't depend on the NAS end even if a Docker Host fails completely all services are still available. To make this even more HA the Hosts will connect to different switches. Of course, if one of them fails not all will work, but there will be still a path to the Internet and as much lights that I can find the broken hardware should work in the house.
The NAS itself will be with no hardware redundantency and with no raid. All it will to is regular backups and snapshots on a second storage. What this will be I have not decided yet, but probably a Docker container as well. As all services relying on the NAS are not critical, media streaming, photo archive etc., I call them comfort services, a manual hardware swap even if it's next day or next week will do the job.
For the NAS I decided to go with a NanoPI M4v2 with SATA Hat. Because the introduction to my ideas got longer then expected and I've not describeted my plans for the NAS, I will stop here and describe my planned NAS setup and the open points I have questions about in a second post.
At least you can already expect what crazy stuff is spinning in my mind.