Happy newbie running 16 containers below 10W

I'm fairly inexperienced with Linux, I had no previous experience with Docker and I had a tough initial journey through several Open Source NAS servers and had an unlucky start with Open Media Vault. If you have issues with installing from the OMV 6 ISO, then maybe you need to go down the same path I was guided through by the helpful community:

Thread

Newbie feedback

Hi,

I've just installed OMV a few times.

I have to say, so far OMV 5.6.13 at first glance seems to be the best NAS for me, I've also tried TrueNAS Scale, TrueNAS Core, Unraid and XigmaNAS. I got a lot of stuff set up in OMV 5 and so far very few errors and so far they don't seem to cause problems.

At the end of the KVM install I got this error:
Updating locale files ...

>>> *************** Error ***************
Failed to read from socket: Connection reset by peer
<<<…

FrederikSchack

Jun 12th 2023

I have to say that after the initial stress, I have become super impressed about Open Media Vault in combination with Portainer, it's phenomenal.

Now I've got 16 containers running and the CPU (J5040) is barely doing anything, the 8 GB RAM seems to be plenty and all of this with a baseload of just below 10W. Only when I challenge the CPU, I sometimes push the total power consumption a bit over 20W.

It blows my mind that I can navigate around in Ubuntu Mate in a container that I RDP into it from Windows, while Calibre is scanning books via SMB and mostly stay around 10W. Sometimes there is a small jump in power consumption when Prowlarr and Radarr starts doing stuff, but I have to really push the system to get above 20W.

My personal user experience with Open Media Vault is much better than TrueNAS, Unraid and XigmaNAS. Further the community support is outstanding!

So, to put my OMV experience in perspective, this is my condensed experience with the NAS systems:

TrueNAS looks like it tries to be userfriendly, but really isn't. Further it forces you to use ZFS, which is not optimal for some use cases, it consumes a lot of RAM, it's picky about hardware and there is an incompatibility between ZFS and Docker. I thought I had two separate issues with the disk and with Docker installation, but they may have been one and the same thing. The community forum is often so slow, so it's barely functional.

Unraid seems to be easy in regards to installing "apps", but it has a horrible disk management in my view, maybe fine for people who don't care and who just want to get moving, but it didn't work for me.

XigmaNAS doesn't have very much expandability, because it's based on FreeBSD, so no Docker. My bet was on the VirtualBox for expansion, but it's a hopeless and barely functional port of VirtualBox.

So, I was a bit worn out when I finally got to try Open Media Vault and the head winds with the install didn't make me more optimistic

Open Media Vault has a very functional UI, that is logical and get's straight to the point and you can do most of the stuff you need to do from the UI. I had to learn to de relatively few things in linux, like the mounting structure, how to mount folders from boot in fstab, how to get user ID's and a few other commands. I understand that the setting up of Docker and Portainer is slightly more involved in OMV 6 than OMV 5, but still fairly easy and only has to be done once. I personally think that Portainer should be a standard thing included in OMV, it's so easy to do everything and they run so perfectly together.

Portainer is a wonder in itself that saves you from breaking Linux while being a kind of ultra light virtualization and easy to set up. I primarily had to get my head around the networking and the persistence and the smartest way to organize the data.

My advice to other beginners:

I found that the nicest network experience is with running the "host" network and mDNS, if you don't use the "host" network, the different containers can't call each other by local domain name. I use a short local domain http://omv.lan, so I use that instead of IP addresses, then I just have to add the port numbers after omv.lan to access the different services. It's even easier when you set up all the services in Dashy (control panel you can install from Portainer) and make it available on port 80 and switch Open Media Vault to another port, then all you have to remember is omv.lan.

Further I found the nicest way to organize data was to mount folders that I use often under "/mnt", so for example "/mnt/media" under which I have folders for everything like books, movies, documents e.t.c. Another example is "/mnt/docker" where I save all the configuration files. This is instead of having to copy/past various long paths, it's easier to remember a simple structure and makes it a breeze to set up the binds in Portainer.

I don't know how I got everything set up so the docker containers lands at the boot drive, I think I didn't get the choice, but it suits me fine. I have a small Kingston 128 GB for boot drive and I set 20GB aside for cashing and the last 100+ GB seems to be more than plenty or both OMV and docker containers (I still have 80 GB free).

So, in short, a very happy new user that found a new home in Open Media Vault

B.t.w. the mounts I have I share through SMB and map as network drives, in this way I can conveniently create the new folders I need from Windows, when setting up Docker containers.

Quote from NullIndent

It is recommended to use the solution recommended by the document instead of manually mounting through fstab, because manually mounted disks will not be managed by the webgui.

The document address is as follows:

https://docs.openmediavault.or…/storage/filesystems.html

https://docs.openmediavault.or…/various/fs_env_vars.html

A careful reading of the docs should solve most of the problems you can run into

Ok, the filesystems were mounted through the UI, but I didn't find a way to mount a folder at boot from within th UI, that's why I did it in fstab. I made shares through the UI, by finding the corresponding folders and It's working fine.

I learnt about config.xml when I unmounted a drive manually from fstab 😁 then I found out that I had to remove it from config.xml too, because it was still in the UI and by then couldn't be removed from within the UI. I'll only use the UI for that in the future.

I mounted the cooler in the cabinet, it fitted perfectly to a vent port on the back of the cabinet. I had to harvest a 3 pin fan plug from an old Pentium III to connect it to the CPU fan connector..

I set the BIOS up to a target temperature of 45, running in an automatic mode, but to my surprise it was running full speed all the time. I read a bit about it and it's probably because the automatic mode always runs, but at varying speeds, but my fan only has a plus and minus, so it doesn't have variable speed (PWM) and thus run full speed all the time.

My smart plug that I used to measure the power consumption simply refused to cooperate over a new router that I set up (have enabled UPNP), so I have no measurements of the power draw now, but I would expect around a watt.