Installing and setting up a minimal Open Media Vault server

Open Media Vault (OMV) is a user friendly NAS operating system based on Debian, that makes it easy to manage your data, and install additional services. Debian is an incredibly stable distro of Linux, making it ideal for a server. In this guide, I will take you through the process of installing OMV, and installing additional plugins that are crucial for easily managing your server.

Step 1: Acquiring the Open Media Vault ISO, and flashing it to a USB storage device.

In order to install Open Media Vault, you will first need to download the ISO from the official OMV webpage, https://www.openmediavault.org/?page_id=77. Here, you can choose to download the latest stable version. After download, you will need to flash the ISO to a USB storage device of your choice (Flashdrive, external SSD/HDD, etc.). In order to flash your ISO you will need the right software. For Windows, I would recommend either using Rufus (https://rufus.ie/en/), or Balena Etcher (https://etcher.balena.io/). For Linux, information on flashing software can be found on the Arch Wiki (https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/USB_flash_installation_medium). After flashing, simply restart your computer with the USB device plugged in, and choose to boot from the USB in your BIOS screen.

Step 2: Installing

Once you first boot from your now flashed USB device, you will be met with this screen.

Language, Country, Keymap:

Here we will simply select install. After hitting install, you will be prompted to select your language of choice, location, and keymap.

Hostname and domain name:

Next, you will be prompted to enter your hostname, this hostname will be used identify your server by your router. You will then be prompted for the domain name of your server, you can choose anything you want here (Note: On my Linux machines, I have edited my /etc/hosts file to map my servers ip to it’s hostname and domain name, I recommend doing this).

Choosing your root password:

You will then input your new root password. This password is used for logging into your server, SSH (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Shell), updating your systems packages (https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-faq/pkgtools.en.html), and performing various other administrative tasks. Ensure that you pick a strong password, and save it in a safe, secure place.

Choosing your timezone:

You will then be prompted to select your timezone, this is very important to get correct, as choosing the incorrect timezone can produce confounding issues in the future.

Choosing your package mirror:

After a little bit, you will be prompted for the country and package manager mirror of your choice, I recommend just choosing based on your location/the defaults. For info on finding your best possible mirror: https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-find-a-fastest-debian-linux-mirror-for-your-etc-apt-sources-list

For your proxy, you can just leave this part blank.

Choosing GRUB installation target:

Next, ensure that you select the correct target disk for GRUB (this should be your primary disk). GRUB is a GUI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_user_interfac) utility for selecting how you would like your computer to boot at startup. More information on GRUB can be found here: https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/.

Completing your installation:

At this stage, you should get a prompt saying “Installation complete”, you will then remove your USB device, and click on <Continue> to complete your installation.

Step 3: Updates, and accessing the Web UI

Now that you (hopefully) have a complete install of OMV, we can move on to configuring your new server. After reboot, the GRUB menu will appear, giving you the opportunity to choose how you want to boot your computer. Either select the first choice, or GRUB will auto boot after about 5 seconds. The following screen should appear:

Logging in:

You will then be met by the terminal, here we can first input “root” as our username, and then use the root password that we set earlier to login (Note: when logging in, your password will not appear as you’re typing). If you are unable to login, you will have to reinstall OMV.

Initial Updates (Optional, updates can be done through the web UI):

Before moving on, we will update all packages on the system. Type the following command to update your package manager:

sudo apt update

You will then be prompted for you root password as we are running the command “apt update” with “sudo” privileges

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudo.

Post completion of “apt update”

After updating, we can now upgrade our packages with:

sudo apt upgrade -y

The “-y” flag tells our server that we accept any and all changes for apt upgrade, if you would like to inspect what packages are being upgraded before you confirm, remove this flag. This command may take a while to finish executing.

Post completion of “apt upgrade”

Once this command is complete, we can move out of the terminal, into a more friendly environment through OMV’s Web UI.

Accessing the Web UI interface:

To access the web interface we will first type the command:

ip a

This command will give us information for all active network connections on our server.

Here we can see 2 active connections: “lo” which is our loopback device (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loopback), and “ens18”, which is the ethernet connection that we are interested in (Note: Your primary connection’s name will likely be different from mine). Next to “inet” we see that our server has been assigned the IP “192.168.50.44”. We will use this IP to connect to our server by simply typing it into a browser on any device on our local network:

Opening your servers Web UI through a different device

We will then be brought to the login page of our server’s Web UI:

OMV Web UI login screen

The login for this screen is actually different from what we used in the terminal. The default username is “admin”, and the password is “openmediavault”.

The default credentials

Changing the default credentials:

After logging in, we will immediately change the default login credentials. First, click on the person icon in the top right, and choose “Change Password”. Note that this only changes the password for the Web UI, and does not affect our root password.

Confirming configuration changes:

If you did manual updates earlier, after changing our root password, we should also have a large yellow banner displaying “Pending configuration changes”. Here, we should click the checkmark and confirm. This displays because of the “apt upgrade” that we performed earlier. From hereon out, updates should be performed through the web UI in the “Update Management” tab under “System” on the left hand side.

Step 4: Configuration

First, we will enable S.M.A.R.T., which allows us to see the health of our drives.

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We can enable this in the tab:

Storage->S.M.A.R.T.->Settings

If you have additional drives that you would like to use, you can mount them under Storage->File Systems. I do not have any additional drives to mount at the moment. However, OMV makes it easy to mount pre-exisiting, or blank drives in the Web UI. However, this would be done under the Storage->Disks tab.

Creating Shared Folders

Under the tab: Storage->Shared Folders

We can create directories to store our data. I will create a directory as an example. First, click on the plus button. Next, we will set a name for our directory (this will be it’s identifying name in the OMV UI), and select the file system (Drive, etc.) that it will be on. The relative path is the path that this directory will actually be available at on our system, for now I will set it as “/example”.

After creating this directory, we will apply our changes. Using the “ls” command, we can see that our directory was created

Under the Shared Folders tab, we can set permissions for, edit, or delete any Shared Folders that we’ve created.

Recommendation: Setting a static IP

To ensure that your server’s IP never changes, I recommend setting a static IP for your server. This means that your server will reserve a given IP on your router, ensuring it will not randomly change using DHCP after a reboot.

[embed]Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol - Wikipedia The Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol ( DHCP) is a network management protocol used on Internet Protocol (IP)…en.wikipedia.org

First, got to Network->Interfaces

Here, we can click the pencil icon to edit our interface. I will set the IPv4 as “Static”, I will reuse the IP we were assigned on installation (we found this with “ip a” in the CLI), I will set my netmask as 255.255.255.0, and my gateway as 192.168.50.1 (Since my address was 192.168.50.###, the router will most likely be at 192.168.50.1).

If you have a custom DNS server, you will input this in the Advanced Settings section. Here, I will use 8.8.8.8 for the Google DNS servers (You can also use 1.1.1.1 for Cloudflare, or an alternate of your choice such as OpenDNS). Then save, apply your changes, and test your internet connection by typing “ping google.com” in your terminal. If your change was successful, you should see responses from google in your terminal as such:

You can also verify your IP with “ip a” again.

Customizing our home page

OMV allows you to customize the home page of your web UI to display stats, system information, and diagnostics. After clicking the person icon in the top right, click “Dashboard” to customize your dashboard.

Here, I have chosen my preferred widgets:

Finishing up:

To finish up, we will perform an update through the update tab, and restart our system. Go to System->Update Management-> Updates, click the download button to install your updates, and perform a system restart.

Step 5: Installing plugins

Installing omv-extras:

We will begin by installing omv-extras. Installing this package gives us access to additional plugins, not usually available on a vanilla installation. We will install omv-extras through the command line by running the following command:

wget -O — https://github.com/OpenMediaVault-Plugin-Developers/packages/raw/master/install | bash

This command can be found on the omv-extras website:

https://wiki.omv-extras.org/.

After installation, we will press “ctrl-shift-R” in the browser. To confirm your installation, in the web UI, you should see “omv-extras” under the “System” tab.

Installing Plugins

NOTE: If you encounter an error code “500: Internal Server Error” when installing any plugin, simply refresh your browser. Most likely, the plugin was successfully installed.

Installing plugins is easy in OMV through the “Plugins” tab under the “System” tab. Here there are many plugins that I use, however I will only go over a few in this article.

Flash Memory

Flash memory is a plugin that increases the overall efficiency of your system at the cost of using a little bit more ram. Overall, I have not found this plugin to use very much ram, making it an ideal choice. After selecting Flash Memory through the plugin browser, simply click the install button located above the top plugin in the browser.

Your web UI will refresh after you close the installation window.

You can confirm that flash memory is installed and running through the tab:

Services->Flashmemory

Backup

Backup is another omv-extras plugin that allows you to schedule regular backups of your system. Primarily, this plugin will only backup system files, however you can set it to back up all data if you desire. We can enable, and set a schedule for our backup plugin through the tab:

System->Backup->Schedule

Fail2ban

If you intend to make your server accessible outside of your local network, Fail2ban is a crucial plugin to have. This plugin will ban IP’s that fail too many login attempts, or show malicious signs. This plugin can be enabled and configured through the tab: Services->Fail2ban->Settings and Services->Fail2ban->Jails

For additional information on Fail2ban, visit the following website:

[embed]How to secure your Linux server with Fail2Ban configuration Fail2Ban can protect your server from brute-force, dictionary, DDoS, and DOS attacks. Read on to learn how to install…www.hostinger.com

Wetty

Wetty is a service that I regularly use. You have the option to SSH into your server from other computers through a terminal, however Wetty allows you to access your terminal from another computers web browser. After installation, you can find and enable Wetty in the tab:

Services->Wetty

If you are on Linux and have put your servers information in your /etc/hosts file, you can simply click the “Open UI” button. However, if you have not, you can access Wetty by typing the following information in your web browser: <replace-with-your-server’s-ip>:<replace-with-your-wetty-port>

Symlinks

This plugin found under Services->Symlinks, allows you to alias long pathname under easier to remember names. This is especially useful when managing multiple storage devices allowing you to instead of accessing a storage device by it’s UUID, you can create a custom directory name.

Reset perms

Everything in Linux has permissions. When changing permissions on a specific file/directory, things can get messy. If at any point you just need a fresh restart point, resetperms is the plugin to have.

File browser

File browser is an extremely useful plugin, allowing you to browse your files and directories through a web UI. This is especially useful if you plan to use OMV as a NAS/Replacement for cloud storage. After enabling this plugin through Services->File Browser, you can access it’s UI in a similar way to Wetty. It’s important to note that you can only set one Directory in File Browser. I recommend either using your root Directory “/”, or creating your own root directory for data that you’re interested in.

Compose

Compose is an extremely useful plugin that’s essential if you plan to deploy services such as Jellyfin or a Plex Media Server on your installation of OMV. Compose allows you to combine multiple docker files into one single file.

[embed]Docker Compose Learn how to use Docker Compose to define and run multi-container applications with this detailed introduction to the…docs.docker.com

The possibilities with Docker Compose are endless. You are able to deploy a VPN, media servers, torrenters, and other services with ease. For finding services, go to this website:

[embed]Docker Hub Container Image Library | App Containerization Welcome to the world's largest container registry built for developers and open source contributors to find, use, and…hub.docker.com

Finishing up, Additional Recommendations

If you wish to access your server from outside your local network I recommend installing Tailscale through your terminal, and following their steps for configuring it. This service allows you to securely access your servers dashboard from anywhere in the world.

[embed]Tailscale · Best VPN Service for Secure Networks Securely connect to anything on the internet with Tailscale. Deploy a WireGuard®-based VPN to achieve point-to-point…tailscale.com

An alternate option would be purchasing a cloudflare domain and deploying a cloudflare tunnel through docker compose. This is a riskier option, however it provides more flexibility, allowing anyone to access it (Depending on how you configure your tunnel in the Cloudflare Web UI)

[embed]Cloudflare Tunnel · Cloudflare One docs Cloudflare Tunnel provides you with a secure way to connect your resources to Cloudflare without a publicly routable IP…developers.cloudflare.com

Buying storage drives

I recommend using serverpartdeals for purchasing storage devices. Ensure that you select SATA (unless you can use SAS drives) when purchasing a drive. The Western Digital helium drives have been shown to be reliable.

[embed]Server Part Deals | Enterprise Drives Upgrade the datacenter with enterprise-grade storage at the best prices. Shop for hard drives and SSDs that will be fit…serverpartdeals.com

Hard drive statistics are publicly available from Backblaze from determining your ideal drive

[embed]Backblaze Drive Stats: Download Hard Drive Reliability Stats, Reports, and Test Data Understand hard drive reliability and explore the hard drive test data from the Backblaze data centers. Backblaze is…www.backblaze.com

Server Hardware

I personally use a Z420 Workstation motherboard with an E5–1620 3.2GHz Intel Xeon processor that I bought from ebay. In this board I was able to fit 128GB of ECC RAM. ECC ram is essential for trusting your server with your data. Old workstation motherboards like this are great budget choices with powerful Xeon CPUs that provide exceptional performance for Servers, and parallel workloads.

File Systems

I personally use ZFS through the OMV-extras plugins for my file system. ZFS uses an exceptional amount of RAM, however it provides lots of performance in return for your storage pool.