OpenMediaVault

OpenMediaVault is an open source project that provides users with a free NAS (Network-attached storage) solution based on the award winning Debian GNU/Linux operating system. It is oriented towards small home offices and home environments, allowing anyone to create their own network storage server.

Features at a glance

Key features include a stable and reliable Debian GNU/Linux (Squeeze) base, S.M.A.R.T. monitoring and email notification, watchdog, web-based administration, hard disk power management (APM/AAM), as well as support for the EXT3, EXT4, XFS and JFS file systems.

In addition, the project supports software RAID JBOD/0/1/5/6 (mdadm) and email notification, LVM (Logical Volume Management), share management, ACL support, SNMP 1/2c/3 (read-only), SSH, FTP, TFTP, NFS, SMB/CIFS, NTP, UPS, RSync, BitTorrent and DAAP client.

An easy-to-install NAS solution

The project is distributed as CD-size ISO images for the 64-bit (amd64) and 32-bit (i386) instruction set architectures, which can be burned onto CD discs or written on USB flash drives of 512MB or higher capacity in order to boot them from the BIOS of the PC.

These are not Live CDs, which means that the user must install the operating system from the get-go. Therefore, the boot loader provides them with two installation methods, one with support for serial console and a normal one.

The entire installation process is text-based, requiring the user to select a language, location and keyboard layout, configure the network, set a root password, configure the clock and package manager, as well as to configure the resolvconf.

Basically, just pressing Enter a few times and selecting some items on the text-mode installer interface. Nothing fancy! After restart, the user must login with the root username and the password set during the installation.

Bottom line

Summing up, OpenMediaVault is an easy-to-use and great product for turning an old or semi-old computer into a powerful network-attached storage (NAS) with minimum effort and without paying for expensive solutions. Maybe a graphical installer will make even more users aware of this product!

What is new in this release:

• Using Sencha ExtJS 5.1.1 framework for the WebGUI
• Add a new dashboard and widgets
• Many internal improvements and bugfixes
• Improved the internal network interface backend
• Add Wi-Fi support. Only WPA & WPA2 is supported
• Add VLAN support
• The network interface configuration page has been modified. Now only the configuration values are displayed. Use the dashboard widget to show the state of all network interfaces.
• The public key of the user must now be specified in the RFC 4716 SSH public key file format. It is possible to add multiple keys.
• Option to turn off the collection of system performance statistics.
• Use the browser local storage to store the WebGUI state (e.g. displayed grid columns, column width, ...) instead of cookies.

What is new in version 2.1 / 3.0.79 Beta:

• Using Sencha ExtJS 5.1.1 framework for the WebGUI
• Add a new dashboard and widgets
• Many internal improvements and bugfixes
• Improved the internal network interface backend
• Add Wi-Fi support. Only WPA & WPA2 is supported
• Add VLAN support
• The network interface configuration page has been modified. Now only the configuration values are displayed. Use the dashboard widget to show the state of all network interfaces.
• The public key of the user must now be specified in the RFC 4716 SSH public key file format. It is possible to add multiple keys.
• Option to turn off the collection of system performance statistics.
• Use the browser local storage to store the WebGUI state (e.g. displayed grid columns, column width, ...) instead of cookies.

What is new in version 2.1 / 3.0.58 Beta:

• Using Sencha ExtJS 5.1.1 framework for the WebGUI
• Add a new dashboard and widgets
• Many internal improvements and bugfixes
• Improved the internal network interface backend
• Add Wi-Fi support. Only WPA & WPA2 is supported
• Add VLAN support
• The network interface configuration page has been modified. Now only the configuration values are displayed. Use the dashboard widget to show the state of all network interfaces.
• The public key of the user must now be specified in the RFC 4716 SSH public key file format. It is possible to add multiple keys.
• Option to turn off the collection of system performance statistics.
• Use the browser local storage to store the WebGUI state (e.g. displayed grid columns, column width, ...) instead of cookies.

What is new in version 2.1 / 3.0.36 Beta:

• Using Sencha ExtJS 5.1.1 framework for the WebGUI
• Add a new dashboard and widgets
• Many internal improvements and bugfixes
• Improved the internal network interface backend
• Add Wi-Fi support. Only WPA & WPA2 is supported
• Add VLAN support
• The network interface configuration page has been modified. Now only the configuration values are displayed. Use the dashboard widget to show the state of all network interfaces.
• The public key of the user must now be specified in the RFC 4716 SSH public key file format. It is possible to add multiple keys.
• Option to turn off the collection of system performance statistics.
• Use the browser local storage to store the WebGUI state (e.g. displayed grid columns, column width, ...) instead of cookies.

What is new in version 2.1:

• Using Sencha ExtJS 5.1.1 framework for the WebGUI
• Add a new dashboard and widgets
• Many internal improvements and bugfixes
• Improved the internal network interface backend
• Add Wi-Fi support. Only WPA & WPA2 is supported
• Add VLAN support
• The network interface configuration page has been modified. Now only the configuration values are displayed. Use the dashboard widget to show the state of all network interfaces.
• The public key of the user must now be specified in the RFC 4716 SSH public key file format. It is possible to add multiple keys.
• Option to turn off the collection of system performance statistics.
• Use the browser local storage to store the WebGUI state (e.g. displayed grid columns, column width, ...) instead of cookies.

What is new in version 1.9:

• Update locales.
• Fix ‘Gateway 502' error after manual installation of OMV.
• Adapt OMV to CuBox-i.
• Mantis 0001233: Add on crontab option @reboot.

What is new in version 1.0.20:

• The main features at a glance:
• OMV 1.0 is based on Debian 7 Wheezy
• Better support for weaker systems (i.e. Raspberry Pi, Cubieboard, Cubox, etc)
• Nginx (instead of Apache2) for the WebGUI
• Dashboard with support for widgets
• Systems can be put into standby mode
• Improved infrastructure for plug-ins
• And much more...
• Excerpt from the changelog:
• Debian 7 (Wheezy)
• Improvements regarding performance on slower systems (Raspi, ...). The list of updates and plugins are indexed, that is, the search for new updates or plugins will not be launched each time when the user invokes the WebGUI to.
• File systems on non-rotating drives are with the mount option ‘discard' hooked (ext3, ext4, btrfs, vfat, jfs, xfs).
• Infrastructure improvements for plugins
• Systems can be put into standby mode (hybrid suspend / STB, Suspend to disk / STD, Suspend to RAM / STR). There, the mode is automatically selected which is supported by the system. Priority is STB, STD, STR.
• Many bug fixes
• Dashboard with widgets
• Small improvements in various services
• The ClamAV plugin now supports a quarantine
• Use rrdcached to reduce disk I / O of collectd
• Add asynchronous I/O (AIO) support to SMB/CIFS
• Add ability to audit SMB/CIFS file operations per share
• Add button to manually empty the SMB/CIFS recycle bin
• Add feature to revert configuration changes
• Supporting stateless address autoconfiguration (SLAAC) for IPv6 network interfaces
• Supporting stateful address autoconfiguration for IPv6 network interfaces
• Add ability to customize look via WebGUI ‘css/omv-custom.css' file
• Use php5-fpm FastCGI process manager
• Change webserver from Apache2 to nginx
• Add PFS (Perfect Forward Secrecy) support and other security improvements
• Improve PAM configuration. Block users for 180sec after 3 failed WebGUI login attempts. Check the pam_tally2 manual page for more information.