[Freedombox-discuss] Minimal spec for NAS?

[Tony Godshall]

On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 12:56 PM, James Vasile <james at hackervisions.org> wrote:
> On Wed, 1 Jun 2011 19:36:01 +0100, Lars Wirzenius <liw at liw.fi> wrote:
>> One of the things in the "Is/is not" list for the FreedomBox was
>> that it should act as a file server. This is a good thing to
>> start with, I think, since it does not require dealing with
>> NATs, firewalls, and such, just doing stuff in the local LAN.
>>
>> What would be the _minimal_ spec for the _first_ generation of
>> FBX-NAS? Something like the following, perhaps:
>>
>>     I create a USB memory stick with FreedomBox, and boot an
>>     old laptop off the stick. The laptop is now a NAS server.
>>     I can format a disk on another computer (ext4, possibly
>>     over LVM), and then plug it into the FreedomBox, which
>>     automatically mounts it and shares it over the network.
>>
>> I emphasize that this should be _minimal_ and _initial_,
>> because otherwise things will get too complicated too fast,
>> and nothing will happen. It's better to start with the simplest
>> possible thing that can be made to work, and grow the system
>> later on.
>>
>> * all users see all files
>> * uses SMB for maximal client compatibility,
>>   and sftp over ssh for maximal security
>> * comes preconfigured with a user with a known password
>> * management via command line tools, login via ssh
>>
>> The next iteration should probably add a web based management
>> tool, but there are a lot of open questions of how that should
>> work, so I think it would be good to avoid that initially, in
>> the name of getting something to work (and people to build on).
>>
>> Detection of a USB disk would happen via udev, I guess, or possibly
>> over dbus, after which it gets mounted under /media (just like on
>> a desktop system). After that, adding it to Samba should be easy enough.
>> We could even have Samba just share everything in /media, for
>> utmost simplicity, to start with.
>>
>> What do you all think?
>
> I quite like the plan of starting with a small, simple thing and slowly
> increasing features.

But does this fit with the basic principle of being secure and
encrypted by default?