Install Open Media Vault - Open Source, Self Hosted NAS running Linux
OpenMediaVault is a really great Network Attached Storage system (NAS) that's open source and self hosted. You can use your own hardware, setup your own system, and run it completely free.
You can run OpenMediaVault as a standalone physical server, on a Virtual Machine (like we'll be doing today), or even on a Raspberry Pi 4.
It boasts a really great browser accessible user interface that's really easy to navigate.
Install
Regardless of how you install it, you'll go through a similar process (the Raspberry Pi 4 withstanding as you burn the image right to the SD Card for that).
Essentially, download the OpenMediaVault ISO image from https://www.openmediavault.org/?page_id=77 - I know, not the most intuitive URL, but when you get there you'll find a link for downloading the builds from SourceForge. NOTE: for Ubuntu users - For some reason when it's accessed from Ubuntu it tries to download a .deb instead of a .iso - not sure why, but haven't found a way around that yet.
Download the ISO image (and as a somewhat sad sidenote, you should copy the md5 Sum from the link above, and use that to ensure SourceForge didn't insert any code into the image). Once you download the image and check it gagins the checksum, you'll need to burn it to a flash drive (use something like Balena Etcher for this), or upload the ISO to the virtualization system you want to use. In my video, I used Proxmox to set it up, but you can use anything you want.
Once you're got your ISO onto the media you need, boot your system and set the ISO as the boot drive (this may be telling a physical machine to boot from a USB (NOTE: You'll need a monitor, mouse, and keyboard connected to the physical machine to run through the install, but after that you can just run the machine headless), or starting your virtualization server with the ISO selected for the boot drive).
When the system starts to boot from your ISO you'll be greeted pretty quickly with the splash screen for the OpenMediaVault installer. From here, select "Install" and press enter.
Now, highlight your preferred language from the list using the up and down arrow keys, then press Enter to select the highlighted option.
On the next screen, choose your country, again pressing enter to select once it's highlighted.
Next, pick your keybaord layout, and press Enter.
After a bit of initial setup runs, you'll be asked to set your OpenMediaVault servers hostname. If you intend to only run this on your local network, then give it a name like "openmediavault.local" or "omv.local". Anything will work, but if you give it a full domain name like "mymedia.gorillas.com" you need to own the domain "gorillas.com" or you'll likely have no luck getting routed to your server properly. After you enter your preferred hostname, tab to highlight 'Continue' and press Enter.
Now, you'll be prompted to enter your root user password, then repeat it. Make sure to use a strong password, and remember what you enter.
Next, choose your timezone from the list, the press Enter.
Now, it will perform the system installation. After the installation completes, the system will want to install updates. Choosed the country you want to get updates from, usually just pick the country you are in, or the country you are geographically closest to.
Next, you'll choose a mirror from the list provided. The list is based on the country selection from the previous step, so if you don't see the mirror you want, you may need to go back and select a different country.
If you need to use an http proxy to access the internet from inside your network, you'll want to enter that on the next screen, but if you don't use one, just leave it blank, tab to highlight "Continue" and press Enter.
Now the system will pull any updates, and then update your install. After that it will install the bootload, and ask where you want to install it. Make sure you choose the right drive in this step. You may only have 1 choice, but if you have more than one,choose carefully.
After this, you'll be told it's time to reboot, and you'll continue from the browser. Congratulations you've just installed OpenMediaVault!
To access the browser user interface, open any modern browser of your choice, and try to go to http://<the hostname you entered> For me, I went to "http://omv.lcoal" and was taken right to my new install.
To login to the fresh install you'll need to use the default credentials:
username: admin
password: openmediavault
Now you can start clicking around the user interface and exploring. Check out the video linked at the start of the article to get an overview of OpenMediaVault , learn to setup disks and storage, as well as install Docker, Portainer, and start self hosting even more.