OMV has a bunch of official as well as third-party plugins that you can install and enable as per your needs and requirements. However, it’s the set of plugins that kick its usability into overdrive. Straight out of the box, OMV is a very capable distro for deploying a NAS. Once you’ve defined your NAS, you can make it visible on the network using any of the popular protocols, including NFS, SMB/CIFS, FTP, SSH and rsync. This section also makes it possible for you to define access control parameters via an easy-to-follow interface. Very helpfully, in addition to adding individual users, OMV enables you to import a bunch of users by specifying them all in the relevant format. Then there’s user management, which is just a graphical interface for creating users in the underlying Debian base.
When you select a RAID level, OMV will tell you the minimum number of disks you’ll need for the selection. (Image credit: Open Media Vault)įor instance, the default RAID level 5 requires a minimum of three disks, while RAID 1 that mirrors data across drives only needs a minimum of two. The OMV 5.x releases are based on Debian 10 and you can SSH into your installation and administer it from the CLI as well.
