News

I think it is time to clarify what OpenMediaVault is for. After reading many posts and requests to implement feature x and y i have to clarify where OMV is classified. The main reason i have started implementing OpenMediaVault is to have a small and simple NAS solution for home environments. This means, OMV is no router, firewall or storage solution for hundred of users (i think about Samba PDC, AD, …), there are other solutions like Zentyal, OSNexus, OpenFiler, Open-E, … that will fulfill this. Such solutions are too big for home scenarios and i hope OMV will fill this gap, but it will not be a replacement for these products.
In summary: OMV is a NAS (Network Attached Storage) solution for home environments administrated by novices, nothing more.
Hopefully this will help you all to understand some of my answers and decissions concerning OpenMediaVault.

P.S.: OMV is enhanceable, so if you feel feature x is a must have, you are free to implement it as plugin and contribute it to the project and its community after OMV has been released.

This weekend i’ve implemented the Apple Filing (AFP) plugin for OpenMediaVault. Due to the fact that i do not have a MAC i am not able to test it. Hopefully it does not have too much bugs 🙂 I’ve reduced the number of options in the share configuration page to a minimum number, but it can be enhanced if necessary (feature request). TimeMachine support has been added based on howtos and docs i’ve found in the net.

Please note the following taken from the official Debian netatalk package:

OpenSSL support is currently disabled, because of licensing issues: The Free
Software Foundation and Debian consider the GNU General Public License (GPL)
under which Netatalk is licensed to be incompatible with the OpenSSL license.

Thanks to gcrypt support (introduced in netatalk 2.0.4beta2) the DHX2 UAM provides encrypted access for MacOS X 10.4 and newer, but older releases of MacOS X and MacOS Classic can only connect unencrypted as both of the UAMs DHX and Randnum requires OpenSSL support.

You can build locally with OpenSSL using the following commands:

sudo aptitude install devscripts
sudo aptitude build-dep netatalk
apt-get source netatalk
cd netatalk-*
dch -l +ssl -D local –force-distribution “Local build with OpenSSL.”
DEB_AUTO_UPDATE_DEBIAN_CONTROL=1 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=openssl debuild -us -uc
sudo debi

You my need additional build-dependencies not resolved automatically.

Alternatively you can subscribe to unofficial(!) precompiled packages by adding the following to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://debian.jones.dk/ $DIST netatalk

One of the last issues for OMV has been finished today. The UPS plugin enables you to define how to act on power loss, e.g. immediatelly force a shutdown after a given time range (the UPS may come back during this time, so no shutdown is necessary) or if the battery reaches its lower limit. If notification is enabled you’ll get an email for every changed state, also messages will be written to syslog.

You are also able to get various details about your UPS via the WebGUI, e.g battery charge or temperature graphs.

After a long time i will show you the new storage management in OpenMediaVault. I split it into three sections:

• Physical disks
• RAID management
• Filesystems

Hopefully this will be the best solution to be open to add additional storage services.

Today i’ll give you a short impression about the new implemented feature: System statistics. I’m using collectd to collect the system statistics every 2 minutes, the graphs will be rendered every 5 minutes. I’ve choosen collectd because of its better performance and lower load than Munin. The WebGUI can be enhanced easily by plugins later. The ‘Time’ configuration page has also been refactored a little bit.