Hi guys. I really love this project and thanks to all the volunteers and developers who make it work. I have openwrt running simple setups on a few networking devices but just recently found that it supports my MyBookLive Nas.
I was going to upgrade it with Debian Jessie ppc but it's end of life already and figured OpenWrt would be the sensible option for both forum and ongoing software support.
I'm posting here firstly for best advice on setting it up as it's a 3tb device not a tiny 256mb.
I've so far DD copied the image and booted the device. Then tar extracted sda1 and sda2 and then repartitioned the device with 8mb sda1/boot, 512mb sda3/swap then 2.7tb sda2/system.
This works fine and swap partition is configured in Luci but what would be best partition layout for long term Nas/lamp/email? I'm thinking extra partitions would be a better setup.
I found that MBR would not format the full partition so I reformatted the drive in GPT. I've kept uHTTPd and moved Luci from www to www/Luci port 81 and have another www/site folder for port 80.
I was thinking it best to use Apache for multi domain but I've got no real idea in that. Perhaps someone can advise me here but so far so good. Is it possible to move Luci to Apache?
If I'm later integrating multi domain email I'm hoping someone can please provide some good advice on the preliminary setup. The plan is to host local backups /samba file shares. Host two seperate websites using WordPress and host emails for both domains. Data will be rsynced daily to an external ext4 drive of similar size.
Sounds simple enough. Debian would be a breeze. I think I might struggle with OpenWrt. I look forward to any help or advice. Thank you.
nginx is packaged on master as turn-key with LuCI and TLS.
Memory is likely to be a huge problem running samba, nginx, PHP, MariaDB/MySQL, postfix, spamassassin, dovecot, .... I’d suggest a fast SSD if you insist on that hardware. I’d more strongly suggest something with 2 GB of RAM or more.
Not sure if you meant the root folder ("/") or root's home folder ("/root") here. Anyway, I would not use the same filesystem for both "system stuff" and "data or user's stuff". The former must never fill and could be wiped during an upgrade, the later grows naturally and contains valuable files.
Sorry for the confusion yes it should be sda2/system. So as to preserve /system for sysupgrade what would you suggest as a better partition layout. Would you seperate /mail and /www also? And ideas please
Thanks Jeff I'll look at nginx soon. The demand on this will be extremely low so I'm happy to see if it performs. I didn't think about spam assassin but and that's probably a big overhead.
In tune with @eduperez, I would strongly advise against resizing the default partitions, you will lose the ability to sysupgrade without data loss. Rather leave the default partitions alone, create additional partitions and mount them into the file system where needed.
From recent own experience I would also suggest not to create additional partitions flush to /dev/sdb, but rather 1 or even 2 GB into the disk to allow for future size changes of the default partitions. Recently, the default rootfs size changed from 256 MB to 128 MB, and a smaller partition is not a big problem. But this indicates that default partition sizes are to be considered somewhat volatile. And if they become larger again someday, and you have your additional partitions perfectly flush, upgrading becomes difficult.
This is really a recipe for disaster unless you plan to do a lot of manual work and head scratching.
Services facing Internet needs to updated very frequently and you need to keep track of CVEs/vulns unless you don't mind getting your device hacked and recieve letters from your ISP. OpenWrt doesn't really have a facility for this at all so it's up to you to repackage whatever service/software that's needed, recompile and respin the firmware. Pretty much any major distro will offer some kind of automatic/semi-automatic service instead of you trying to keep track of everything by hand and offer a smooth upgrade using a package system.
OpenWrt sparsely utilizes the multi user concept which you for sure want to use it for hosting, you can overcome this limitation but again it's not really designed for this kind of application.
E-Mail hosting is hard, you need to say on top of things and most likely your ISP already blocks this service unless you're on a business line. You also "need" a static IP-address since pretty much all major E-Mail services blocks residential IP ranges and known "spam host ranges".
Many of these services requires additional software apart from the "main service", auto updated lists and proper logging. This will be quite hard to achieve and will require you to package software.
As mentioned earlier 256Mbyte of RAM isn't going to rock your boat, it's barely going to start needed services let alone run these at a resonable speed. Do yourself a favour and get a cheap SBC instead that has proper support for a distro or very close to it. Orange PI Prime, PINE A64-LTS are good starting points in that regard, Rockchip RK3399 is quite a bit faster but still a bit rough so I wouldn't recommend such a board just yet.
Not to forget, if you're planning you use any kind of CMS, dynamic site or site generator such as Hugo it'll be a bumpy ride.
This is just the surface, I don't have the intention to scare you in any way but you're looking at a very non optimal solution and I think it would be ill adviced to recommend it.
I agree diizzy it's probably way above what the device can handle with just rsync alone probably maximising resources. I've got two MyBookLive 3tb sitting idle so I'm happy to see how it goes just for the fun of it.
For email I was planning on forwarding everything through Gmail. The mail server will only need to send mail. Maybe a full mail server for the second MBL later on.
Honestly, save yourself the heartache. It's certainly possible to set up your own email outfit on an MBL (using dovecot, sendmail, fetchmail if needed). I actually did that myself for some time, and I canned it all in the end and went back to have my emails hosted. The first thing that went out of the window was actually what you primarily want to do: my own SMTP. Just for the simple reason that a lot of my recipients' servers would reject mails from residential/dynamic IPs.
If you're doing it for the challenge, fair enough. But it really doesn't make a whole lot of sense, especially if you're planning to go through Google anyway.
To give you an idea, a box running similar services, under no load, is consuming 1.28 GB of RAM.
A box capable of running a server distro (FreeBSD or Debian, for example) with at least 2 GB of RAM would let you focus your time on getting the services running properly and securely, rather than fighting with hardware limitations.
I think it depends a lot in how are you going to use the system, how fine you want to tune the system, how much time you want to spend on administering it, how are your needs going to change, whether you can afford LVM, ...
As a bare minimum, I would separate "system" and "data"; then you can chop "data" into smaller pieces or not.