Manual OpenMediaVault install

General Discussion
1

Hello forum! :slight_smile:

First of all thank you for this magnificent distro! What took hours to configure some years ago now takes minutes!

I discovered OpenMediaVault and I would like to try it for a while, while I know that you arenā€™t supporting the automated install since some years, I want to install it manually. I read that some of the functionality of DietPi will break and I would like to know what to expect if I decide to ship OMV in my ā€œproductionā€ dietpi.

Thank you! :wink:

2

Hi,

many thanks for your report. Based on your message I was giving it a try on my RPi3B+ and I used following install script

wget -O - https://github.com/OpenMediaVault-Plugin-Developers/installScript/raw/master/install | sudo bash

At the end I was able to setup OMV but faced some issues in between.

  1. SSH Server
  • OMV will install OpenSSH even if Dropbear is already installed. This will lead to a conflict as just one SSH server can be started and installation will fail at this step
    • Solution would be to switch SSH server preference to OpenSSH before
  1. TimeSync
  • Network Time Synchronization service systemd-timesyncd.service will not work anymore after installation of OMV
    • Solution would be to disable the service. Looks like OMV has itā€™s own Time Sync process.
    • Downside, there will be no time sync during reboot/restart. Time sync will happen after OMV has been started only
  1. DHCP
  • on one of my restarts, DHCP was not working correctly and there was no IP address assigned leading to some services failing and no access possible to the system. I guess it was due to issues with time sync and system time not set correctly
    • solution would be to set STATIC IP instead of DHCP
  1. Watchdog service
  • I noticed watchdog service was not working correctly on my RPI due to missing kernel dependencies.
    • Solution would be to disable watchdog service
  1. Nginx web server
  • OMV will install Nginx web server. It will lead to some conflicts if you already have a different type of web server running
    • Solution would be to switch web server preference to Nginx before

I did not continue at this point, even if OMV was running and I was able to login to website. From my point of view, there are to many conflicts and dependencies. Next to this, OMV is exactly the opposite of DietPi. Because DietPi is an extremely small and lean version of Debian, were OMV install quite a large amount of packages (even if not needed or used). So might be better to go with OMV image directly instead of trying to set it up in DietPi.

3

Thank you for the reply.

I am using a RPI3B+ as a testbed while my ā€œproductionā€ Dietpi server is installed in a regular PC x86/64

I used the exact same script to install OpenMediaVault and I discovered that on a clean Dietpi installation by just changing the default dropbear ssh server by openssh the installation of OMV works out of the box.

Its true that timesynced didnā€™t work, but DHCP worked normally on the WiFi

Now, I also planned to have on my DietPI the following software together with OMV, this is what I currently run on my dietpi pc.

*Deluge
*Pi-Hole
*Plex

Doing it right now so Iā€™ll post what are the conflicts of installing these afterwards.

4

Also, while I agree that the DietPi is focused on lightweight Debian distribution, I would still like to have the choice of installing a chunky software if I need it, OMV has good plugins for backups that it would be hard to configure manually in Debian. I installed DietPi not for the lightweight but for the simplicity in having ready to use software.

5

You are already running a couple of web applications. Keep in mind that OMV is expecting Nginx web server.

6

I donā€™t follow you. Canā€™t this be fixed by using a different port or a virtual host?

7

the problematic one is PiHole as Deluge and Plex using their own web server. Basically you would have 2 options. Change the http port from 80 or reinstall PiHole using Nginx

8

Is there a way to change the port via dietpi configuration file?

9

no you need to use web server config file directly. In case of lighttpd, it would be /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf

10

Would it be possible to set a virtual machine inside dietpi to host openmediavault?

11

You could try using docker if supported by OMV

12

It is supported https://hub.docker.com/r/ikogan/openmediavault/
However itā€™s not recommended https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/4eihvp/omv_in_docker_container/

Perhaps I can give a try in docker just before I decide to have it permanently. I was asking if thereā€™s a possibility to install a vagrant or virtualbox and run a virtualmachine there to be able to make the two systems coexist together :slight_smile:

13

in theory you can install all Debian packages

but qustion is what do you like to archive with OMV? You told you are looking for Backup functions. So how does it work if you are running on a VM? :wink:

14

Yes, I am looking for backup functions (long story: I have a NAS but itā€™s slow 30MB/sec. So Iā€™d put OMV upfront and rsync to the NAS weekly)

My plan is attach a usb disk and passthrough it to the OMV VM so I have the storage I need

15

I went ahead and installed virtualbox, vagrant and ran the openmediavault virtualbox through vagrant. Since itā€™s all command line and no gui is needed my system is still very lightweight of ram and cpu usage. Still I need to configure the network to be bridged but itā€™s lookinng good so far

16

How does it behave in terms of used RAM and I/O using vitualbox and OMV?

17

It performs well with 2GB of Ram. How would you measure the IO?

18

maybe to copy some files to see how performance is.

19

7 minutes to copy a 3 GB file over an 5GZ WiFi with Samba. I believe the performance is good. Itā€™s using a USB3 disk

20

From Windows it measures 60MB / sec again over a WiFi