Open Media Vault

There is a server that has been running in my attic flawlessly for five years now and that server runs Open Media Vault. I think they only thing that has managed to take it down has been a power cut. OMV 6 is a rock built on Debian 11 Bullseye and OMV 7 is looking to be the same.

But, what is it for? 

Basically, Open Media Vault allows the fairly simple setup of a no fuss home network. You know, the sort of network where you can access shared folders from your Windows, Mac and Linux machines.

Depending on how you set it up you can have home folders for each user, folders accessible by password or a shared folder that everyone can access.

How do I use it?

For instance I have,

• Homes - Where each user has a private home folder for backups, etc...
• Music - For our music.
• Pictures - For our pictures.
• Video - For our videos.
• Public - a folder for guests.

In addition I run virtual machines on it with KVM, a miniDLNA server to play media from it, a Rustdesk server for remote desktop access, a Borg server for backup, Transmission for torrents and Syncthing for file sharing. The first two are using plugins you can access through OMV extras and the last four I have installed with apt because under the hood it is just Debian. You install it like usual, adjust the firewall in the OMV interface and that is about it.

Try it, there is a small learning curve and then it just works.