Thanks for the feedback guys. I'm going to try and use OpenMediaVault. It seems to be my ideal choice for these reasons:

1. Debian based, and relatively recent version (Debian Jessie, with plans to move to Debian Stretch soon), and I'm most comfortable with Debian based distros.

Installation of OMV allows either an automated install on a USB stick or hard drive, or install Debian first and OMV on top of it.

2. Because it is Debian based, I know it will support my wireless adapter (with non-free firmware). Driver support for other distros (ie Fedora/CentOS) is unclear.
3. FreeNAS does not support wireless adapters out of the box (and doesn't seem to play nice with wireless in the first place, from what I'm reading).

Points 2 and 3 are important. A wifi setup for my use-case is required (I'm willing to accept performance penalties). NAS4Free seems to support wireless setups, but I don't have the funds (nor the patience) to hunt down a supported adapter at this time.

Bonus:

4. OMV (and by extension Debian Jessie) does support ZFS filesystems through plugin support. Debian supports Btrfs also, and as long as you avoid raid5/6 it is pretty stable and safe these days

One can hope that one day the ZFS license will be made GPL compatible, and the Linux kernel will support it natively. Oh well. Until then there are workarounds.

Cheers

Matt




-------- Original Message --------
On Nov 21, 2017, 06:28, Stephen Partington < cryptworks@gmail.com> wrote:

I use ubuntu, because it is familiar. If you are familiar with Debian use that.

I am a fan of openfiler and freeNAS for dedicated nas solutions. but I will use whatever fits the need.

On Mon, Nov 20, 2017 at 9:39 PM, Brien Dieterle <briend@gmail.com> wrote:
I would just go with Debian Stable.  You're already comfortable with this.  Why not?  Then you'd have all the flexibility you need down the road if you decide to do more with the box.

On Mon, Nov 20, 2017 at 2:09 PM, Matthew Crews <mailinglists@mattcrews.com> wrote:
Hi all, 

I'm sure this comes up every so often. 

I'm in the process of repurposing an older desktop machine I have lying around and turning it into a NAS. I would like to do as little system administration as possible once it is set up. I would like relatively recent packages too, but I do NOT want to use a rolling release system.

I haven't decided on which distribution to use. My top three choices: 

1. Debian Stable (presently 9.2) 
2. Ubuntu LTS (presently 16.04, soon will be 18.04)
3. Others 

Debian Stretch was recently released, and so the packages are newer than what's found in Ubuntu 16.04. However, Ubuntu 18.04 is just around the corner and will contain newer packages than Debian Stretch.

Anoption is also to install Ubuntu 17.10, upgrade to 18.04 in April, and keep it on the LTS path going forward, but I feel that could be a recipe for disaster. Not terribly comfortable with running non-LTS Ubuntu on this machine, though.

I'm most comfortable with Debian-based distros, but I'm open to using other distros if they do the job well, such as CentOS, OpenSUSE, and the like. I'm open to using a BSD (like FreeNAS) if it does the job and my hardware works for it. 

What's everyone's experiences? For my use case, what is the preference?

Cheers, 

-Matt



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--
A mouse trap, placed on top of your alarm clock, will prevent you from rolling over and going back to sleep after you hit the snooze button.

Stephen