Hi all,
I’m currently experimenting with different distros using virtualbox. My set up is Workstation PC - QNAP TB to 10g NIC - 10g switch - Synology 1621+ NAS. The connection between the NAS and the PC is equal to about a gen 3 SSD. I do see one particular place where there may be an issue: the qnap adapter needs drivers of some sort to able to act as a nic. But maybe there’s a way to still tell my bios to boot into my nas? or maybe I could make a little partition that only activates the nic and from there boot into the nas? I also can just connect a 2.5g directly between my computer and nas, but that would end up being really slow, slower than many of the single hard drives I have in my nas.
What I’d like to do is run my chosen distro(s) from my PC but have them install on the NAS itself. Essentially I’ll all the storage for the OS on the NAS, but have access to my workstation’s more performant ram, cpu and GPU.
Is this possible?
Also, I’m looking at nobara, endeavour, mint, mx linux. May look into opensuse and alpine at some point as well.
Primary purpose will be for general browsing/research and programming. Some gaming if it’s possible. my long term goal is, once gaming is stable enough on linux, switch entirely over to linux and only use windows for games/media creation/music production that can’t be done on linux, but daily drive linux.
The thing that comes to mind is setting up a block device as an iscsi target on your NAS. That would present the storage to you as though it’s another hard drive that you can format and map in windows. Then you can save vms there as though it were directly connected.
Well I do have a folder on my nas mapped to a lettered drive on windows. That’s where I’m installing the VMs right now. I want a non VM installation, on the NAS itself, so I can basically boot up my PC from an installation that lives on the NAS.
Oh, gotcha. In that case, maybe a PXE boot server would be worth checking out.
Oh, awesome suggestion. I actually just went ahead and cut up one of my nvmes to play around with different distros, trying out refind to allow booting into whichever.