Hi all,

I’m testing out different distros and I’m giving them just 20gbs for the main install partition, with the aim to have everything stored on the NAS. Is there recommended way to do this? I’m thinking just making a symlink to a location on my NAS but I’m concerned that’ll cause some unforeseen complications. Would really appreciate any advice!

  • Podo_Danderfluff@lemmy.world
    2·
    1 year ago

    Is this to replace your /home/$USER ? I’ve never done it with a symlink, but you could actually mount a samba share to the home directory with cifs-utils. A quick search will find you instructions, such as This one.

    I think the only way to do this with better performance would be to use iSCSI, which requires a little more setup but would be the best in terms of reliability and speed.

    • MonkCanatellaOP
      1·
      1 year ago

      Is this to replace your /home/$USER ?

      I don’t think that’d be sufficient because it looks like most of the storage being taken up is from like, the app store repositories and stuff.

      I was originally going to try something like that and figured I could just make a small partition on my ssd and save most of the apps and stuff on my NAS. Looks like I’ll have to figure out booting from the NAS after all.

      • Podo_Danderfluff@lemmy.world
        1·
        1 year ago

        If your NAS can handle virtual machines, that might be easier, and then set up your client device as a thin client. Check this video out. This guy’s whole channel is awesome.

        • MonkCanatellaOP
          1·
          1 year ago

          Well a virtual machine would use the ram and cpu assigned to it from the NAS correct? My workstation is a lot more powerful by an order of magnitude. I’ve gotten fedora installed and booting from my NAS now. Took a few hours but I got it set up! Now the problem is, I have a 2.5g port on my motherboard, but I use a tb to 10g nic from qnap to transfer between my nas and workstation. For some reason I can’t boot from the 10g card so that’s what I’m researching now. Although I think if the iscsi connection is initiated through the 10g card that should be ok even though it would be nice to load the OS from 10g as well.

            • MonkCanatellaOP
              1·
              1 year ago

              Haha I’ve been switching installation methods more than I’ve been switching distros! I’ve once again settled on a local install with extra storage on the NAS. I was only giving about 20gb per partition which was way too little. Now I have 4 different distros each on 100gb partitions on my local nvme. It’s about 7-8gbps vs my NAS which was only about 1gbps and that’s on larger files only. I think that gives me a fair amount of runway while I figure out the distro or two that I’ll use for my main. I still can spin up a NAS install really easily in the case I want to test something out though! Although Arch makes it a real headache to install to an iscsi