Up till now I’ve been running Debian on a 2008 Dell tower as my homeserver. I just got 2 1tb drives for it so I want to upgrade to an actual dedicated NAS software to simplify how I manage it. The problem is, I only have 4gb of RAM in it. Any recommendations?
Edit: For context, I mostly use the server for Nextcloud and Syncthing but I also want to be able to have a generic Debian server with ssh access available if I need it.
I haven’t used it, but maybe look at Cockpit? You could install it on your generic Debian server and it would give you a nice gui and tools, while letting you do whatever you are currently using it for.
I am using openmediavault for my NAS, which seems reasonably lightweight and is debian based. If that fits the bill
I’m currently trying out openmediavault on an old laptop and if that’s not markedly easier to use than Debian then I’ll try Cockpit.
My anecdotes: I have OMV the plugins and docker makes things easy, once you read about how things are meant to be setup. OMV5 had cockpit, portainer plugin/addon making things very simple. OMV6 did away with addin/plugin Portainer to try to make a better built in docker management interface; Which focuses more on compose files. Overall running OMV got me used to docker and eventually CLI management of them.
With SMB shares, DLNA, and several containers running I have never it the 4gig Limit of my Pi. (I actually have an old arm board with 256MB of RAM and use that with an old OMV release and idle it uses about 25% of that RAM, streaming audio gets the cpu up and RAM up but never past 256MB.