Home Network HELP!

[uppie1414]

Hey everyone!

Looking to set up a home network. We work from home with 2 main PCs, plus another 2x that we use in the house at different times (laptop / walking treadmill).

It would be nice to be able to share a folder that contains office files and have one of the PCs as the home server to save the files to (or we can set up a running PC/server full time for this). Literally use for logging onto gmail/outlook, but one PC has most of the files we use and would like all computers to be able to see a couple of the excel files.

What's the best way to do it? Windows 10 file sharing just does not seem to be cooperating and finally gave up about 3 months ago.

Microsoft One Drive is an option, but $5 a month per user (2x) for a year seems high for something so simple. I could wire a home server or buy a home cloud/etc like below, but not entirely sure that's what we need

https://www.amazon.com/Synology-Bay...d+storage&qid=1548089511&s=Electronics&sr=1-4



Thanks!

 

[Dhiru]

Get a raspberry Pi and setup samba on it with an external USB HDD. Should serve the purpose well for cheap if you are not really after performance.

 

[mrgstiffler]

A lot of routers have USB ports that you can plug a drive into to share out. Do you know which one you have?

 

[Marsh]

Windows 10 file sharing just does not seem to be cooperating and finally gave up about 3 months ago.

What are the problems that you encountered?
Using Windows 10 , you already have file sharing capabilities.

 

[WANg]

Eh, before I toss my 2 cents in, there are several things you might not have thought about -

a) How would you want this network file system to handle concurrency issues?
Let's say the missus is adding this month's expenses in an Excel file at the same time that you are working on a bunch of numbers (new investments / positions), and you have no idea that she was working on it at the same time. She saved her new expenses before you did. There is a good chance that your changes overrode hers. How would you like for the filesharing to deal with it? Do you want to lock out the file so only one person can edit it at a time, or do you need it to figure out non-colliding changes / merge them later or flag overlaps for resolution?

b) How would you handle versioning/change controls?
A variant of the same issue as above. You added 200 lines to an Excel spreadsheet yesterday, and then when you check it today, the 200 lines are missing and replaced by a version that has 160 lines, none of which overlaps the 200 lines you've added. Do you need to revert to a version that was made available on the network at a specific place at a specific time, and give you an idea who made those changes?

c) Do you want the ability to do backups to offsite media, or the cloud? Any network file storage is just one or 2 disk failures away from losing you data. What's your desired recovery strategy if/when that happens?

 

[EffrafaxOfWug]

a) How would you want this network file system to handle concurrency issues?

Assuming we're talking about CIFS/SMB, isn't this already handled by its oplock capability? User1 opens File1 read/write; User2 tries to open File1 read/write but CIFS sees there's already a r/w handle from User1, application sees this and reacts accordingly (e.g. Office apps asking if user wants to open read-only).

 

[WANg]

Assuming we're talking about CIFS/SMB, isn't this already handled by its oplock capability? User1 opens File1 read/write; User2 tries to open File1 read/write but CIFS sees there's already a r/w handle from User1, application sees this and reacts accordingly (e.g. Office apps asking if user wants to open read-only).

Yeah, Office apps will let you open a copy of the file in read-only mode, hiding the concurrency issue from you, but not really addressing the issue of overwriting - once the oplock releases Excel will happily let you "oh shit" overwrite someone else's changes without so much as a "are you sure we are pretty sure the original file changed" - you still need a mechanism like merge or versioning to deal with that.

Also, *ugh* trusting most Samba implementations on your wireless router to work properly. Reminds me of this one issue that Netgear refuses to fix...

 

[EffrafaxOfWug]

Well, hoping that any vendor of consumer products will keep up with security patches seems like a fool's errand these days. Specific to that post, at least the WNR3500 might be flashable with openwrt or similar but that's a whole 'nother kettle of complicated fish.

Whilst I understand your point re: potential overwriting, it's not really anything to do with locking - if you're in a scenario where one instance of a file can be overwritten by someone else's instances of a file, then this is always a danger and the only real answer is a) user education and b) lots and lots of snapshots/backups.

Last I looked, MS office formats (indeed, most non-text formats) still didn't lend themselves nicely to diffing/merging or external version control.

Back on topic: consumer appliances are frequently crap and I wouldn't trust a router for CIFS capability long-term for support reasons; the "best" but probably most expensive option would be a shared server of some sort IMHO. I'd be wary of using a Pi because their IO capabilities are slow and frankly to unreliable for my tastes. Something like the Synology would be ideal and makes for a great home server (especially if you're not an expert) so I'd got for that if you can justify the expense. Just to lay my cards on the table, I'm no fan of Windows 10; even if the OP did have a nice functional sharing network I'd be worried about an update taking one of the machines offline for an extended period - NAS appliances don't have as much of a problem in that regard.

(If you wanted to get more complicated you could maintain a "master" copy on the file server and a local copy on your office PCs, synced with something simple like Unison [there are probably better programs to do this now, this is just what I used aeons ago], but that's a topic for another thread)

P.S. I'll also add a warning to uppie1414 that, for many, getting a NAS box can be a gateway drug. Plenty of people who started off with similar simple requirements then eventually end up building a 17-node ZFS cluster straddling three continents in order to keep their cat pictures safe from Ragnarok

 

[WANg]

Well, hoping that any vendor of consumer products will keep up with security patches seems like a fool's errand these days. Specific to that post, at least the WNR3500 might be flashable with openwrt or similar but that's a whole 'nother kettle of complicated fish.

Whilst I understand your point re: potential overwriting, it's not really anything to do with locking - if you're in a scenario where one instance of a file can be overwritten by someone else's instances of a file, then this is always a danger and the only real answer is a) user education and b) lots and lots of snapshots/backups.

Last I looked, MS office formats (indeed, most non-text formats) still didn't lend themselves nicely to diffing/merging or external version control.

Back on topic: consumer appliances are frequently crap and I wouldn't trust a router for CIFS capability long-term for support reasons; the "best" but probably most expensive option would be a shared server of some sort IMHO. I'd be wary of using a Pi because their IO capabilities are slow and frankly to unreliable for my tastes. Something like the Synology would be ideal and makes for a great home server (especially if you're not an expert) so I'd got for that if you can justify the expense. Just to lay my cards on the table, I'm no fan of Windows 10; even if the OP did have a nice functional sharing network I'd be worried about an update taking one of the machines offline for an extended period - NAS appliances don't have as much of a problem in that regard.

(If you wanted to get more complicated you could maintain a "master" copy on the file server and a local copy on your office PCs, synced with something simple like Unison [there are probably better programs to do this now, this is just what I used aeons ago], but that's a topic for another thread)

P.S. I'll also add a warning to uppie1414 that, for many, getting a NAS box can be a gateway drug. Plenty of people who started off with similar simple requirements then eventually end up building a 17-node ZFS cluster straddling three continents in order to keep their cat pictures safe from Ragnarok

Heh - I mentioned that WNR3500 issue to make a point - that is, the rather nonchalant attitude most device makers have when it comes to post-sales support. Even when it's pointed out to the vendor that their firmware contains a gaping security issue, their response is "buy a new router we have no plans to fix it". The fact the end user mentioned that it has a USB port to plug in a drive means that it's most likely a WNR3500L/Lv2 model, which is fully supported by DD-WRT nowadays, but only a seasoned techie will know that.

Even if you are an RPi enthusiast, I doubt you'll like the idea of having your files stored on something with a propensity to crash due to someone using the Xenon flash on their smartphones nearby, or doing odd stuff when undervolting due to a crappy cellphone power brick, either of which has happened to me. In at least 2 instances the RPi did not come back up due to a filesystem stored in a MicroSD card being borked via a crash. Those required manual intervention. Not exactly something you want to put your faith upon.

The point is - out of the box most file sharing implementations (cifs/smb being one) simply do not do versioning unless its underlying filesystem can do snapshots or track versioning changes (you figure this will be something that most people will know about by now) - nor do most routers implement any redundancy measures to protect against disk failures. That's one of the reason why my answer for home office filesharing isn't automatically "throw Ubuntu onto a network router/Pi and connect an external USB drive to it". Not unless you want to see what happens the day someone gets bit in the ass with the concurrency/versioning problem, or if one of the drive dies without any warning, so yes, at the very least there should be a NAS. A robustly built and constantly monitored Synology with periodic snapshots for backups and change control is definitely a good idea.

Honestly, if I have to recommend something it's not buying a NAS for their environment, it's to tell the user to get a Microsoft Office 365 Home subscription - it comes with 1 TB of Onedrive, you can share it with up to 4 people, and if you save the spreadsheets in question to the onedrive Excel turns it into a multi-user online spreadsheet with change tracking, explicit authentication/authorization/auditing and automatic versioning control. In most western countries it's roughly 99 USD/year. You also sidestep a lot of issues, like the inevitable "oh crap I left the spreadsheet I need on the NAS at home now I'll need to figure out how to VPN/LogMeIn home for it".

Note: I do admin an Office 365 tenant as part of my gig, and at the previous gig it was Google Apps, so I do "get" the cloud for certain business needs. Of course, the Linux admin in me cringe a bit.

 

[EffrafaxOfWug]

Piss-poor support of consumer devices is why I gave up and only started buying SMB kit years ago. The oldest router I have in service was bought in 2008, has been in service since day one and is still receiving security updates. As the saying goes; buy cheap, buy twice. Consumer appliances I'll generally only countenance if they're hackable, esp. with an open-source firmware.

FWIW I concur with you on the reliability of the Pi's - fantastic for hobbying and general mucking about (I have three) but not a good choice for a 24/7 solution IME. If you like the form factor there are many other SBCs out there with vastly superior IO and networking capabilities but that's into the realm of DIY servers again.

From a quick search it looks like synology devices support automated snapshots these days via underlying btrfs - this was after I stopped using NAS devices but I dare say it might be worthwhile asking in the NAS forum if anyone has any experiences of it. IIRC QNAP had a similar sort of thing but not using btrfs.

You might think snaps/shadow copies and the like might be common knowledge but they're not - even many people in IT aren't really aware of what goes on behind the curtain. I was asked to explain VM disc snapshots in a job interview recently and it became blatantly clear the guy had no idea how they actually worked at the block level, I had to get up and whiteboard it (and no, he wasn't being all "Socratic method" on me!).

"Cloud" as in "proprietary protocols with my stuff on servers outside of my control" is out of the picture for me as the concept gives me the creeping shivers, so I wouldn't consider that personally but like you say it might well be a valid choice for the OP.

(Anyway that's me done derailing and thoroughly overcomplicating the thread...)

 

[uppie1414]

GREAT read! I'll comb through all of this in a bit and keep you all updated. Wow, I really appreciate the support!!

 

[mathiastro]

You could also just use a free Microsoft, Google or Dropbox account, if it's not too much data or very sensitive data it's the cheapest and best solution imo.

 

[uppie1414]

Thanks!