Cloud NAS with local cache

While I was bored and had a spare NanoPi Neo3 laying around I though to myself why not make good use of it? With its small size, gigabit ethernet and a USB3 port it is the perfect board for creating servers or in this case a crude network storage. Some of you already read about it on Twitter.

Finally found a new purpose for my #NanoPi Neo3 #SBC. Serves now as simple home #NAS.

With a SSD connected via USB3 for local caching it syncs everything (on user choice) encrypted or not to the #cloud in the background.

Of course driven by #rclone by @njcw and @armbian.

— Ben Zucker 🍰 (@DieZuckerbude) February 22, 2021

Intentionally I did not plan to write an article about this project since I believe it is poorly hacked together and it also suffers from performance issues which I could solve partially at least. However to anticipate the excitement for all the Neo3 owners: I did not finish this project on this board and had to switch to a more expensive model to accomplish full speed. If you are fine with slower speeds it is still perfectly fine though.

Since my cloud backend would be Google I realized that this way I can access all the data on my phone as well simply by using the Drive app. This is comfortable but also concerning since I do not want to blindly send all my data plain to the cloud and simply trust a hugh company in the US. So I split it up into two shares: an unencrypted one for mobile access and an encrypted one for local access only.

I will cover both.

Station P1 - desktop usage

I have been using the Station P1 mini-computer for a while now and as already stated occasionally I am pretty happy with it. For the last couple of weeks it’s been used on daily basis. Fun fact: I am writing this article on it right now.
The main reason for that is its electric efficiency. While my main workstation wastes lots of power for mostly being idle all the time the Station P1 barely exceeds 20 watts of consumed power while being very busy. For comparison the graphics card in my desktop computer consumes twice the amount while being idle(!).

Each time I think about this NicoD comes to my mind for his description for desktop PCs as “giant space heaters”. There is a bit of truth in these words.

Not the same procedure...

… as last year 🤔
Noticeable quieter.

Not your average New Year’s Eve ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Anyway happy New Year to all of you around the globe!

Armbian - using CREATE_PATCHES

The Armbian build script has a built-in method to automatically create patch files from changes you do within the sources.
The official documentation writes about this:

prompt right before the compilation starts to make changes to the source code, separate for U-Boot and kernel, and will create patch files out of this. If you want these patches are included in the normal run, you need to copy them to their appropriate directories.

While this basically puts stuff in a nutshell for beginners this could be a bit confusing. In this post I will show you step by step how this works in a practical example.

• What is needed to start this process?
• Where are the sources to edit?
• Where are the created patches?
• How to apply them next time you build?