cockpit-file-sharing VS Portainer

I just build a new Proxmox server, and it has a ZFS pool that I'd like to share via NFS/SMB with other hosts on my network. I want to do as little on the Proxmox host as possible, so I figured I'd mount the ZFS pool in an unprivileged Ubuntu 22.04 LXC container that runs cockpit and cockpit-file-sharing to easily manage NFS and SMB shares. Should be simple, right?

I am a fan of virtualization and run a three-node Proxmox cluster along with a Hyper-V host at home. I avoided Docker for years because I couldn't wrap my head around it. A couple of months ago, I migrated my NAS from being a Proxmox VM to bare-metal. It runs minimal Debian 11 (no desktop GUI) and the Cockpit web UI with the 45Drives Cockpit File Sharing extension for managing the server and file shares, respectively. I also installed Docker Engine and a Portainer container for managing containers. The system, a 2C/4T i3 CPU with 16 GB RAM, easily runs 19 containers.

My NAS is simply minimal Debian 11 running the Cockpit web UI (https://cockpit-project.org/) with the 45Drives Cockpit File Sharing application (https://github.com/45Drives/cockpit-file-sharing) for managing SMB and NFS shares. I use MDADM (Linux software RAID), but 45Drives also has a ZFS management Cockpit application as well. Cockpit is in the Debian repository, see https://cockpit-project.org/running#debian. Give Cockpit a look. You can easily “apt remove” if you don’t like it.

https://cockpit-project.org/ https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit-machines https://github.com/45Drives/cockpit-navigator https://github.com/45Drives/cockpit-file-sharing

Hi, I'm using Cockpit to manage my Ubuntu server and I want to mount a network share (Synology NAS) through the web interface. Under the "Storage" page it is possible to mount a NFS share with options such as auto-mount at boot and such, and this is exactly what I need for Samba. I found a third-party plugin to manage Samba shares (link), but it can only create new and manage shares and not mount existing network shares (I think, I haven't tried it yet). Does anyone know how to mount SMB shares using Cockpit? Thanks in advance.

45-drives makes a plugin for the web interface for nas features (use the "install from RPM" install option). You'd also need this plugin

Some important services for me: 1. Wireguard: I have bypass rules in Authelia since I’m too lazy to login to my services. Wireguard also provides adblock on-the-go. 2. Samba server: use to transfer files between iPhone/iPad/laptop. Didn’t expect I’m depending on it too much. 3. Webtop: aka my lite/fake VM. I mounted my data directory to this container, mostly use it when i need GUI to move/edit files on my server. Accessible through web browser or RDP protocol. 4. Diversion: adblock on Asus router. Easy to setup adblock with vpn. Also no need to setup 2 Adblock instances. Another advantage, asus router can force all dns queries through this, bypass hard coded dns on some devices. 5. Cockpit with file sharing plugin: easily manage samba/nfs share

there's plugins for cockpit like: https://github.com/45Drives/cockpit-file-sharing

Portainer

> Any tips on the minimum hardware or VPS's needed to get a small swarm cluster setup?

From my testing, Docker Swarm is very lightweight, uses less memory than both Hashicorp Nomad and lightweight Kubernetes distros (like K3s). Most of the resource requirements will depend on what containers you actually want to run on the nodes.

You might build a cluster from a bunch of Raspberry Pis, some old OptiPlex boxes or laptops, or whatever you have laying around and it's mostly going to be okay. On a practical level, anything with 1-2 CPU cores and 4 GB of RAM will be okay for running any actually useful software, like a web server/reverse proxy, some databases (PostgreSQL/MySQL/MariaDB), as well as either something for a back end or some pre-packaged software, like Nextcloud.

So, even 5$/month VPSes are more than suitable, even from some of the more cheap hosts like Hetzner or Contabo (though the latter has a bad rep for limited/no support).

That said, you might also want to look at something like Portainer for a nice web based UI, for administering the cluster more easily, it really helps with discoverability and also gives you redeploy web hooks, to make CI easier: https://www.portainer.io/ (works for both Docker Swarm as well as Kubernetes, except the Kubernetes ingress control was a little bit clunky with Traefik instead of Nginx)

In this section, we will add Portainer to help us in managing our Docker containers. You can find more details about it here. To integrate Portainer into our EC2 project, we can follow these steps:

Git issues pointing to: https://docs.portainer.io/v/ce-2.9/start/install/agent/swarm/linux gives a ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS.

I am currently running Portainer, but webhooks (GitOps) appear to be broken ( [2.19.0] GitOps Updates not automatically polling from git · Issue #10309 · portainer/portainer · GitHub ) and so I cannot send webhook to redeploy a stack. So, looking for alternatives. Using this as a good excuse to learn more about docker and CI/CD etc.

A Synology NAS running Portainer (https://www.portainer.io/) running Paperless NGX (https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx)

This works better than I can possibly tell you.

I have an Epson WorkForce ES-580W that I bought when my mother passed away to bulk scan documents and it scans everything, double-sided if required, multi-page PDFs if required, at very high speed and uploads everything to OneDrive, at which point I drag and drop everything into Paperless.

I could, thinking about it, have the scanner email stuff to Paperless. Might investigate that today.

Paperless will OCR it and make it all searchable. This setup is amazing, I love living in the future.

> I've come to the conclusion (after trying kops, kubespray, kubeadm, kubeone, GKE, EKS) that if you're looking for < 100 node cluster, docker swarm should suffice. Easier to setup, maintain and upgrade.

Personally, I'd also consider throwing Portainer in there, which gives you both a nice way to interact with the cluster, as well as things like webhooks: https://www.portainer.io/

With something like Apache, Nginx, Caddy or something else acting as your "ingress" (taking care of TLS, reverse proxy, headers, rate limits, sometimes mTLS etc.) it's a surprisingly simple setup, at least for simple architectures.

casaos it just makes things like backups, offsite syncing and many other nas related things so much easier to manage. And gives you a proper nas like experience similar to that in which you'd fine on companies like tnas or synology. I actually also use it as a replacement for portainer when i don't need the more advanced features it offers

> I moved to docker swarm and love it. It's so much easier, straight forward, automatic ingress network and failover were all working out of the box. I'll stay with swarm for now.

I've had decent luck in the past with the K3s distribution, which is a bit cut down Kubernetes: https://k3s.io/

It also integrates nicely with Portainer (aside from occasional Traefik ingress weirdness sometimes), which I already use for Swarm and would suggest to anyone that wants a nice web based UI: https://www.portainer.io/

Others might also mention K0s, MicroK8s or others - there's lots of options there. But even so, I still run Docker Swarm for most of my private stuff as well and it's a breeze.

For my needs, it has just the right amount of abstractions: stacks with services that use networks and can have some storage in the form of volumes or bind mounts. Configuration in the form of environment variables and/or mounted files (or secrets), some deployment constraints and dependencies sometimes, some health checks and restart policies, as well as resource limits.

If I need a mail server, then I just have a container that binds to the ports (even low port numbers) that I need and configure it. If I need a web server, then I can just run Apache/Nginx/Caddy and use more or less 1:1 configuration files that I'd use when setting up either outside of containers, but with the added benefit of being able to refer to other apps by their service names (or aliases, if they have underscores in the names, which sometimes isn't liked).

At a certain scale, it's dead simple to use - no need for PVs and PVCs, no need for Ingress and Service abstractions, or lots and lots of templating that Helm charts would have (although those are nice in other ways).