Cleaning up NAS

Updated in May 2021

Over the last few years me and my wife have been using the network server more frequently from its initial install and setup. We share 3-4 computers across the house and constantly move files onto the NAS. I have installed Nextcloud which I will detail in another post in the future. We have come across an issue that I have noticed with the network share. We moved all of our images and files over and ended up with tons of duplicates and a giant mess. I will show you what I am doing to clean that up. Our Nas is running on a ubuntu server. The following commands should work on most linux NAS servers.

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Ultra minimal Raspbian Image for Pi Zero and Zero W

I wanted to make a ultra lite image that I can quickly drop Go programs onto. This image had a few requirements, be under 300MB, have less than 20MB ram usage idle, startup in under 5 seconds. I will post below everything I did to strip this down so that it can be replicated in the future. Currently with the steps below I have achieved 427MB/16MB, close to my goal for disk and memory usage is below the goal. As for bootup time, I am limited by network connection time 5+ seconds.

Install a fresh Raspbian Stretch Lite image into the SD card (source).

Configure headless SSH and Wi-Fi (if necessary) before starting the SD card (source).

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Raspberry Pi Booting From USB on older models

Booting from USB is easy on a Pi1, Pi2, or Pi3. This can be useful in mamy cases to speed up the performance of your pi when using a slow sd card. It can also provide a reliable location where you operating system data resides. Sd cards are prone to data corruption from writes a operating system ussually does. Write the latest Raspbian image to an SD card and boot it. [Read More]

Switching to Linux

I have just about had it with Windows updates being forced on me. Graphics drivers breaking. My settings getting reset every time I get on and many other reasons I won’t begin to rant about. I chose to go with a decently common operating system for better compatibility.

I have gone through the install process and have installed Ubuntu 18.04LTS. For less advanced Linux users you can go with a simpler Linux like Solus which is a little more GUI friendly system.

You can modify ubuntu to your likings using a tool called “gnome tweaks” and you can disable animations to speed things up by using a tool called “dconf-editor”.

In dconf-editor, browse to org.gnome.desktop.interface and set enable-animations=false.

You can also run this command to disable animations:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface enable-animations false

You do not need to log out and back in, it should take effect immediately.

After getting all settled and having all my software carried over. I had a few pieces of software that was not compatible and I still needed. Most of my software was available in Ubuntu application store. Everything left is listed below:

Ubuntu Get right click new documents back. Here is a link to a couple of templates we made.

File previews on file explorer:

apt install gnome-sushi

To get the Windows-only software running I installed Virtualbox and installed Windows 10 and started to hack away at all its imperfections to slim it down. This virtual machine won’t be used that often so its a compromise I’m willing to make. I can also set quick one click restore points just in case windows breaks. I have compiled a list for all to use:

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