Network

In this section you can set several system network related settings.

General

Hostname and domain settings.

Interfaces

The grid only displays configured interfaces done through the web interface. If you see this panel empty and your default interface was configured by DHCP or static during install is normal. The installer does not setup the network using openmediavault, it just configures /etc/network/interfaces. The dashboard contains a network widget that displays current status of interfaces.

Ethernet

Just select DHCP or static. openmediavault is a server so the recommended setting is to have static IP address. If you have a proper network infrastructure (separate router and switch ). In a reboot if the router fails to boot, you can still access the web interface through the switch bridge. If the switch also fails you can use a direct ethernet connection as you already know the IP address assigned to the server NIC.

When using static configuration be aware that the configuration window does not expand completely, scrolling down are the IPv6 fields and DNS fields. The DNS setting is essential for fetching updates, do not leave empty. A common value is to use the same IP address as the gateway, if unsure just use google DNS 8.8.8.8.

Wake on LAN (WOL)
This enables WOL in the kernel driver, make sure the NICs supports this and the feature is enabled in BIOS.

Wireless

Support for wireless network was added in openmediavault 3.0. The configuration window displays the same IP configuration fields as ethernet, plus the relevant wireless values: SSID (the wireless network name) and the password. Please be aware wireless should not be used in a production server. This feature is intended for extreme cases. Whenever is possible please always use ethernet for a NAS server.

Vlan

If your network supports vlan, just add the parent interface and the VLAN id.

Bond

The configuration window provides all available modes for the bond driver. To configure bonding, is necessary at least two physical network interfaces. The web interface allows the selection of less than two, this is by design for configuration purposes. The workflow is as follow for dual nics:

  • If the primary NIC is already working either by the installer, configure it through the web interface as static. If set as static using the same IP address given by DHCP, it should not be necessary to re-login to the web interface.
  • Click Network | Interfaces | Add | Bond, select the second available NIC, select the bond mode, fill the IP field and subnet mask values, leave gateway and DNS empty. Save and hit apply.
  • Log out and access the web interface using the new IP address assigned to the bond interface created.
  • Now select the primary interface configured through web interface in the first step, and delete it. Save and hit apply.
  • Select the newly created bond interface, click edit add now the physical nic that was deleted from the step before should be available to select. Save and hit apply.
  • The dashboard should now report the bond interface information (including speed).

Note

  • 802.3ad LACP (Link Aggregation) mode only works if physical interfaces are connected to a managed switch that supports aggregation.
  • Is not possible to achieve 2GBit bandwidth (or more depending on the ammount of nics) in a single client using LACP. Even if the client also has a LACP bonded nic or 10Gbit card as there is no multipath support in samba or other openmediavault services like Windows server has for file sharing using SMB.
  • Higher speeds using link aggregation are limited by disk speed. When serving simultaneous clients make sure the phisical media is capable (SSD or RAID array) of reaching the speed of the bonded nic.

Advanced Interface Configuration

Proxy

This panel configures the server proxies using system wide enviromemtal variables. Every software that obbeys Linux proxy environmental variables should be able to use the proxy. This is useful for example if there are many Debian servers in the network, when performing apt operations, packages can be cached in the proxy if this configured appropiatly to reduce download bandwidth.

The variables name are:

http_proxy
https_proxy
ftp_proxy

This settings do not configure openmediavault to act as a proxy server.

Service Discovery

This panel configures avahi-daemon announce services. You can disable selectively by service and/or change the common name announce. Plugins can add their service here also. Avahi announces are recognized by Linux file browsers by default. Mac OSX only recognizes SMB and AFP protocol in their sidebar.

Windows does not understand avahi announces. Samba announces to windows client using the NetBIOS daemon (nmbd). If windows network section does not display the samba server this settings do not change that behaviour.

Firewall

This is grid panel for adding iptables rules. This can be useful if you need to secure access in your local network. At the moment is only possible to add rules to the OUTPUT and INPUT chains in the filter table. The configuration to load the rules at boot or network restart is located in this file /etc/network/if-pre-up.d/openmediavault-iptables. The mkconf openmediavault script uses a run-parts folder /usr/share/mkconf/iptables.d where is possbile to store custom scripts to add rules to the NAT and RAW table or the FORWARD chain,

Tip

  • To avoid locking yourself out while testing, create a cron command to run every five minutes that flushes the OUTPUT/INPUT chain.

*/5 * * * * root /sbin/iptables -F INPUT && /sbin/iptables -F OUTPUT

  • Before adding the last rule to reject all, add a rule before the reject all, to LOG everything. This will help understand why some rules do not work. The log is saved in dmesg or syslog.

When seeking support please avoid posting screenshots of the grid panel, this is useless because it does not give the full overview of your firewall ruleset. Instead use:

$ iptables-save > /tmp/file.txt

If you have no problems with sensitive information in the ruleset then you can create a text link:

$ iptables-save | curl -F 'sprunge=<-' http://sprunge.us