Yup! Considering that cpu, debian will be painful, but ubuntu as a server is asking for trouble. Look for fedora server, for the love of god even an arch server. Do your future self a favor and avoid that grilled roadkill that is ubuntu.

Fedora server comes with cockpit if thsts what you want.

For the 370, fedora works well.

Pinch of salt- i got burned too many times with ubuntu server, I run an extensive homelab and I’m a regular at the burns ward. I loathe ubuntu with the energy of a Wolf-Rayet star.

For a NAS, like, storage on the network, keep it as simple and as reliable as possible, so avoid Ubuntu and go to the core underlying OS: Debian.

Then just build up the functionality you need, is SMB, NFS, etc.

Personally, I went from OMV to a home built NAS, but went with Arch as that’s what I use elsewhere (btw), so am comfortable with it, but it’s bleeding edge which isn’t always the best if some functionality changes when you’re not ready for it.

If you’re going for a server running lots of containers, etc, then find whatever the container handler (docker?) is best on… I just put everything on bare metal, so can’t advise what’s best for containers… probably Debian again…

But, keep it simple.

For the storage volume:

Bcache to make an ssd cache, then for the volume itself, BTRFS raid 1 setup. Setup any necessary SMB and NFS shares. Setup Nextcloud via docker. Probably rsync for any local distro mirrors. I’d also toss on dockerized gitlab. Add any additional services via docker.

Install a better (server oriented) OS??

Depends what protocols you need?

If you use SMB install the Samba server package. If you use WebDAV install a WebDAV server like SFTPGo, etc…

If you want a google drive like replacement there’s Nextcloud, Owncloud, Seafile, and others.

For the drives themselves you can have traditional RAID with MD, or ZFS for more reliability and neat features, or go with MergerFS + SnapRAID, or just directly mount the disks and store files on some and backup to the others with Restic or something.

Lots of options!

Can’t talk about AMD but I’m on NVIDIA and I always followed https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers and never had issues others seem to be having. I typically hear good things about AMD GPU support, on Debian and elsewhere so I’m surprised.

Now in practice IMHO GPU support doesn’t matter much for NAS, as you’re probably going headless (no monitor, mouse or keyboard). You probably though do want GPU instruction set support for transcoding but here again can’t advise for this brand of GPU. It should just be relying on e.g. https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Hardware/AMF

Finally I’m a Debian user and I’m quite familiar with setting it up, locally on remotely. I also made ISOs for RPi based on Raspbian so this post made me realize I never (at least I don’t remember) installed Debian headlessly, by that I mean booting on a computer with no OS all the way to getting a working ssh connection established on LAN or WiFi. I relied on Imager for RPi configuration or making my own ISO via a microSD card (using dd) but it made me curious about preseeding wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/Preseed so I might tinker with it via QEMU. Advices welcomed.

PS: based on few other comments, consider minidlna over more complex setups. Consider Wireguard over tailscale (or at least headscale for a version relying solely on your infrastructure) with e.g. wg-easy if you want to manage everything without 3rd parties.

Don’t expect much difference between Debian and Ubuntu. I guess you just need to install a newer kernel package from backports.

apt install nfs-utils

Since it sounds like you’ll be using it for more than just a NAS, I’d go with TrueNAS, Proxmox or Debian headless (in order of easiest to hardest to install and maintain).

I just use Debian… I won’t touch Ubuntu as a server anymore (or a desktop either, but really that stems from the server side for me).

Vanilla Debian or proxmox is functionally all I’ll use at this point, including with 3 AMD machines (two 1700x, one 5700x). Though none with an and igpu, mostly older dgpu’s.

Edit: The point being, maybe figure out what the problem is here rather than going Ubuntu, which has been a huge security problem in the past (snap + docker especially).

Install Fedora Server instead

I would avoid Ubuntu myself, but as others have said it’s not going to be any different from using Debian for the same job. Just install the samba package, add a user, configure your shares, and you’re good to go.

I personally would run Fedora Server for an easy out-of-the-box experience. It comes with cockpit and SELinux. Great for Podman, too.

This is a relatively new CPU. You might struggle on Ubuntu as well. As much as I love Debian, something like Fedora might be better.

It may be possible to get Debian running, though - either run Debian Testing or install a Backports kernel and Mesa. Were you failing to boot Debian, or did you just struggle after getting it installed?

Either way, I just don’t recommend Ubuntu.

I went for the simplest option

1. Installed a distro (in this case Debian)
2. Installed tailscale on the server, logged in
3. Installed tailscale on my other devices, logged in
4. Used sshfs to mount the desired directory on the server to my client
5. SSH in once a week or so to run updates

Found it very simple. Avoided the tedious setup of samba and samba had weird reliability issues for me when copying large files. Took a bit to learn how ssh works, but very much so worth it.