Best way to mount a folder on the same LAN

I (am to) have two servers (names are imaginary), where both are behind the same router:

  1. grumble is an old ARMv5 for backups as it sports two big HDD in a (LVM¹) RAID
  2. joy is a new ARMv7-A for serving web pages Nextcloud etc., but has only one HDD

What I plan to do is to store some larger files that I rarely need access to (backups of legally obtained games and music) on old grumble, but I would ideally like to have access to them through joy’s Nextcloud instance when I fancy searching and downloading it. Uploading I plan to do directly to grumble, most probably via scp.

The options that I see are:

  • SFTP
  • FTP(S)
  • native – e.g. using NFS on grumble and then mounting that on joy and then selecting the mountpoint in Nextcloud

What is the least silly option?


1: don’t ask please

Soooo, no opinions?

Best option is SFTP, secure and encrypted transfer incase someone is snooping in your connection.

The SSH overhead in a LAN is negligible, even though it’s in LAN?

Depends on some factors as size of LAN or number of users. For a very little LAN, encryption is not strictly necessary, but perimetral security has to be enforced to avoid intrusions, that could sniff the shared files. However, encryption is always recommended, since any system isn’t totally free of the possibility of intrusion.

NFS could work within SSH, but a simpler way to share encrypted files is SFTP.

SFTP it is then, thanks :slight_smile: