Fair warning right away: I'm not a programmer. The code could be prettier, the architecture more elegant. But my goal was different – to make a convenient tool for myself as a system administrator. What came out came out. Don't judge too harshly, it's beta.

How it all started

I had some free time. I had an old Netgear Stora MS2000 lying around – I'd installed Debian 7 and OpenMediaVault on it back in the day. Then a disk crashed, I reinstalled Debian 9, but OMV turned out to be too heavy for this hardware.

Editing configs in the console every time was tedious. And all I really needed was SAMBA and NFS. So I thought, why bother? I'll write a couple of PHP scripts to create and edit shares.

And so Mini Bucket began.

The first two pages – and off we went

I whipped up the first two pages quickly: shares started working. Then I thought, "It would be nice to have a dashboard to see all the stats." A third page appeared – a dashboard with graphs.

Then I figured: since I've got SMB and NFS, might as well add rsync and FTP too. Added them.

Day by day, my "two-page panel" grew into a project now called Mini Bucket – NAS Control Panel.

And you know what? It actually works. On hardware where modern panels simply won't start or slow to a crawl.

What is this thing?

Mini Bucket is a web-based NAS control panel focused on resource efficiency. It runs on:

How I wanted two pages for SAMBA and NFS, but ended up with a full-featured NAS control panel with 20+ pages