Announcing a new project

It looks like you are way ahead of where I had to stop in this project: omv-on-proultra-series----a-project.  My personal matter is going to take away a lot of my free time (at the age of 70, I have become the single parent of my 8-year-old granddaughter for at least 2 years), so I'm going to bow to you.  The models you've used have the advantage of having a display (though the Pro6 requires the addition of the cable) and also expandable memory.  I wanted to keep it capable of running on lower-end units.

To get around the lack of a display without having to use the TTL console (which can be daunting to novice users, especially on legacy units without the USB-C connection), I was going to use FAI (Fully Automated Install) or GRML with SSH enabled to do the generic Debian install and partitioning then install OMV over it.  FAI was preferred because it can do the GRUB installation, all of the initial partitioning, and  the Debian installation without user intervention.  I got bogged down with GRML because I couldn't repeat a previous success, but I've not gone back since you pointed out that I may need to use the last 2025 version (which may well be what I used initially).  I never got far with FAI because I needed to first verify the GRUB and partitioning would work at all, but you've done that.

I was going to partition the drives almost as you did.  The difference was that I intended to make root also a RAID0 across all drives.  For the file system for main, I was going to use BTRFS on MDADM because I'm more familiar with it but also because I understand ZFS takes a lot of RAM and likely wouldn't perform well on units limited to 2GB.  Both of these are as Netgear did with OS6 -- we just need the addition of boot because the flash is too small for it.

Because I wanted to support all the Intel 64-bit models, including 2-drive, but without having to build in a lot of if-then-else in the install, my approach was going to be to set up with just two drives on every system and then expand.  My main test bed is a 312 because it does have an HDMI display so I can use it to fix any screw-ups but it's limited to 2 drives and 2GB of RAM as are a lot of other unit types.

I don't have the experience to work on my own GUI, so that's where OMV came in.  But even if I did, I'm not sure I'd want to burden myself with having to do any updates that Debian updates might require, so I left that to OMV.

Though my time will be limited, I can offer a lot of unit types for testing.  I basically have most everything covered.  Most are in storage and would have to be pulled out, but they are readily accessible there.  I don't have all the unit types, but have some covered by other models with just a CPU or drive backplane difference.