I got here an outdated Mac which I want to turn into a small home server
Additionally, I have external USB storage for 2TB, so I was thinking I could run some kind of NAS-like software to expose my external 2TB storage as family cloud storage (to sync up for example photos from all family phones to it)
But I’m not sure I want to get rid of Mac OS as a whole, I was thinking of running some Docker which would expose NAS-like software over an HTTP port and mound external drive as volume storage. So I’m wondering if it’s even possible to run Rockstor as a docker image instead of *.iso which should be installed as the main OS on hardware?
I believe that due to the docker architecture this won’t easily be possible because of the more involved, lower-level disk management and other functions Rockstor uses.
Your best bet would be to install a virtual machine manager like VirtualBox, QEMU (has some restrictions on how old the MacOS is you’re using on it) or similar (Parallels, VMWare Fusion, etc., but those have a cost associated with them) and run it as its own instance on there.
The Linux KVM described in our documentation is QEMU, the installation under MacOS will be slightly different, however the base flow should be the same.
I think we have some forum users that have been using Macs as their underlying hardware. If so, may be one of them can pitch in here further, since I don’t have any access to Mac hardware to even run a quick test for it.
To be honest, if all you need is a cloud-like solution for your family, have you considered something like NextCloud/OwnCloud ? They would probably do what you are looking for, and IIRC NextCloud does have a native Mac OS install.
I’m a big fan of Rockstor and have been using it for a few years, but from your original post I think your use-case might be satisfied elsewhere.
And here I go - just make sure you have effective backups
EDIT: How jolly rude of me not to say welcome to the world of Rockstor…
