Build it yourself

The best way to understand this stack isn’t reading a marketing page — it’s standing it up. This site is paired with a real, working, openly-documented project:

github.com/mcgarrah/ceph-gateway-45drive

That project documents building a protocol gateway — a Linux VM that mounts a CephFS pool and re-exposes it over SMB, NFSv4, and S3, using 45Drives’ actual open-source Houston UI stack (Cockpit + the modules described on the Houston UI page) plus native Ceph RGW for object storage. It’s not a sanitized demo — it’s a real build log, including the parts that didn’t work on the first try.

What’s actually in there

• Step-by-step setup: mounting CephFS with scoped credentials, installing the 45Drives Cockpit stack, configuring SMB/NFS shares, and standing up an S3-compatible endpoint via Ceph’s RADOS Gateway.
• A running list of real gotchas found along the way — the kind of thing you only discover by actually doing the install, not by reading documentation. A few examples: Samba’s registry backend (what the Houston UI writes to) and the flat smb.conf file are two independent config stores that don’t talk to each other unless you explicitly wire them together; a self-signed TLS certificate needs its file ownership set correctly for the service that actually reads it; and a hostname longer than 15 characters will silently break NetBIOS naming.
• Security considerations worth thinking about before you expose any share — least-privilege Ceph credentials, network-scoped exports, and not pointing a guest-accessible share at more than you mean to.

Why this matters beyond “it’s a cool homelab project”

Every one of those findings came from actually running the open-source stack 45Drives builds its hardware on — which is a pretty direct demonstration of the whole point of this site: it’s real, runnable, and inspectable, not a black box you have to take on faith. If something doesn’t work as documented, you can find out why, because the entire stack — Ceph, ZFS, Cockpit, and 45Drives’ own plugins on top — is open source, end to end.

If you build your own and find something worth documenting, the repository is open to issues and pull requests — that’s the whole idea of an open-source ecosystem.