YES! You can use Windows 11 as a NAS (FULL GUIDE)

So recently I got asked this question on a video and initially I replied with absolute shock and horror. But after a followup with the commenter, I realized this is a question worth answering. Yes, you can use Windows as your NAS operating system. And in this video, that's what we're gonna be doing. Granted the Linux gods are gonna look down on me with disgust and horror. It is possible and it's a fairly easy process. Now for this, you don't need a dedicated NAS necessarily. A lot of the steps in this video you can do if you're just running like your single Windows desktop computer and you want to get some NAS functionality out of it. I will have timestamps down below so you can skip around to whatever sections are applicable to what you are trying to do. But throughout this entire video, there will be various tips and tricks that will make this a fairly smooth experience. And I will preface this as smooth as it can be. Desktop Windows was not built to be a NAS operating system and there are definitely better options out there. I personally recommend something like Unraid.

There's True NAS, Open Media Vault, even something like HaaSOS. There's a ton of other options. But again, I mean, if you're running a Windows desktop, you want functionality out of it, this is great. Or if you just really, really love Windows, this is the video for you. Some of the features that we're gonna be setting up, of course, is a RAID instance. We're gonna be setting up various network shares. We're gonna be diving into Docker and spitting up a service or two. We're gonna be accessing our NAS through remote desktop connection, which is gonna act as our NAS GUI, which is literally gonna be the Windows desktop. And of course, I will show you how to connect to all of this externally outside of your home network with our sponsor, TwinGate. TwinGate is an awesome VPN alternative that uses zero trusted networking. And it's really easy to set up. You just set up connectors on whether that be your Windows NAS or some other devices in your network. You use a client to go ahead and connect to it. And throughout their dashboard, you can set up users, various resources, support restrictions, a whole bunch of things. It is free up to five users, but that's all I'm gonna say about it because we're gonna actually be diving into how to set up some of that stuff near the end of this video.

So with that, again, there are timestamps. So if you already have a Windows install, you can skip around, but we're first gonna be starting off with putting Windows on our USB. I believe the minimum requirement is eight gigabytes. And if you have anything on your USB, you're gonna want to make sure you back it all up because what we're gonna do is gonna completely wipe it. First things first, go to the Windows 11 download page. You're gonna wanna scroll down, click right here, Windows 11 download. And then from there, it's going to give you the language option, pick your language, hit confirm. It will begin downloading. While it does that, we're gonna go ahead and grab Rufus. The reason we're using Rufus over some of the alternatives is they have some fantastic options to make this whole process a little smoother and easier. Once you have all that ready, you're gonna want to plug in your USB. You can see I have it plugged in right here. Make sure you do pick the right device if you have multiple things plugged in. From there, you click select and pick the Windows 11 image that you downloaded. We're gonna click on open and we can leave most of this at default. I'm just gonna change this for fun. Let's do Win USB and then click on start.

Now this is where we get some of the options that really make this nice. You can select really what you want and customize this how you see fit. But this right here is basically my default selection. I disabled the data collection, disable BitLocker. I removed some of the requirements and create a local account. The one recommendation I have is do this something simple, no spaces. I'm just gonna do admin. This is gonna be the admin account of the NAS that we are creating. You could do your first name, you could do whatever. I just recommend leaving out spaces because later on it makes it a lot easier to connect with Linux devices and things like that. Which is really weird to think about, connecting to your Windows server from your Linux desktop. So we're gonna hit okay and then it is gonna warn us that all the data is gonna be gone. We're gonna click okay again and let that do what it needs to do. And while it does that, the device that I'm gonna be installing this on is the TerraMaster T6-423. This is the NAS that I've been running forever as my UNRAID instance, but I did recently switch that out for the 6 Bay UGreen unit. So we got a free NAS to desecrate.

And I would say the specifications of this NAS in particular are probably the minimum requirements that you're gonna want to actually do this. You can see here as an Intel Celeron N5095, quad core at two gigahertz. Right now it only has four gigabytes of RAM, which again, Windows eats up a lot of it. There are better options for a dedicated NAS unit. I can upgrade it if I want to, but I'm just rocking the four gigs for now. Setting up file shares in a couple Docker containers, it's gonna be fine. And I have six four terabyte drives in it. All right, we are finalizing, finishing up and it is ready to go. So what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna pull my USB out, plug it into the NAS, get my other keyboard, I actually have plugged into the NAS and then boot here into the BIOS, depending on your motherboard, it could be a variety of keys, somewhere between delete, escape, F1, F12, F11 something. But here I am just gonna go and select my boot as my USB drive. And then we are going to save changes and exit. There we go, booting into Windows. And I tested this out earlier, the display drivers are absolutely cooked until I get the drivers updated.

I'm gonna go all English and go next, install now. Now I don't have a Windows product key, the only thing I'll say, there are some fantastic resources on GitHub. Let's go like that. Here is the addition, it doesn't really matter, I just generally always go with Pro. All of the features that we're gonna be utilizing, I'm pretty sure are available on home if you happen to have a license for that. So accept their terms of service, let's go next. And then from here, we're gonna go custom install. So this is the drives and if you have a lot of drives in your system like I do, it may look something like this. And you could see these are all basically four terabyte drives and the drive I'm actually going to want to install Windows on is this one right here, drive six. I know this because it's a pretty small 128 gigabyte NVMe SSD. For sure, install Windows on an NVMe SSD or another SSD as installing really anything on a hard drive kind of sucks. So when you know the drive you want to install it on, all you do is go ahead and delete all the partitions. So I'm gonna tab, delete, okay. And then we go all the way down again and then we just repeat the process.

So down, delete, okay. Until the entire drive is unallocated. Then you'll see drive six is completely empty. So all we do is go ahead and hit next and it should begin the installation process. And then when that's done, our computer or NAS is gonna go ahead and restart. There we go. Now other than my absolutely cooked display drivers, you're gonna notice this is a lot better Windows install experience than we normally get. After of course using Rufus, gonna run a little update. Hey, there we go. Just dropped us right in. All we had to do is pick our language and keyboard layout and we're good to go. It takes forever. The best Windows installation experience still is not a good one. Well, look at that. We are in. I pulled up my updates, started downloading all of them. I need drivers so it doesn't look like absolute garbage. So we will come back when this is completely done. All right, so after a few quick reboots, all the drivers are in and we can actually see what is going on. So now I'm gonna go over some important settings that you're gonna wanna change and starting with the device name.

If we head over to the settings application and let's go down to system here, we could see right here the current device name is desktop and a bunch of random characters. This is the current host name and we wanna change to something a little more recognizable and easier. So if we wanna log in with third party services, I'm gonna call this something like WinNAS as it is our new Windows NAS. So I'm gonna go next and there we go. To actually rename and change the hosting, we are gonna restart, but before that, we're gonna change a couple more settings. So let's restart later. And now what we're gonna wanna do is actually enable network discovery. So to do that, we're gonna go to network and internet and click on our internet connection. It's currently set to internet. I would definitely recommend using internet if you do plan on using your computer or whatever as a NAS unit. And we're gonna want to go ahead and switch this over to private network. As we're gonna be keeping this device on our home local network, we're gonna wanna switch to private and this will expose it so we can access remote connect, shares, Docker ports, things like that. So now let's go back over here to network and internet and we're gonna want to go down to advanced network settings.

And then from there, we're gonna go to advanced sharing settings and we're gonna want to enable file and printer sharing. This is what gives access to the files that we have on the NAS after we go ahead and share some folders. And then from there, we're gonna wanna head over to our power settings. I'm pretty sure it's under systems. And then if we go to power, what we are going to want to do is go to screen and sleep and completely disable sleep. If your computer does go to sleep, you won't be able to see the file shares or have access to it. Now in a situation in which you do want your computer to be able to go to sleep, but still kind of function as a NAS, there's actually a group policy thing that we can change. Do note that you are probably going to need to somehow ping the server to kind of wake it back up, but doing this does make the network card active. So if it sees something going on, it's going to wake up your computer. And to do this, I'm gonna go ahead and close out settings. We're gonna go to a little more of a old school application. This is going to be the group policy editor from the control panel.

So let's go ahead and open this up. From there under computer configuration, we're gonna want to go to administrative templates. And then in there, we're gonna want to head over to system. And then we're gonna want to go ahead and scroll down to our power management folder here. And then under sleep settings, there's gonna be something we want to change. Make this a little bit bigger so I could see what is going on here. And then we have this option right here, allow network connectivity during connected standby. Give that a double click. And then from here, we're gonna want to just click enabled. And you can see if you enable this policy setting, network connectivity will be maintained in standby. And we're just gonna go ahead and hit apply and then okay. And now from there, we are gonna go over to our device manager and make sure that a certain packet is enabled on our network card. So if we go over here, let's minimize that and go under network adapters, we have our controller here. We have two of them. I'm gonna do it for both of them because I'm not sure which one my internet's plugged into, but right click that, go over to properties.

And then here under advanced, it is going to be the wake on magic packet. We can see that's currently enabled, which is good. And then from there, we're gonna go over to our power management tab here and allow this device to wake the computer as well as only allow a magic packet to wake the computer. We're gonna hit okay. Now real quick, we're gonna reboot the system, one to enable that policy, two to change the host name and three to check our bios here real quick. All bios look a little bit different, but you're gonna wanna look for an option like this that says wake on LAN. Make sure your cards are enabled here. And here, if you want to, you can enable S5 via RTC if you want it to turn on automatically at a certain time. But for now, I'm gonna keep that disabled. And one thing with wake on LAN, I'm pretty sure fast boot is not supported. So you're gonna want to make sure and leave that off. I could be wrong. Somebody will correct me in the comments, but from there, I'm gonna save changes and exit. And now we are going to log in here real quick.

It may ask you to change your password if you used the Rufus method. And now to test this, I went ahead and set the sleep settings. So that way it will fall asleep after one minute. So I'm gonna wait that minute for the device to shut down. And once it does shut down, we'll see here if it fires up when I connect to the network tab, which that tab kind of pings out to everything to see what is accessible on your network. And that search to see that should be enough that it fires it up with wake on LAN. And if it does work for network discovery, it should work for other services such as Docker containers and things like that. And I just saw the fans kick off. There's no lights or anything. So if we head over to network tab, it's firing up and then it should pop up after it wakes up. And there it is. We have a Windows, which we can log into now. This is one of the reasons why we wanted to change our password. So I'm gonna log in. Oh, it's not gonna be that. It is admin. Type in our password, remember the credentials, sign in.

And here we go. Folder is currently empty because we have nothing shared. So now that our little NAS at least functions like a server when it comes to the power and accessibility on our network, we want to access it remotely. I don't want to be plugged into it. I wanna go move it somewhere else. So in this case, what we are going to do is remote desktop. And if you're running Linux, you can still access Windows remote desktop from those machines you use a different software, but it basically works the same. We're gonna go down to remote desktop settings here. And then we are going to simply enable this and confirm it. We can see our PC name, WinNAS, nice and easy for us. And now we have remote desktop users here. If you do have other users, you can add them, give them access, but you can see here admin already has access, so we are good to go. Now, one way to connect to it is by right clicking right on the device and connecting with remote desktop connection. I'm gonna change the settings just a bit. So if we go over here and I get this keyboard out of the way now, remote desktop connection, the actual application, this was the last computer I connected to.

And now we should just be able to go Win NAS, just like that. You can see the username automatically filled in as admin. I'm gonna show some more options, head over to display. And it's already at 1080p, which is what I was gonna wanna do anyways. So you can go ahead and mess with some settings here if you would like to, but I'm just gonna go ahead and hit connect. There is a certificate warning, it's our computer. We just set it up, it's gonna be fine. Don't ask me again and yes. And will you look at that? We now have access to our server. So now our next step is going to be create a RAID. We do have a bunch of hard drives in this thing and Windows actually does have moderately decent built-in tools to be able to do this. So if I go down here to search and I do storage and right there, manage storage spaces, we're gonna click on that. And here we have our storage spaces. This is combining drives. We're gonna go ahead and create our new storage pool. We're gonna say yes. And here are all the drives in the system, disk 043152.

It does a pretty good job about not putting your actual boot disk in here, which is what we installed on the SSD. But do make sure if you have other drives in here, like if you have a bunch of stuff you wanna put in a RAID and you have a one, one terabyte drive that just has like your Steam games on it or something, make sure not to select it because this is gonna wipe the drives. So boom, let's go ahead and create our pool. And there was no errors right there, but if you do encounter an error, an error I encountered, it looks a little bit something like this. It may say can't create pool. And the issue is the physical disk sector size is not supported by the storage pool. If you run into this, what you are going to have to do, I'm gonna cancel this out real quick. And then we are gonna go ahead and open up create and format disk or hard disk partitions. And then what you're gonna have to do is go to these specific drives. So for example, disk 0 here, right click on it. You're gonna make a new simple volume, go next, keep the defaults here. You can assign whatever drive letter you want. It doesn't matter, we're gonna be reformatting it again. And here under the allocation unit size, go ahead and change it to 4096 for every single drive.

And it's gonna look something like this. So I'll actually just go ahead and do this. Let's go next, finish, let that do what it needs to do. And there we go, we have the new volume. And technically now since I did that, it's gonna be accessible through here. We can see our new volume. It's a single four terabyte drive actually showing up now. But what we're gonna do is go back over here, create a new storage pool. Yes, and now here you can see there's two sections. There are formatted drives and unformatted drives. I'm gonna select all of them. If you have to go through and do that fix for all your drives, everything's gonna be right here. I'm gonna check it. And if you do have formatted drives, I do recommend viewing the files and making sure you have nothing of importance in there. But we're gonna select the entire pool of drives and create the pool. Now from here, we're gonna wanna go ahead and give it a name. I'm just gonna name it something, let's say vault. This is my vault. I'm gonna give it the drive letter W for Windows. Unfortunately, we only have the NTFS file system available. The file systems like btrfs or "butter fs" are much better through Linux NAS operating systems.

And then we have the resilience type here. This is basically your RAID configuration, but it's not as technical and there's not as many options. You have two-way mirror, so there are gonna be two copies of everything. If you only have two drives in your system that you're doing this with, this is the way to go. We have a three-way mirror, so if your data is super important, you don't want any risk of losing anything you can have. It says two drive failures here, but me, I always go parity. This allows one disk in the array to fail, switch that out. It can rebuild itself and it's fine. Do note that if you pick one of these, it's gonna determine how much storage you get. So for example, the three-way mirror is only gonna give us two of the drives of available storage, which is just under eight terabytes. Simple is gonna give us a whole 21, but if a drive fails, you're screwed. I, again, like to go with parity, gives us 14 terabytes, that should be good to go. So I'm gonna hit create the storage space, then it's gonna go ahead and do that. And now we can see here it is created. We're not using hardly anything. This is Vault-W right here, it is okay.

We could see the actual physical drives. And there are some management things here too, so if you want to remove one, you can prepare it for removal, switch it out if you want to, if one's acting funny or failing on you. You could create more pools if you want multiple arrays, if you have a lot of hard drives in there. And I do recommend doing this through this application because there, you can also do this, I'll show you. Cool, if we go to manage storage spaces within the system settings, granted it is just a little bit prettier. You can see our storage pool here, all the drives, but it does lack some functionality, especially when creating that the legacy application or version of this has. So now we have our storage pool. If I go over here to Vault, we can see there's nothing in there. What we're gonna do now is actually create our shares. Now you can create shares basically anywhere on your system. And that's really helpful for if you're not doing something like this, you can make a share just in your home directory in your documents, whatever you wanna do. But for this case, we're gonna create a couple in this vault, which is what I'm gonna have people be able to access. So the shares that I'm gonna create, you could create whatever you want, do it however you want.

But generally what I do is I have a data share. And what that is going to do is be basically everything. It's gonna be my movies, TV shows, Linux, ISOs, backups, things like that, all are gonna end up in this data folder. Another thing that I do is I create one called Docker. This is gonna be where I store all my various Docker configurations. And for now, these are the only two I'm gonna go with, but you could create another one for like projects, just to organize it however you would like to. And real quick on my host system here, if I go back over to network, go to Win NAS, you could see the folder is still empty. And what I'm gonna do is share these. So for example, the first one, let's right click on this, go to Properties, and then over here, we have sharing. So we are gonna want to share this. Let's click on Share. We have the permissions for admin. And this is probably really one of the only situations that I can think about where it actually use like additional users on a Windows system is giving them various permissions in various shares.

You can always add a user by clicking right here, you could say everybody. So everybody has access to view this, or you could give a view access specifically to an admin. One thing I'll note, let's go ahead and add everyone to this just as an example. You can see the permission levels, you could give them read, write, or just read, remove altogether. And of course the owner can do absolutely everything. So I'm just gonna leave that as is and click on Share. That way users on my network can see the files, access various media, but at the same time, not have the privileges to move things around, delete things, add things, so on and so forth. So here, your folder is shared. This is the location of the actual share. And you can see here shared items aren't accessible and your computer is asleep. So again, like earlier, you're gonna want to either disable sleep or enable the wake on lan features. So we can hit done here and I'm gonna close this out and then we're gonna go ahead and share Docker. So if I go properties, go over to sharing, click on share. And this one I'm only gonna give to myself because nobody else really needs to see or mess with my Docker configurations.

So now it's on the Docker share. Additionally, there are advanced settings. So if I were advanced sharing settings, so if I click on this, you have your shares here and you can do a lot of things through this little window here. You can add more shares, limit the amount of users per share, add comments and get into more detail when it comes to the permissions here and all the users that have access to it. So I'm gonna cancel it out, cancel. It's already shared, so I'm gonna close that out. And now if I head over to the share on a separate computer, open it up, you can now see I have data and Docker. So now if I open up data, what's something I could put in here? Let's open a new tab, go over to my downloads. Hey, we got this Holo ISO, which is basically Steam OS. I'm gonna copy and paste that into my data share. It's gonna take just a little bit of time to get in there. And there we go, it is uploaded. So if I close this out, go back to our NAS, open up the data folder. Well, will you look at that? It is now shared.

So now another feature that we might want to go ahead and enable is open SSH. I'm pretty sure that's under the additional features and settings. So we're gonna go to system, and I believe there is an optional features right here. Let's go ahead and open that up. And here you have all kinds of plugins and stuff. So right here under open SSH client, oh, it looks like we already have it. That's good. Last time I did this, it wasn't enabled by default. And close that out. We go over to services. Let's make sure it's running. Make this a little bit bigger here. We got a whole bunch of stuff. Most of it's probably garbage. So go down to the O's. This right here, the authentication agent, we're gonna want to go ahead and enable automatic for that. Hit apply, start the service, and then hit okay. So now we can try to connect to this. We're gonna need our IP address. If you don't know the IP address of this machine, you can always open up the terminal, type in IP config. Here we are. So it's ending in 66. And we're gonna check to make sure that everything's in there.

So get service name SSH. Hit enter. Ah, we don't have the server. Okay, let's make sure we have that. Go back to settings here. Optional features, add an optional feature. It just said open SSH, not server. Ignore me. Open SSH server. Next, add. All right, that's added. So now go back to services. Sorry, nobody's perfect. Let's find, there it is. Open SSH server. We want this startup to be automatic, start the service, and apply the changes. Okay, and now if we go over here, beautiful. So now if we open up the terminal on our local system, we should be able to connect with SSH admin at the IP address. Hit enter, awesome. Key is not known, hasn't seen it before. It's our key, we know what it is. So we'll hit yes. Type in our password. So now we have SSH access in our Windows server.

If you hit exit, you can go ahead and log out. And I'm pretty sure we could connect with just the host name as well. So Win NAS, sweet, cool, cool stuff. So that's how you can remote into it with SSH from other machines, if that's something you would like to do. But adding that open SSH server also gave us access to SFTP, which is another way to connect and mess with the files. So let's make sure that works. SFTP. ., forward slash forward slash. This is admin at, I think the host name will work with this, not 100% admin and then the password. Oh, there we go, always trust this host, continue. And now we got everything. Since we are the admin user, we can see everything. And I think to access the share, we can change the letter right here. So W, get rid of that. And there we go. See, we have our data and Docker here. So now we have full access to all that under data. We can see the ISO that we uploaded earlier. So now with our file access, file server, all spun up and ready to go.

Let's install some Docker. One of the beautiful things about having a network attached storage beyond its intended purpose, which is a network attached storage, is to be able to run various services and other softwares on it. Now, for a lot of really popular applications, you don't even necessarily need to use Docker. For example, I'm gonna do Jellyfin. This is what I'm gonna be spinning up, but just for the record, if you just go download now, you have a version specifically for Windows here. So you can just install an EXE and get that service spun up, but there's no better time to learn Docker than to run it on something like this. And with Docker desktop, it's really easy. There's barely any learning to do out of the gate. It has a very nice graphical user interface. Everything's super simple. There's tons of plugins to make it even simpler. So we're gonna grab Docker desktop for Windows real quick here. So we're gonna go ahead and proceed with this installation. And here it is. So I do recommend just keeping this how it is. It's actually gonna be using the Windows subsystem for Linux. I'm gonna go ahead and continue.

And while this does that, I do wanna note that for Docker, their documentation is wonderful. There is so many different articles and information on how to use things, various prerequisites, and the core functionalities of Docker. If I go to the Docker docs page here and go over to guides, at least go through these first three. We have Docker overview, which kind of covers just about everything. Gives you a brief little insight on what's going on, the getting started, as well as Docker concepts at least. Check out the basics here if this is your first time running Docker. It's a pretty straightforward thing. It's just little containerized applications that are kind of separated from the rest of the system. And it makes it really easy to update, spin them down, customize these services. Definitely a lot more flexibility than just installing a EXE service, such as Plex, Jellyfin, and many of the others that offer that. So let's go ahead and close this out and let this finish up here. And there we go. So we're gonna have to restart our system here real fast.

This is one of the things that just sucks about restarting Windows. There's always something to do. Log us in and now we can see right here, we have Docker desktop. Let's fire it up and accept their little agreement. For this right here, I do recommend you use the default settings, especially if this is your first time doing this. And yep. And we can continue without signing in. You could sign in if you want to. For now, let's skip this survey. And then we are here. And there we go. We're jumping in, starting up the Docker engine. Now there's a lot going on here. I do recommend you check out some of these, what's container, how to run a container. But this is just to demonstrate how easy it is to get something spun up. And we're gonna go ahead and test this out with Jellyfin. Generally going with the official is a good bet, but I kind of have a bias for Linux server down here. So the tag is the version, gonna go latest and pull this image. I could just run it from there, but it might not give me the configuration options that I want. So while it does that, I do recommend you go over to settings up here and do some small changes. First, we're gonna start the Docker desktop when we sign into the computer.

And then we're gonna add the Docker internal names, the DNS that can help with DNS issues in the future. So from there, that is all we need to do at the moment. Let's go ahead and apply and restart. And service isn't running. Let's go ahead and start our service there. Yes, that is our privileged helper. Closeout settings and wait for the engine to start once again. So now we could go over here to images. We have our Jellyfin instance. So I'm gonna just go ahead and run this. Now under optional settings, you're gonna want to change some things here. So I'm gonna go Jellyfin. Here under host port, this is the public port. So actually being able to access it. So I'm just gonna copy what's over here in the private ports. So 89, what is that? 20. Just like that, now we have some volume paths. We're gonna add a second one. And for the host path, we are gonna select a config. So we're gonna go to Docker here and we're gonna make a new folder called Jellyfin. This is where we're gonna store our configuration.

Select that folder. This is gonna be at config. And then we're gonna go to the host path again, go back to our vault and data's right here. And you can see I added in a movies folder so we can actually kind of pull a library. So let's select the data folder and we're gonna place this in data. And environmental variables. This is where you like attach your GPU for hardware acceleration. You can add a bunch of different things here, specific networking, user permissions, lots of different things. For this quick demo, I'm not really gonna do any of that. I am just going to click on run. And then it's going to launch the container. We could see all the information. If there's any errors or anything, that's where you can see it. Additionally, we have inspect so we can see our full configuration here. We have our amount locations. You can access the terminal directly in this container. This we can see the files that the container can see, which we can see the data right there, which is good. And then over here, you can view the status. What it's running here, you can see it's really not using too much system resources, which is good. If we go back to logs, we could check to see if it is up and running, what it is.

So we are gonna access it. And to do that, we just need to head over to our web browser here. If you do remember the IP address for this machine is 6060. And this is our public port. So if I hit enter, and here we are. Welcome to Jellyfin, deploy language, English. Let's go ahead, fill out this really fast, and then go next. And we should be able to add our library. So here content type is gonna be movies. And then here under path, we can see our data folder and our movies folder. Got a couple things in there. Let's hit okay. And we have some more library settings, not gonna dive too far into that. Let's just hit okay. And then next, from here, select our regions, allow remote connections, automatic port mapping, continue and finish. Again, this is running on our local machine and not the server. You'll sign in. And there's only a couple movies, so it should have pulled them pretty quick and you can see them right there. You can see it's running pretty smooth. And even playing that media really isn't doing too much at all to our server.

So that's just an example of the services that you can easily spin up using something like Docker desktop. Now you may be wondering, how am I going to connect to this outside of my home? And to be quite clear, there are numerous ways to go ahead and do this. You can set up a VPN, you could set up reverse proxies and open up ports, but that's not really too secure. There are a few different zero trust clients that you could use, but for this case, we're gonna use twin gate one, of course, they're sponsoring this and two, they're what I would probably be using anyways. So I've quickly signed into twin gate here. I already use it. So you're gonna see a lot of different devices and resources. But it's a pretty simple process. There's a whole bunch of documentation, but first you set up your remote network. When you do that, you give a location, it's gonna be on premise, you give it a name. And then from there, you could go ahead and set up your connectors. So if I go to my remote network, open it up, you could see I have two connectors. One is on my Proxmox instance and one is in my Terra Master NAS. So for this, I'm gonna go ahead and add a connector, just so I can show you the first kind of launch up connector.

You can do this a lot of different ways. You run this through Docker, run it through Linux. For this case, we are gonna go with the Docker and let's go ahead and generate some tokens. We're gonna need to authenticate ourselves, give a quick sign in and there we go. We have our tokens. I'm gonna delete this connector, so don't try to use them. We do have some options here, but we can simply just grab this Docker run command. So here let's search twin gate and pull the connector. And when it's pulled, we could go over to our images here and we have our twin gate connector. So if we hit the start button under optional settings, we're gonna call this twin gate. And we don't actually need this whole command here. For example, if I see read our Docker compose, really we just need the network, the access token and the refresh token. So I'm gonna get our network, paste that as an environmental variable. We're gonna want two more of these, which one of them is going to be our access token, right there and then our refresh token, right there. I'm gonna scroll up a little bit and just copy these tokens, paste in our access token and then head over to our refresh token, give that a copy, paste that in and then our network is tech hut.

So we should be good. Let's go ahead and click on run and we can see it right here. The state is now online. So if we head back over here, we can see the connector is up. Cool. Now what I'm gonna do is add our Windows NAS as a service. So to do that, we are just going to go to resources here. It's a resource not a service. And you can see some of the stuff I already have passed through here. If I click on plus for the resource, this is gonna be Win NAS. IP address is at 66 and we're gonna add it to our main network. Now you can add various port restrictions if you'd like to. The default is to allow all ports, but for example, if I only wanted jellyfin, I'd pop that port in. If I only wanted SSH, I'd throw in port 22, but for now we're just gonna get full access and you don't have to get full access to everybody in your twin gate instance. You could pick your groups. So I have everybody and family. I'm gonna go ahead and give this to everybody and grant access. So now we could go ahead and test this out with my phone. I'll just disconnect from wifi. And you can see here, I am on the twin gate app.

These are all of the resources I have access to. I'm recording this separately and I did have to change the IP address. So you'll notice that. But if I go to something like my terminal application and then I access the NAS, you can see it's asking for the fingerprint. I'm gonna go ahead and continue. And there we are. You can see there, I am connected with a local IP without being on the local network. Additionally, we can access our jelly fin instance. So if you go 80, 96 for the port, you can see we have access to that. And next we have our RD client, which is the remote desktop client. I'm gonna have to edit this real quick, 34, save. And if I go ahead and try to access this, it is gonna prompt me for my information. It has a connection. It's asking us if we want to verify this certificate. And there we go. We have remote connection and you can see, we can mess around with just about anything in our new Windows NAS. So yeah, now we have a Windows machine, a Windows NAS running all the services that I would expect out of a NAS unit.

Granted, it is not the best platform to do this on, but like I said in the beginning of this video, if you have hardware, you're used to Windows, you like Windows, it's an option. Better yet, if you have a desktop PC that you actually use every day and you want it to have that NAS functionality, you could follow the shared folder steps, throw some extra hard drives in there and make a little raid instance. And of course, install Docker and have services running in the background. Disable sleep and it will keep running on your network. So then you could have Jellyfin and other fun services in your home network. And with TwinGate, you can connect to your home network externally and have a good old time. So with that, I do hope you enjoyed this video. Please check out my video of the top five server OSs I can promise you Windows is not in that video. Comment down below with any suggestions, tips and tricks or things I might've missed. It's much appreciated both to myself and the people in the comment section. And with all that, good.