I’m not sure you’ll get nice performance in local network with small appliances (consumer network hardware, mini PCs and rpi 4). I’ve never got sub-ms network disk access on 1Gbps switch and router over NFS. In the end I’ve done the opposite - I’ve added one k8s host with a lot of storage, and any storage services are deployed there. All the other k8s services rely on local SSDs.

There probably is a clever way that you could do it, but clever ways are easy to overstep, misconfigure and can be unreliable long-term.

Congratulations, now your „password” (the 512-byte random key file) is stored as plaintext on your machine :)

With rate-limiting, non-trivial passwords are not viable to be brute-forced, so making them larger just doesn’t give you much.