I got a Raspberry Pi Model B. It’s cheap and I want to do some experiments for fun.
Experiment #1: I have a 1T external HDD (FAT) and I want to turn Raspberry into a very basic NAS.
I used:
- 1 External USB HDD (with external power supply)
- 1 ethernet cable CAT. 5 (10/100) or better
- 1 HDMI cable and monitor / tv
- 1 smartphone microusb battery charger
- 1 SDHC (for the OS)
- Raspbian “wheezy” (tested on 2012-08-16 release)
- 1 modem router for connectivity (4 port)
- 1 Windows PC plugged to the router
I flashed Raspbian into a class 10 SDHC, I follow this useful howto about to turn on HDMI instead of TV and voilà, I got a down-scaled debian system into a silent, little board that I charge with the smartphone charger via microusb (5V, 700mA).
I plug a wireless mouse and keyboard on the first USB port, and then I plug my external drive on the second. Debian read the FAT partition well (mounted on /media/MYDRIVE), but now I have to turn it into a wannabe-NAS.
Shall we dance? With Samba!
I plug the RJ-45 ethernet connector from my modem router into the Raspberry Pi and I follow this howto in Italian.
$ is a pi console (Start > Accessories > LXTerminal)
# is a root console (Start > Accessories > Root terminal)
# adduser guest --home=/home/public --shell=/bin/false --disabled-password # sudo chmod -R 0700 /home/public # chown -R guest.guest /home/public $ sudo apt-get install samba smbfs
Then I have a new user “guest” with no password authentication. The howto covers the creation of a shared home (/home/public) but I do something slightly different (WORKGROUP is my local network name):
editing /etc/samba/smb.conf
## Browsing/Identification ### # Change this to the workgroup/NT-domain name your Samba server will part of workgroup = WORKGROUP ####### Authentication ####### security = share obey pam restrictions = yes guest account = guest invalid users = root
And now the most interesting part:
[MYDRIVE] comment = Mydrive read only = no locking = no path = /media/MYDRIVE guest ok = yes force user = pi
Where /media/MYDRIVE is the path to your external usb drive.
And then:
# /etc/init.d/samba restart
to apply.
As this howto explains, the “force user” allows a user (i.e. guest) to get the files from a device mounted by another user (i.e. pi, the default raspbian user).
Have fun
Now on the Windows machine on the Network panel I look for RASPBERRYPI and inside it I find the “mydrive” folder, with all the files from MYDRIVE within. I play a 720p video without slowdown. And so, the cheap NAS experiment is successfully completed.
chirale 
13 responses to “Turn Raspberry into a small NAS with samba”
[…] manuales para la Raspberry pi me encontré con uno sencillo para configurar Debian como NAS y poder compartir de esta forma las […]
nice one !
was wondering another thing
did you try using an USB hub and connecting 2 or more external hard drives ?
I would assume i’ll need to ‘mount’ the two hard drives separately i.e. having two mydrive folders ?
Not yet but yes, you have to add a new section to smb.conf using a different mount point and a different header. So change Mydrive into something else on the second declaration. Be careful not to drain too much power from the Pi, I suggest you to plug only externally powered devices. Thank you for reading!
[…] wrote an article about transforming Raspberry Pi into a NAS to share files on a local network with an external usb storage: see technical details there, for […]
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Thank You, very useful article!
Lele.
simple and straightforward, works like a charme. Thanks a lot!
Awesome stuff!!! Thanks!!! Any Idea on getting it to list on AllShare?
I find this article: http://blog.scphillips.com/2013/01/using-a-raspberry-pi-with-android-phones-for-media-streaming/ and the key seems to be: apt-get install minidlna, this user successfully used it on a Samsung TV: http://sourceforge.net/projects/minidlna/forums/forum/879956/topic/6603472
Let me know if this solve this issue, it may be useful for others.
I just writed a post dedicated to this topic: https://chirale.wordpress.com/2013/04/10/listen-to-your-music-and-play-video-from-your-raspberrypi-nas-using-dlna/. Reading this you should be able to get AllShare listing your contents, since it’s a DLNA-compatible protocol. Have fun.
[…] Supposing you’ve already a RaspberryPi NAS: […]
Hi there,
Thanks fot his post. I’ve been starting using this method a few weeks ago and it worked fine. Now, I’ve got a crash when I was in vacation : samba was not running anymore when I came back home (pidof samba returns nothing). I don’t know if the power has been cut or not. How can I find a crash report? I saw on the smb.conf that there is a script /usr/share/samba/panic-action that should have been executed. Unfortulately, I don’t know the script language and don’t understand where the infos have been sent. Thanks for help.
Thank you for reading and commenting. Logs are usually stored in /var/log/samba/ you’ll probably find a hint about what happens inside that directory typing: “sudo bash” and then “less +G /var/log/samba/filename-to-read”.