Raspberry Pi Forums

Hi

I'd like to use the RPi as a NAS / server. At the moment I already have an external USB HDD of 2 TB and I'd like to connect it to the RPi and use it on my other devices.

Now, which distro and which programs should I use?

I'm really looking for something that's similar to the typical Synology devices: FTP server, Samba server (I have some Windows computers that should be able to access it), WebDAV (to access it over the internet with my ubuntu notebook - is there a better solution?), media server (with DLNA if possible) etc.

In my family we have Windows computers, ubuntu computers and a few Android devices. I hope to be able to access all my music, movies, documents and photos from anywhere (over the internet or in the local network) on any device (Windows, ubuntu, Android).

It would be awesome if I get DLNA working because then I can stream to my Samsung Smart TV. If that's impossible, I'll buy another RPi and put something like XMBC for Raspberry Pi on it and connect it to my tv.

Thanks in advance!

I"m doing something very similar on an ARM nettop.

I haven"t done FTP yet, son can"t help on that one. Shouldn"t be hard though.

There are ARM versions of SAMBA, check your distro's repo (with apt-get, yum…). Word of advice: copy and paste a barebones 10-line config file, don"t even try to understand it, and don"t mess with anything else. Samba is quite slow, apparently there are bugs, general suckiness, and config subtleties… I couldn"t ascertain what those are for my specific config. dlna is much lighter on the server, so try to use that as much as possible.

For dlna, UKScone nicely helped me compile minidlna (http://sourceforge.net/project...../minidlna/), which works fine on the whole. No transcoding, and occasional deletes/rebuilds of the db required. Puts all the shared folders at the root level, so I ended up creating a dlna folder, and filling it with aliases to my media"s folders, so I"d get a nice Films in English, Films in French… tree in the dlna browser, like on my disk, instead of both French, US and all other media mixed together in a huge root one.  xbmc and the latest VLC are the only 2 dlna players I could find on Windows; xbmc has trouble with dual-screen configs or even non-full screen mode, so I"m using VLC.

If you"re a linux noob like I am,

- remember to always check file/folder permissions. Weird error messages often mean  you can"t modify/read/run some file somewhere.

- make the extra effort to put all you config files and scripts in the same place, like home/$user/Config. Saves some hair pulling when you want to go back and tweak stuff 2 weeks later, only to find the config file is not where the doc says it should be, but there are 3 other ones in other places.

- never assume the documentation you found is relevant for your brand and version of Linux.

And general reminder: don"t forget backups. It not about *if*, but *when*, a hardware, software, user, environment .. issue will nuke your disk. rsync kinda works for backups, though my variant of Linux chokes on heavy USB traffic, as the Pi's seems to, too, at least for now.

Thanks for your advice, it's much appreciated!

I stumbled upon this: http://sourceforge.net/apps/ph.....erry#p2674

If the plugins (DLNA is available) for OpenMediaVault are compatible with ARM, than this could be what I'm looking for.

What are your thoughts on this?

It seems a nice pre-made solution. My concern is that the Pi will be using tweaked versions of Linux (see all the work being done right now on solving performance, reliability, compatibility… issues). Unless OMV goes to the trouble to integrate those fixes or re-do them, I'm not quite sure OMV will run very well on the Pi. The safe route would be to start off a Pi-validated (custom ?) distro, and add whatever programs you want to that.

The guy OMV does warn that getting Debian to run can be a challenge ^^