Adding a USB hard drive to my laptop server

[galoisienne2]

You edit the minidlna.conf file as specified in the wiki. Add the path you want as the example shows. Then restart minidlna.

Will give that a try now.

I would caution you about pointing it to such a generic path. It should point to a specific folder like music or movies. There is typically a lot of non-media files in /var/hda/files/drives folder.

Regarding that, could I just create a subdirectory within the "drives" folder and call it "sdbMovies", say, and make that the path specified in the .conf file ? (i.e., specify /var/hda/files/drives/sdbMovies). That's what I'm going to attempt.

Thanks again for all your help

[bigfoot65]

Yes that would be better. Glad to be of assistance.

[galoisienne2]

OK. All .conf file modified with following line added:

media_dir=V,/var/hda/files/drives/sdbMovies

which points it to /var/hda/files/drives/sdbMovies.

One question: How do I restart the DLNA server as you mentioned. I looked thru the wiki and didn't see anything specific. I also searched the forums, and there was much discussion about restarting DLNA, I didn't see specific directions except this, which may be dated from a 2009 post. I got an error when I issued it, viz:

sudo service amahi-dlna restart
[sudo] password for panoadmin:
Redirecting to /bin/systemctl restart amahi-dlna.service
Failed to issue method call: Unit amahi-dlna.service failed to load: No such file or directory. See system logs and 'systemctl status amahi-dlna.service' for details.

Must be very basic, b/c no one talks about how it's done

[bigfoot65]

Code: Select all

​systemctl restart minidlna.service​

[galoisienne2]

Thanks. That did it just fine.

From your post, looks like that came from a wiki, but I checked (again) the DLNA wiki, and I didn't see that particular line (saw one or two that were close, like status (not restart)--tho I've been known to stare right past stuff. Can you let me know where it's from. I'd like to look that over for future reference.

[bigfoot65]

It was not in the wiki. Probably should be though. It came from my head LOL