Adding a USB hard drive to my laptop server

[galoisienne2]

Could some point in the right direction and perhaps give me some pointers on installing a hard drive on my laptop server which runs Amahi 7 (Fedora 19).

I'm expecting this should be fairly straightforward, but just in case there are some details to worry about, I wanted to post here:

I have approximately 300+ Gb on this machine and I wanted to beef that up to a 1 Tb.

It's a laptop, and so I think the easiest thing to do is to add a USB type hard drive. So following successful install, I'd have the original hard drive and a second driven, namely, the new USB drive available to the server.

Is this easy to do ? Do I need to install drivers, or, do I just plug in the hard drive and reboot ?

OTOH, I could always go out and purchase a tower machine with the requisite hd space and put my laptop out again as just a client (not preferred).

Thanks for any tips or wiki references. I found these, but one says, advanced users only:

https://wiki.amahi.org/index.php/Adding ... o_your_HDA

Thanks

[bigfoot65]

The wiki guidance is the best to follow. There is no simple process to adding it that am aware.

Should be able to plug it in and run hda-diskmount. Think there might be something in the wiki about USB drives too.

[ Post made via Android ]

[galoisienne2]

OK, I will approach it cautiously (and perhaps eventually give up and just go with buying a bigger box, and putting the laptop back out into service as a client).

I've started reading the wiki. Any reason to think that the wiki may not completely apply to the newer Amahi 7 (Fedora 19) system ?

What if I just installed Fedora on a virtual box and tested it there ? I know it's not Amahi (just Fedora), but assuming the process and steps are largely going to be the same (?), I could add a hard drive that way in a relatively risk free way (given that I'm v. far from expert). If I'm reasonably successful in adding a drive in the virtual environment, I can proceed with the real thing. I have the luxury of some time - not in a great hurry.

That said, I've followed the first few steps in the wiki with the following results:

[padmin@localhost /]$ ls -1 /dev/disk/by-id/ | egrep -v "part|scsi"
ata-HL-DT-ST_DVDRAM_GSA-T20N_KZ187471208
ata-WDC_WD3200BEVT-60ZCT0_WD-WXE408HY3233
wwn-0x50014ee0ab61d507

[padmin@localhost /]$ sudo fdisk -l /dev/sda2
Disk /dev/sda2: 261.7 GB, 261681577984 bytes, 511096832 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes

I had no idea what my drives were named, but the HDA and the Linfo app gave enough hints for me to try "/dev/sda2" in the fdisk command.

Any thoughts appreciated; will keep apprised of how it all goes. Thanks and regards

[galoisienne2]

OK. I'm clueless. Just noticed that the purpose of those two commands (fdisk and the ls -l) is to check the status of the of the newly added hard drive (which I haven't purchased yet).

[galoisienne2]

In addition, there's the issue of the Amahi Shares and OS: The Amahi system (7.1), shares, etc etc would continue to be used on the original smaller hard drive and the new 1T would be used for storage. That's fine. But what about things like the DLNA server ? Doesn't the DLNA server only look at some of the Amahi Shares (Music, Movies). If I'm storing the majority of video files on the newly added drive 1Tb, wouldn't those video files have to be moved or copied into those Music or Movies Shares on the original drives to be used by the DLNA server ?

This begs a more general question, about whether the Amahi system should be installed on the much larger drive. Any thoughts appreciated. Just trying to make a well-informed decision before proceeding.

Thanks again.

[bigfoot65]

You can move your shares to the larger drive and then update the path in the dashboard for each. You can also point DLNA to any samba folder and restart it if needed.

When the USB drive is mounted, it will have a different mount name. Something like sda will be the OS drive typically. The key is to figure out what the mount point will be for the USB.

Did you check the wiki?
https://wiki.amahi.org/index.php/HowTo_use_USB_disks

[galoisienne2]

I used the following link, earlier on, and managed to mount the drive which I now have read/write access to via terminal:

https://wiki.amahi.org/index.php/Adding ... o_your_HDA

The new drive is mounted here:
/var/hda/files/drives/drive1

Is there a simple way to make this accessible as an additional share ?

I read thru that short usb-related wiki you mentioned, and maybe it's just terminology, but I couldn't understand what it was getting at. Does that allow me access to this newly mounted drive as a share. As I say, I can access it via terminal (ssh), but ideally, I'd like to be able to click on it via Finder in the way I am able to do with the shares, which makes life easy for PDF and video files.

Perhaps the solution is elsewhere: Is there a graphical interface available for install, with access to all the drives, for example ?

What's the preferred route. I'd just like efficient access to this new volume.

Many thanks!

[bigfoot65]

Yes, create a share in the Shares tab and add that path. You may have to create the share first, then edit the path once it's created.

[galoisienne2]

OK. Did that. I can now see the new share in my mac Finder window and I tested it by successfully playing a video by clicking on the file in Finder.

Regarding your earlier advice about "point[ing] DLNA to any samba folder and restart it if needed." How do I point to DLNA?

From the DLNA wiki I see this. The problem is, I don't know what is meant by the USERNAME. I tried my HDA login username, but I don't think it wants that. I took a guess and tried "admin" and it took that but it didn't allow me to make the new share visible to DLNA.

Here's the path of the new share I'm trying to make visible to DLNA: /var/hda/files/drives

Here's the section from the DLNA wiki that I was using:

Ownership/Permissions Issues

If you have problems where DLNA cannot see some files, it may be due to some ownership/permissions issues. You can do this (change the path and USERNAME accordingly):
bash code
​cd /var/hda/files/movies && chown -R USERNAME:users *​
NOTE:
Some Amahi applications that share the same media files require specific ownership/permissions to media directories and files.

In the case of Fedora the following could apply:

bash code
​cd /var/hda/files/
chown -vR apache:users movies
chmod -vR 775 *
cd movies
chmod -vR 775 *​

Thanks

[bigfoot65]

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

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.