Mobile Network File Server
The Omega’s firmware has packages available for a file sharing server program called Samba. By plugging in a USB storage device, you can turn your Omega into a mobile network file server!
Overview
Skill Level: Intermediate
Time Required: 20 minutes
This project will walk through how to set up an external storage device, configure a Samba server on the Omega, and how to access it from other operating systems.
Sample Configuration files
The Onion samba-server-config GitHub repository contains reference configuration files in case you need to troubleshoot your setup.
Ingredients
- Onion Omega2 or Omega2+
- Any Onion Dock to power the Omega
- We like the Mini Dock if you plan to keep it one place.
- Use the Power Dock if you plan to make this a truly portable network storage device.
- A USB storage device or Micro SD card (for Omega2+)
Step-by-Step
Let’s turn your Omega into a portable network attached storage, or NAS for short!
1. Setup your Omega
You’ll need an Omega2 ready to go, complete the First Time Setup Guide to connect your Omega to WiFi and update to the latest firmware.
If you need to hook up the Omega to a new network, connect to the command line and use the wifisetup utility:
root@Omega-0104:/# wifisetup
Onion Omega Wifi Setup
Select from the following:
1) Scan for Wifi networks
2) Type network info
q) Exit
Selection:Follow the instructions to scan for WiFi networks and connect to your router’s network.
2. Set up your Storage Device
You can share any directory on your Omega through Samba. For this project, we’ll assume you have a USB storage device or microSD. Both of these devices will be automatically mounted at /tmp/mounts.
Usually, a USB device is mounted under /tmp/mounts/USB-A1, but you can make sure by calling:
ls /tmp/mountsThe directories listed should all correspond with auto-mounted devices.
Copy down the full path to your storage device (/tmp/mounts/USB-A1 worked for us) - we’ll need this to configure Samba.
For a detailed walk-through on how to use storage devices, take a look at the guide to USB Storage and MicroSD Cards on the Onion Docs.
3. Install the Required Software
We’ll need Samba for this, naturally. Samba’s name occasionally changes with versioning changes, to check what it is, we can do:
opkg update
opkg list | grep samba
opkg install samba##-serverAt time of writing, Samba is at version 36, so we can install it like so:
opkg install samba36-server4. Find the Omega’s WiFi card
By default, Samba does not listen to Omega’s WiFi for incoming access requests. We’ll need to let Samba know which interface it should listen on to get requests for its data.
The Omega communicates with other networks through the apcli0 interface. Note that down for later!
If you’d like to see for yourself, use
ifconfigto list all the interfaces available. Here’s an example of that the output will look like:root@Omega-E755:~# ifconfig apcli0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr AA:AA:AA:AA:AA:AA inet addr:192.168.1.109 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 inet6 addr: fe80::40a3:6bff:fe00:e755/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:13787 errors:0 dropped:3 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:5953 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:3197266 (3.0 MiB) TX bytes:602257 (588.1 KiB) br-wlan Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr AA:AA:AA:AA:AA:AA inet addr:192.168.3.1 Bcast:192.168.3.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 inet6 addr: fe80::42a3:6bff:fec0:e757/64 Scope:Link inet6 addr: fd1d:48c4:7633::1/60 Scope:Global UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:456 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:746 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:58973 (57.5 KiB) TX bytes:88296 (86.2 KiB) ... ...We see
apcli0is the interface with the mostRX bytesandTX bytes, meaning it’s being doing the most communication. Additionally, it has an IP Address (see theinet addr) that corresponds to a LAN - starting with192.168.1.
4. Configure Samba
For Samba to start sharing our folders, it needs to know where, how, and who. It gets all these details from configuration files. Specifically, /etc/config/samba and /etc/samba/smb.conf.template.
First let’s open up /etc/config/samba with our editor. It should look a little like this:
config samba
option 'name' 'Lede'
option 'workgroup' 'WORKGROUP'
option 'description' 'Lede'
option 'homes' '1'These fields are all customizable options that change how the Samba server behaves.
We recommend changing name option to your Omega’s Omega-ABCD name (where ABCD are the bolded numbers on your Omega’s cover) for easy recognition. The other options should be left as-is, and the description option can be changed to something helpful.
Next, we’ll add in a line like this:
option 'interface' 'apcli0'This tells Samba it should listen on the apcli0 interface, this sets up Samba to accept connections. We just need to let it know the location of our shared folder.
To declare a new shared folder, we’ll append a block to the end like this:
config 'usbshare'
option 'name' 'usb'
option 'path' '/tmp/mounts/USB-A1'
option 'users' 'root'
option 'read_only' 'no'
option 'guest_ok' 'no'The main configurations that are needed are the name, path, and users:
- The
namewill be the name that appears devices accessing it. - The
pathis the directory (or file) you want to share. - Setting
read_onlytonowill mean that anyone accessing the shared folder can change its contents - While having
guest_okset tonomeans access is only granted after authentication.
The
/etc/config/sambafile is a Universal Configuration Interface (UCI) file, LEDE uses it to simplify configuration of system services.
Next, we’ll have to fiddle with /etc/samba/smb.conf.template. Opening it with our editor will greet us with this:
[global]
...blah
...blah
enable core files = no
guest ok = yes
invalid users = root
load printers = no
...blahWe’ll have to change one thing here since we’ll be accessing the shared folder/s as root:
invalid users = #And now Samba is ready to go!
More Options
Samba has a ton of configuration features that allow you to micromanage who gets access to what. For a bit more detail on how Samba works, LEDE has an excellent guide on configuring Samba. For a lot more detail on how Samba works, Using Samba is available to explain the nitty-gritty details.
5. Users and passwords
To allow access, we’ll have to set up passwords any user we specified - since we only used root, we can call smbpasswd like so:
smbpasswd -a rootThis utility will create a root Samba account associated with the root account of the operating system. You’ll be prompted to enter a new password for use with Samba.
6. Applying our changes
Samba needs to be restarted for our configuration to apply. We can do this with:
/etc/init.d/samba restartNow we’re ready to check out our file share!