Quintic

Introduction

A friend on mine venerable windows File Server of 23 years gave up the ghost the other day – power supply / motherboard communication issues. And as my friend said – it isnt really worth looking to fix it, not with component sof that age. So, knowing that i used raspberry Pi for my Web and Email server he asked me about using a raspberry Pi as a NAS.

Well I must admit, my experience of using the Pi as Web & Email servers is great. They are stable, reliable, easy to upgrade, not power hungry, and take up no room. So I though why not. Let’s investigate.

A quick search on the Pi sites came up with OpenMediaVault. This is a Debian based NAS available for x86-64 and ARM platforms, and, more importantly, there are detailed instructions on installing on a RaspberryPi here

So, I thought I would give it a go. I had a spare Pi4 and a 120Gbyte SSD lying around. What a perfect way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

And at this stage I wish to ackowledge and give credit to Patrick Fromget whose installation instructions here I followed and found to be extremely good.

Setting up Pi

Creating Image

The Raspberry documentation on installing OMV notes that OMV will nolonger install on an O/S with a GUI – so it’s terminal time, and that means removing the existing O/S on my Pi4 and replacing it iwth Lite.

These days though this is a piece of cake.

Install Raspberry Pi Imager on PC.
Stick SD card into a USB adapter and insert into USB port.
Fire off Raspberry Pi Imager – select Sd card and Pi OS LITE (64 bit)

Now more experienced Pi’ers would have said “Click on the settings button” I didn’t, but we will come back to that later.

This created the image. Insert into Pi, and fire it up.

All worked OK except I am using a TV screen as my monitor, and the Pi seems to think its screen is bigger in both width and height, as a consequence I could not read the current line or the first 3 characters of every line that I could see. Tried raspi-config to see it I could adjust screen size / resolution, but no go when using a TV screen with HDMI. Bit of a pain, but then all I needed to do was set up WiFi & SSH and I could then resort to PUTTY.

Setting up WiFI & SSH

Quick check on the internet on setting up WiFi using terminal only – that was when I relased that the Settings Button on RapberryPi Imager allows you to, amongst other things, set-up Hostname, WiFi, SSH, and Users as part of the image creation process. Oh well – you live and learn. In the meantime its back into

raspi-config
System Options
- Wireless LAN – Enter SSID and passphrase
Interface Options
- Enable SSH

Entered SSID and password/passphrase. I also set the hostname at the same time; exited and then a quick: ifconfig wlan0 to check IP address. No IP address. Checked the file /etc/wpa_supplicant and the correct entry was their. However I had entered the SSID in lowercase. Now I have always selected the Wifi SSID from a drop-down, so I had not realised that SSIDs were Case Sensitive

Reboot

I now have an IP address and can open up Putty on my PC and connect.

Adding SSD Drive

OpenMediaVault

Installing

OMV is not available as a package as in sudo apt get omv does NOT work. However they do provide a script to download and install

wget -O - https://github.com/OpenMediaVault-Plugin-Developers/installScript/raw/master/install | sudo bash

Executed the above script and OMV did install. It took about 10 mins, and the end it executes a reboot. All well and good, except no network connection. Tried to use raspi-config to reset the WiFi and recieved a “No supported network connection manager found” error.

My first thoughts were I had screwed it up with the SSID being incorrect case, so I re-imaged the SD card and reloaded OMV. Only took 15 mins so no big deal, and this time I set Hostname, SSID, and SSH within the Pi Imager.

Result however was the same. Quick search using Duck Duck Go brought up a number of reports about the same issue on the OMV support web site. However these reports were from 2020 – 3 years ago. I couldn’t imagine that the problem had persisted for this length of time.

I did wonder if it was a WAN vs LAN issue, but a couple of the reports mentioned the same problem with LAN set-ups. Luckily one response suggested running omv-firstaid. Now there were no further details, and the person who reported the issue said that omv-firstaid didn’t help, but i thought I would give it a go.

omv-firstaid is a bit like raspi-config, except each action is a one-off.

However option 1 allows you to configure the network interface, and within this you can set-up LAN or WAN or both. With the WAN set-up, checked ifconfig wlan0 and we had an ipaddress. So now I could login using Putty.

Configuration

Configuring OMV is a bit more long-winded than I had thought, but as long as you follow the instructions it is not complicated. All the configuration is via the

Documentation

OpenMediaVault

Detailed instructions here

Step:

Install Raspberry Pi Imager
From Imager select Raspberry Pi OS Lite – Doesn’t have a GUI. All Terminal based.
Use the Setting options to
- Name Pi device
- Allow SSH (For Putty)
- Set WiFi SSID & password (if WiFi required)
Write Image to microSD card.
Insert card and start Pi.
By using the Pi Imager you probably have the latest everything, but still worth doing sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

Install OpenMediaVault – wget -O - https://github.com/OpenMediaVault-Plugin-Developers/installScript/raw/master/install | sudo bash
At this point Network will have been lost. (At least if WiFi it will have been)Need to:
- sudo omv-firstaid
- re-instate network
- Also good idea to re-set admin password
Check network working – ifconfig – should have an IP address
Attempt to login-in to OpenMediaVault Workbench by:
- http://hostname or ip address/
- User: Admin
- Passsword: openmediavault – unless changed earlier (MINIalfa)
Hopefully the workbench web-site will be up and running. If so we now need to:
- Add Users (openmediavault does not use the system users)
  - Settings>Users – Click Add
- Configure the Shared Drive
  - Storage>Disks – Ensure the disk you want it visible.
  - Storage>File Systems – Click create
  - Choose your device and the file format (ext4)
  - Storage>Shared Folders – Create Folders and give required permissions
- Configure the Services
  - Services>SMB/CIFS
  - Click the Enable Checkbox at top of screen
  - If you want set the Workgroup to match Windows – though this doesn’t seem to make much difference
  - Service>Shares – Selected the Folder(s) created above and Enable Sharing