Difference between revisions of "Alx9r's Network Attached Storage Setup"

Revision as of 22:45, 14 June 2008

Alx9r's Sample Setup

System Diagram

I opted to use a built-in (sata connected) secondary media storage drive for my hybrid core.

Rationale

The two-drive scheme has three key qualities:

• The media drive can be formatted XFS so that LinuxMCE can "listen" for new media files that are copied to the drive. Other filesystems don't allow for this.
• Fresh installations of LinuxMCE can be put on the primary drive without losing media. If you have only a single drive, you need to use the custom partition installation which is somewhat less-supported
• Checkpoint images of the system drive can be copied to and restored from the media drive. This means that you can get my hybrid core working just right, and copy the system drive to my media drive. Once I've done that I can experiment with changes to my hybrid core until it is FUBAR, then simply copy the good version back to the system drive.

Folder Structure and Media (Pre-Installation)

Before installing LinuxMCE, I formatted my secondary media drive to the XFS filesystem using the gparted LiveCD. Then I created the standard LinuxMCE media drive folder structure on that drive. The structure looks like this:

public

|-data
   |-videos
   |-music
   |-pictures

Also before installation, I moved all of my media to the appropriate folder on the media drive.

Symlink and Permissions (Post-Installation)

Once LinuxMCE is installed, there are some steps that I performed to prepare the media drive: I created a symlink to the drive and set appropriate permissions to it.

I wanted the drive to be accessible as /media/bi (bi short for built-in). I created a symlink accordingly using this command:

ln -s /mnt/device/XX /media/bi

Where XX is some sort of ID number for the media drive that seems to change each time I install LinuxMCE.

I wanted the default user, linuxmce to be able to do things at will on that drive, so I made that user the owner:

sudo chown -R linuxmce /media/bi

Everyone should be able to delete, rename, and copy stuff to the public folder, so I changed the permissions accordingly:

chmod a+w -R /media/bi/public

These permissions pass through on the samba shares, which means that I can put stuff on the media drive folders from a Windows computer by browsing to \\mce\public^1. and logging in as a LinuxMCE user.

Footnotes

1. The string mce in the path \\mce\public is mapped in my router's hosts file. See my router setup for details.