hpr4136 :: Pi Samba Share
Setting up a Samba share on your Pi for when your streaming services are down
Hosted by Kevie on 2024-06-10 is flagged as Clean and is released under a CC-BY-SA license.
Pi, media, server, samba.
1.
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general.
We live in a time where everything is streamed; from our TV, radio, podcasts everything is fine until the internet goes down. Gone are the days of simply turning on the TV with a set top aerial. With this in mind, I set up an old Raspberry Pi 2 and connected it to use as a video and music server through a Samba share.
To complete this task you will need:
- A Raspberry Pi
- A micro-SD card
- An Ethernet cable
- An external hard drive (min 2TB recommended)
Step 1: Update your Pi software in the terminal:
sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade
Step 2: To allow us to share our files over a network we will install Samba:
sudo apt install samba
Step 3: To find UUID and the file system of the drive, enter:
sudo blkid
Ignore the line with fat32
, this is your Micro-SD
card.
Step 4: We need to mount this drive automatically whenever the Raspberry Pi is switched on. Firstly, we'll need to create a location to mount the external hard drive, we can do this by using the command:
sudo mkdir /media/external
Step 5: Now we need to edit the fstab to tell the Raspberry Pi to automount the external drive every time it is switched on
sudo nano /etc/fstab
Insert the following line at the bottom of the page:
UUID="{the UUID you noted down in step 3}" /media/external {type noted in step 3} auto,user,rw 0 0
The above should all be on one line, pressing the tab key to create a gap between each piece of information.
Step 6: Now we need to set up which folders are going to be shared. I'll assume that we are going to make the whole of the external drive available over the network
sudo nano /etc/samba/smb.conf
At the bottom of the page add the following, note that you can call this anything you wish, just exchange the word external but you must include [ ]:
[external]
path = /media/external
available= yes
browsable = yes
public = yes
writable = yes
It's worth noting before we continue that I've set the option
writable = yes
, this means that you can add to or remove
the contents of the external drive over the network. If you are not
comfortable having this option then simply change it to
writable = no
. Now save and exit (ctrl + X), make sure that
you answer 'yes' to save your changes.
Step 7: We will now set the Raspberry Pi to log in automatically on startup, if the user Pi isn't logged in then all of things we've just set up will not work. Type:
sudo nano /etc/inittab
Navigate down to the line:
1:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty --noclear 38400 tty1
and add --autologin pi
after getty
to make
the line:
1:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty --autologin pi --noclear 38400 tty1
Save and exit (ctrl + X) make sure that you answer 'yes' to save it.
Step 8: We can try it out our system and auto-login by using the command
sudo reboot
Assuming that everything goes well, your system should be up and running. Try and find it on a computer through the file manager. I personally recommend saving the Pi location on Kodi for an easy to use solution for browsing your media on a TV.