Raspberry and external storage/disk

There is a post, link will follow below, from the Raspberry Org site which is very informativ and handles how to connect your external hard disk, SSD, or USB stick to any of the USB ports on the Raspberry Pi(RPi), and "mount" the file system to access the data stored on it. 

So there is no need for a rewrite and this post will therefore continue with how to connect to a Windows server, (Other SMB or Samba servers will also work), both temporary and automagically at boot. 

Check this post RPi booting from an USB drive !

USB connect

The link to the Raspberry site with connect information for external hard disk, SSD, or USB is found here!

Just some thoughts

• Before you connect the storage to the USB port on the RPi, check/format the storage with your PC/Mac 
• Just after you connected the storage to the USB port on the RPi run the command "dmesg" which will show you information about the device
• If you want to share the USB storage in the network use Samba. Configuration example below.

Server connect

The protocol for connecting to Windows or Samba servers are SMB, CIFS. 

In the same manner as you connect an USB storage to your RPi you "mount" a shared folder on a Windows server so it appears on your Raspberry Pi.

Mounting in Linux is the process of attaching a folder to a location, so we start with creating that location/directory on the RPi, logged on with user "pi"

mkdir windowshare

Manually "mount"

With remote server named "S01", in this case a RPi running Samba, with user "pi" and password "raspberry" issue the command 

sudo mount.cifs //S01/pi /home/pi/windowshare -o user=pi,password=raspberry

Check the remote server content with 

ls windowshare

Please note !! The command will by default use SMB version 1.0 and if your remote server is a Windows server you will probably get an error message.....

mount error(2): No such file or directory

or

mount error(22): Invalid argument

This is due to that the protocol, SMB1, is deprecated in "later" Windows server versions. (Not very informative error message !!) Instead test with SMB version 2.0 or higher. The command will then be 

sudo mount.cifs //S01/pi /home/pi/windowshare -o vers=2.0,user=pi,password=raspberry

where you substitute "//S01/pi" with the path to the Windows server shared folder

 

"mount" at boot

If the manually "mount" went OK then we will go on with "umount"

sudo umount /home/pi/windowshare

which will disconnect the remote server.

To "mount" the remote server at boot you have to edit the file "fstab" with 

sudo nano /etc/fstab

and add, at the end

//S01/pi /home/pi/windowshare cifs vers=2.0,user=pi,password=raspberry,x-systemd.automount 0 0

To test, without reboot, issue the command 

sudo mount -a

and check with 

ls windowshare

If OK do the reboot and check again. Please note that if the remote server goes down the RPi will automagically try to connect again. 

Security

If you don't want to expose the credentials in "fstab" you can "hide" them in a file, with

nano .smbcredentials

and add 

user=pi

password=raspberry

and then change the record in "fstab" to 

//S01/pi /home/pi/windowshare cifs vers=2.0,credentials=/home/pi/.smbcredentials,x-systemd.automount 0 0

To make it even more "secret" you can change owner/group with 

sudo chown root:root .smbcredentials

Remarks

This post on the Raspberry Org site can give additional info and these posts gave inspiration

to the solution

• Raspberry Stackexchange
• Unix Stackexchange

Samba config

Check the USB storage with "sudo blkid", mount with "sudo mount /dev/sda1 /media/extdisk" to the created directory "sudo mkdir /media/extdisk" and then add the following config to "smb.conf"

[Extdisk]

   comment = External disk

   read only = no

   locking = no

   path = /media/extdisk

   guest ok = no

Automatic mounting are descibed here.