"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." (Robert A. Heinlein)

Thursday 25 June 2015

More work on the Raspberry PI


I've been working a little more on my Raspberry PI based server. After installing Minidlna server my Raspberry PI server needed some easy way to transfer media files into the USB disk. Sharing the disk with Samba has been, to me, the obvious solution. Also I installed the basis of a LAMP server (Apache2, MySQL, PHP5) for future installation of server applications.

Sharing a disk with Samba

The first step has been so installing samba from command line apt-get


sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install samba samba-common-bin
then I edited samba configuration file
sudo vim.tiny /etc/samba/smb.conf
where I added the definition instructions for sharing the USB disk
[usbdisk]
comment = Raspberry PI USB disk
path = /media/usbdisk
browsable = yes
guest ok = yes
read only = no
create mask = 0777
directory mask=0777
public= yes
only guest = no
force user = pi
force group = users
To keep things on the easy-to-use side I set the share for a public “guest” use without asking for passwords. Since my Raspberry server is still in a experimental status I don't have, not yet at least, many security worries to think about.
I tested the configuration with the testparm command
testparm /etc/samba/smb.conf
and eventually restarted the samba service.
sudo service samba restart