Access NAS shares from RPi?

Hi all,
I’m new to Riscos, and trying to get to grips with how to mesh it in with my existing home network.
Specifically I have a NAS (Seagate GoFlex Home) that all my other machines (Windows/MAC/Android/IOS) access to get to my music/videos etc.

I’d love to be able to play media files on this NAS on the RPi as it seems the ideal platform for movies etc, being connected permanently to the HDMI port of my TV.

Is LanManFS the way to go on this? I think they are shared as Samba shares, but the NAS also appears as a media device.
Cheers!

I’ve found the easiest way for this is to enable NFS on my NAS and use !Sunfish.

I have the appliaction visible from the filer in the boot sequence and then use a saved !Sunfish mount file in the startup so it pops up the NAS shares when it boots.

Only issue I’ve found it that !Sunfish is very CPU hungry when copying large amounts of data, not sure if this is some kind of USB contention but for playing MP3’s via !DigitalCD it’s splendid.

I use !omni to access a samba share. I use very simple user authentication (it’s just a small home network) but it just worked out of the box once I’d remembered what workgroup name I’d configured in smb.conf. If it helps at all, samba is running on another pi which is using raspbian.

Until now I just used !FTPc to access my Fritzbox NAS. Works ok, not that convenient though. Playing around with Omni however showed it was possible to mount smb shares locally. Much nicer! Unfortunately Omni tends to be a bit unstable on ARMv7. In the end I decided to cough up 40 quid and buy LanMan98 V2.

Hi Neil,
a quick search seems to suggest that !omni is just a front end. From your and Patric’s post it seems that might be out of date. Could you point me to the current version of Omni, and how I should install it?

Cheers!
Jon

I just used the version that came with the pi version of RISC OS – I’ve not updated it in any way, and it seems to be OK! I can read and write to the share, and I’ve not managed to break anything yet.

I’ve also been playing also with AccessPlusPy running on the same server (detailed on another thread here), which exports the same directory as a ShareFS share. This works nicely for the main part, and is slightly simpler to set up, but I’ve managed to break it a couple of times by giving it files with strange datestamps. My fault entirely, and I really should recreate this and pass the debugging information back.

Of the two options, I think I prefer ShareFS for simplicity. But I fully appreciate that this probably isn’t useful for you as it’s a python script running on a unix machine, rather than a NAS, that’s exporting the shares.

Ta,

Splendid! I’ll have a play tonight, thanks.

Hmm, with !Omni I can get to the point where I can tell my password for the NAS account is being accepted but it always says the share doesn’t exist.

The problem I suspect is that all the shares have white spaces in their names.
What’s the correct way to handle names with spaces? I’ve tried
“GoFlex Home Public” and Goflex\ Home\ Public to no avail.

mmm, I don’t have to enter the share name. Start !Omni, select “LanManager”, enter the workgroup name, user and password. I then get the server list (actually only the one) and when I select that, it takes me straight to advertised share. I’ll see if I can grab some screen shots tomorrow and upload them to the wiki. I can confirm through that neither the server name, nor the exported shares contain any white space.

I wonder if that’s the problem. I don’t have a workgroup as such. My network is just set up by a BT Homehub (which does appear under LanMan, but hasn’t got any resources). So I don’t have a username or password to enter.

Ah! Yes, I created a new share with a single name “JON” on the NAS and I can connect to that no problems. So now I just need to work out the white space issue (because the names of the shares are hardcoded and are used by the UPnP and DLNA)

Hi David,
I tried that but the RPi thinks the symlink is a file and won’t access it.

Hi All

Ive just joined RISC OS open forums after 2 years in the wilderness after my RiscPC suffered a double hard drive failure when I lost just about everything.
Now re-kitted with a Raspberry Pi, I am re-starting afresh trying to integrate it into my home network which includes a Seagate GoFlex NAS. As Jonathan found above, I can get to the point where I can tell my password for the NAS account is being accepted and the root share “GOFLEX_HOME” is recognised but the mount operation is not allowed. If I add to that “GoFlex Home Public” so the share entry reads… “\\GOFLEX_HOME\GoFlex Home Public” it then always says the share doesn’t exist. (I have tried forward “/” separators as well)

Is this an issue with long filenames or spaces in their names?

Did Jonathan find a solution?

I am struggling to understand the rest of the advice above! Simple terms please!

Thanks in anticipation!
Grant

I have take a look in the Manual
Why you not use FTPc (Patric take this question also). It works fine with my NAS (not a seagate). Samba works also but to slow.

Yes, I have tried FTPc and it works. I was hoping for a more elegant solution with a drive icon. I believe a NAS can accept data transfer as a preconfigured save path in applications.
I haven’t yet explored the possibilities but I dont think I can use FTP as a configured save path.

Going further, in theory, could RICCOS Rpi be made to boot from a NAS?

IIANM, RISC OS can, in theory, boot from all file-systems that are in the ROM including LanManFS.