I have two Pis running OSMC and trying to transfer files between them is driving me insane. On the first Pi, I have Samba setup and it shows the drives fine. On the second one, Samba is setup, but can’t browse it at all. Whenever I try to access it, the connection fails. I didn’t really want to use Samba to transfer them, but viewing through a Windows Explorer window would be nice. Anything to check here? Outside of turning on debugging log, I’m lost as to why this one isn’t working and the other one is. (Yes, it’s been rebooted, several times)
What I did want to use to transfer files is FTP. That’s fine and good except by default it only allows access to the user home directory which isn’t helpful at all being the media files are on external hard drives. How does one overcome this? I could configure vsftp to allow root, which on my LAN would be no biggie, but this isn’t the kosher solution. I imagine I could create a link in the home dir to /media but that just doesn’t seem like the best solution. Any ideas?
Yes, I’ve seen plenty of posts about NFS where people have had a lot of issues with it, just as well. Why would I like to trade a set of problems that I’m semi-familiar with for a set that I have little experience with? NFS might be better, but if FTP is going to be in the App store, it should at least be usable,
Minor update… Although Samba was installed on the second pi, for some reason it wasn’t started. So now I’ve started it and I can browse the home directory, nothing else. I have again remove and readded the external drive and rebooted it several times to try to get this to work.
On the FTP side, I finally just added a symlink which seems to be working okay. Any other suggestions for a better way to resolve this would be appreciated.
If you don’t want to consider using linux native NFS, then consider using scp. Avoid the Windows reverse engineered SAMBA. It just isn’t as stable.
Most problems with NFS are network problems. I’ve personally been using it for years, with 0 problems. And I use it a lot. Most of my files are stored on a Pi 2, and shared via NFS to 2 other Pis (one running OSMC the other running Ubuntu Mate) and a laptop (running Linux Mint).
I used to work where we had a large number of Windows systems (500+) and Unix systems (1000+). And the problem calls for SMB were about 10 times the calls for NFS problems. For 1/2 the systems.
@Morte I got FTP working with a symlink, as I mentioned above. The downside here is that the pi receiving the files isn’t playing a video, isn’t doing anything, other than receiving the file, and yet it becomes unresponsive to the web and CLI interface. Another woe to iron out…
Just to clarify, SAMBA is a re-engineered version of the Windows SMB protocol. As usual, M’soft feel free to change the Windows version which gives rise to some problems. Further, the SAMBA versions have differences, the practical effect of which are not always clear to me.
Derek