What we will do:

In previously post we prepare, install, and make accessible our OMV 2.1 homeserver. Now we will make basic settings / options to use it as it’s one main-goal, share media across our internal home network. It will be not as heavy task as this OS was made for this target. Let’s start it.

Prepare VM:

At the moment, with one attached disk, we couldn’t start to share as I said in prev post, disk where OMV installed is just usable for system, not for share.

Hints:

 – On real hardware I NOT recommend to use USB-flash drive as OMV’s system disk. It is possible, some OMV plugin also help to decrease wear of it but not healthy solution. Use old, small (10;20;40GB) HDD.

 – Unnecessary to put to RAID system’s disk. You will store data on another disk. On this disk, just OS & configuration will be (with rsync or simply batch script you can make backup from these configuration-files, OMV plugins also can handle this task).

 – No need SSD. System’s disk usage will be low. For me in real life a HDD (5400rpm) was good enough to parallel-use (HD movie; torrent; copy; Plex Media Server;). Just data disk is in use!

Create new disk (share) for our VM:

Now our hardware get the new disk for share. Next steps are to make it visible for OS & start to use it. Please start your VM and login to it’s admin page.

Prepare OS:

Make visible / format newly added disk:

Like in every OS after you added a new disk for your system, it must to be formatted to make it visible. Please follow instructions below:

Now you can create shares, like samba or folder for torrents.

Samba share:

Samba is a network-share application under linux, which’s share can be accessible also from windows. This is the main-goal as this type of usage (access your files from windows) is common case. In our OS samba 3.6.6 is installed.

Hint: As OpenMediaVault is  complete prepared OS I do NOT recommend to update it’s components by hand. I tried to update Samba, but because lot of dependency my system was crashed, web-UI was not available. Update components just in case if it was appeared on web-UI as update package.

As in last picture can be seen, our samba share works. In case of problem, check samba log-files, located under /var/log/samba with less (if not in system, install it with apt-get install less). For example: less log.devops-pc

Install omvextras package (pre-requirement for other plugins):

OMV-extras package provide a lot of plugin for end-user, like torrent-client, dlna-server, plex and a lot of other cool stuff. The only “problem” that this package is not in official installation, it must to be added by hand. For this, please start an SSH-session, and follow the instructions / commands below:

cd /var/tmp/	#Stand to place where download package.
wget http://omv-extras.org/omvextras.deb	#Download package.
apt-get install apt-transport-https	#Try to install dependency.
apt-get -f install	#Workaround if prev. install failed.
dpkg -i omvextras.deb	#Install downloaded omvextras package.

If installation finished successfully, you will find a new menu-entry on web-interface of your OMV (refresh the page):

 – Differences from repository enabled by default is highlighted with yellow, I recommend these repositorys. These are contain everything which need to build multimedia server. Then new (and old-one also) plugins can be found under left-side’s “Plugins”.

Install transmission-bt as common linux torrent-client:

Transmission-bt is one of the mostly-used torrent-client on linux environment. It is a lightweight & rich client with web-interface, support magnet-links & It can watch given path for new torrent files to specify a few of features. As we previously installed omv-extras plugin, next steps can be done via web-UI easily, just follow instructions:

To start to use it, the following settings are enough. If you would like to watch folder for torrent-files, schedule speeds, create incomplete folder and like these, look around in settings tab.

Install Plex Media Server:

Plex Media Server is a very common media-application, which collect and sort your media-files (movies; series; musics; pictures;…) & broadcast it in your network, or to your remote device via internet! But not only just that: Download everything (extra-content, pictures; actors;subtitles;…) for your media-files, act as DLNA-server (TV without media player but with DLNA certificate) and like these. Nowadays this application is the best choose to organize, stream / play your media-files, so let start to install it, follow the pictures below.

Now plex is installed & running. Please register at plex and follow the instructions given by plex (It is very easy and this post cover, how to install. How to adjust / setup it is well-written by plex, easy task.)

Epilog:

Please keep in mind, that this blog-series’s target is to create PXE-boot-server (on next post you will get instructions for PXE-boot server prepare from this system) & we are working on virtual environment. For this reason every parameter was choosed as low as can, like hard disk drive’s size. Please before you start next post, remove plex and transmission-bt as you will not have enough disk to follow instructions (and why you need plex & torrent-client for a virtual machine? 🙂 It is just for test).

Hint: If you faced with issue when you try to login in web-UI (ship credentials, web-UI accept it, but send back to the login-page), start an SSH-session to your VM & check free-size with df -h . If you see 100% in one of the filesystem, you can remove from logs (cd /var/log) with rm -rf ./ * . After that you can login the web-UI & you can uninstall plex and transmission.