Load Me Up, Load Me Down

Mounting It from Linux

Using the Media Vault from a Linux box on a heterogeneous network is dead easy, so long as you have the relevant Samba packages installed. You'll need SMBFS support and Samba client support if you want to set your Media Vault shares to mount to your filesystem at bootup. In order to pull this off, I had to do a little detective work to discover the share names to plug in to fstab.

I used smbclient -L hpmediavault to grab the following shares list from the Media Vault:

Domain=[HPMEDIAVAULT] OS=[Unix] Server=[Samba 3.0.25b]

        Sharename       Type      Comment
        ---------       ----      -------
        Photos          Disk      Default_Photos
        Music           Disk      Default_Music
        Videos          Disk      Default_Videos
        Backup          Disk      Default_Backup
        Documents       Disk      Default_Documents
        IPC$            IPC       IPC Service (HPMediaVault Server)
Domain=[HPMEDIAVAULT] OS=[Unix] Server=[Samba 3.0.25b]

        Server               Comment
        ---------            -------

        Workgroup            Master
        ---------            -------

Because there isn't a default ubershare, you'll have to add one line to your fstab for each share. So long as you have the proper Samba support installed, from here on out it's very easy. For each share, add a line as follows:

//hpmediavault/sharename /your/mountpoint/here smbfs 
 ↪username=username,password=password,user,defaults 0 0

Note the use of the user-mountable flag—this is important if you expect to be able to write to the share at all. Samba mounts are picky about who mounted the drive, and most systems won't let users write to a mounted smbfs share unless they mounted it themselves.

Configuration without Windows

For those of you who, like me, don't keep Vista or XP machines around, setting up the Media Vault is a bit more of an adventure. We simply don't have the option of using the bundled software without borrowing someone else's computer or breaking down and installing XP on machines that we've previously kept sacrosanct from MS Product Activation. This is how you set up all but the most advanced features of the HP Media Vault using SSH and a Web browser.

The first thing you need to do, after plugging the Media Vault in to your network and powering it on, is to find the IP address. As it comes set up to grab a DHCP lease automatically, the easiest way to do this is to log in to your router and find the most recent lease. Once you find the address, pull up that address in your Web browser. The browser screen is a fairly straightforward Webmin panel—it allows you to create users, access levels and directories, and to enable DLNA streaming on a per-directory basis.

In order to enable SSH access, you need to go into the System section, press Edit, and set your admin user name and password. The password you set becomes the root password for the box, and you now can log in via SSH. The user name and password you set also become the login info for the Web admin panel. The System section, by the way, is where you can set the LED brightness level and the hard disk spindown interval. While you're setting up access levels, you'll want to add a user (or a few users) appropriate to your environment in the User screen. Everyone gets access to the basic pre-allocated folders, and each user can create his or her own folders that you can set as private or shared, both through the Web admin panel and through regular permissions management.

The other thing you'll want to do immediately is to allocate the disks on the Disks page. By default, the MV5150 comes with one of the 700GB disks allocated and the other unallocated. You have the choice here to allocate the second disk as a RAID-1 mirror or to allocate it as additional disk space, resulting in 1.4TB of total space. This page is also where you can add external USB disks of the appropriate filesystem types.

Once you plug it in, you can, with a bit of jiggerypokery, find the thing with an SMB browser. It's actually non-obvious in some SMB browsing software (including some versions of Windows), but direct access can be had at smb://hpmediavault. The easy way to deal with this, of course, is to set up your workgroup information in the Network tab of the Web admin panel.

The last thing to do to get the system up and running is to set up the Web server by enabling remote access in the Remote Access tab. Annoyingly, it doesn't seem to work without a domain registration (free for a year, costing money after that), but checking this off allows the folders whose permissions you have set as browsable to be browsed from the Internet through a handy PHP interface. Hacking this thing so it'll serve up your documents without going through the activation process is pretty simple: SSH into the box, create a symlink in the /usr/htdocs folder to the /share/1000/ folder. You then can serve up files at http://myserver'sipaddress/symlink/sharefoldername/filename.

The last tab you'll want to check out is the Backup tab at the far right. This allows you to hook up a USB drive and do a selective backup—direct copy, not compressed—of selected directories. This process will wipe the destination drive, but it's nice to have the easy redundancy option with the processing performed locally on the Media Vault rather than clogging the network by copying between one remote share and another.