Linux Mint Forums

So I have this little computer I setup with Linux Mint. When I say little, I mean LITTLE. I have a USB hard drive that's a pretty large that I use to store all my music, videos, all things fun. What I would like to do (if it can be done) is this.

The computer sits in the corner turned on but not logged into any user.

I want to be able to have that drive plugged into the computer via USB and shared so that I can map it from not only my other linux computers but my *cough* windows computer as well. Can this be done?

Here's the next level. It runs an FTP server that I use to grab files off of it when I'm not home so that I can eventually use my phone to stream...ok don't worry about that. What I was wondering is if I when I log into the ftp server from outside, can I CD to the hard drive I have plugged in??


I dunno, seems reasonable enough to me.

Hi !

Drake2k wrote:So I have this little computer I setup with Linux Mint. When I say little, I mean LITTLE. I have a USB hard drive that's a pretty large that I use to store all my music, videos, all things fun. What I would like to do (if it can be done) is this.

The computer sits in the corner turned on but not logged into any user.

I want to be able to have that drive plugged into the computer via USB and shared so that I can map it from not only my other linux computers but my *cough* windows computer as well. Can this be done?

Use NFS to share the drive out to your UNIX systems and then install and configure Samba to share the drive out to your windows machines.
This is all very normal practice

Here's the next level. It runs an FTP server that I use to grab files off of it when I'm not home so that I can eventually use my phone to stream...ok don't worry about that. What I was wondering is if I when I log into the ftp server from outside, can I CD to the hard drive I have plugged in??
I dunno, seems reasonable enough to me.

There is no reason why you can't issue a CD command via your FTP client, you just need to make sure the USB drive is mounted before hand,
this can be done easily from the command line via an ssh session, use lsusb to check the drive is plugged in and then blkid to get the device name and then
just issue a mount command, or just make sure it is mounted all the time via the fstab file in /etc.

Let us know how you get on ...

Mike.