Setup Buffalo Linkstation LS-CHL NAS [SOLVED}

[Clue in title]

I think the subject gives a clue as what I want to do. But first a bit of context.

I purchased the 1TB model around 2005. This was the time before wireless printers & cloud storage were as common place as they are now. It meant I, my daughters' & wife (all Windows) could all access shared documents. pictures & music & the printer.

But technology moves on. With advent of smart phones & tablets cloud storage solutions such as Dropbox/Google Drive/OneDrive/iCloud made much more sense & printers were wireless. So the Linkstation has sat on my desk plugged into the router & power but not turned on for years.

Now I don't know about you but I find unused but perfectly serviceable bit of kit, be they lap tops or NAS devices, offensive. As an aside the build quality of my old Dell laptop is far superior to my more modern but more powerful one. Anyway a few months ago & booted my laptop into Windows 10 & fired up the Linkstation. Apparently the Linkstation uses SMB1(?) to talk to Windows. At some point Microsoft disabled SMB1 & moved to SMB2 due to "security concerns". So basically it didn't work unless I enabled SMB1 on Windows 10 which is not recommended. I have also tried to get Linux Mint to talk to it to no avail after reading a number of threads.

So now we come to what I want to do.

• I would like to use the Linkstation as an ad hoc storage device for my Mint based laptop as a place to store such things as Timeshift backups.

• I do not need it to automount at boot time. I'm happy to do that manually as & when.

• If does not need to be shared with any other device linked to my home network.

• I have no need for Windows (my laptop is dual boot) to access it.

Like a good citizen I have scoured the forums. Some of the threads are pre-2010. Things may have moved on since then? Some talk about Samba (SMB) others cifs. I'm not a network person.

Any help will be appreciated.

Dave

[AndyMH]

Probably the simplest thing to do is, open your file manager and in the address pane at the top:

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smb://192.168.0.5

replacing the IP address with the IP address for your NAS. Alternatively you can try:

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smb://hostname.local

If these work you can place a launcher on the desktop with the command nemo smb://hostname.local, nemo because I'm running cinnamon, replace with your file manager if different.

I also auto mount my NAS (a synology) via cifs in fstab. You can also use nfs if supported on your NAS, this is native to linux, but most people use cifs.

You cannot use it for timeshift, timeshift does not do network drives and insists on a local ext4 partition.

[altair4]

I would recommend a CIFS mount of whatever shares you have defined on the NAS.

There are a number of advantages:

[1] It eliminates the need to enable SMB1 in smb.conf on the samba client since CIFS doesn't read smb.conf.

[2] It is more app friendly since some applications are not gvfs compatible.

[3] It can be set up in fstab to mount "on demand" through the file manager rather than "on boot".

I wrote a HowTo on the subject here: viewtopic.php?f=42&t=326160

You would end up with an entry in /etc/fstab that looks something like this:

//nas-ip-address/share-name /media/mountpoint cifs username=uuuuu,password=ppppp,uid=your-mint-user-name,noauto,user,vers=1.0 0 0

It's the vers=1.0 that sets the smb dialect to SMB1 only for that connection.

[Clue in title]

Not being able to use the Linkstation with Timeshift is a problem.

However, I will look into both your suggestions if only as an academic exercise.

Thank you for your input.

Dave

P.S. Built your wall yet Andy?

[AndyMH]

Funny you should ask that
Previous one has now been built - low wall along the front of the property to the road. Now building another one up the side of the drive. I'd be out there today if it wasn't raining.

The issue with timeshift is that it uses hard links for files that haven't changed. That way each snapshot is complete without taking up any additional drive space. Windows and smb/cifs don't support them. Not sure NFS does either.

Note - altair4 is our smb/cifs 'expert', knows far more in this area than me, I just learnt enough to connect to my synology NAS, most of which was from his/her posts.

[Clue in title]

Not being able to use Timeshift is not actually a show stopper. As discussed before Timeshift is basically a GUI for the rsync command. A gross simplification I know but ......

Back in the day I would claim to be fluent in shell scripting. Not so much now but I've still got the manuals & all my old housekeeping shell scripts. So if I can get my laptop talking to the Linkstation I could use it as a backup medium.

Dave

[AndyMH]

Back in the day...

...before timeshift and backintime I wrote my own scripts to backup my computer using rsync, still got them somewhere. You could always use timeshift and backintime to a local drive and then an rsync script to the NAS to copy the latest snapshot. Don't know the linkstation, but if it is using a flavour of linux you might be better off connecting to it with NFS* (assuming it supports it), not cifs (to preserve all the file attributes).

* my knowledge here is limited, I worked out how to do it to my synology and then reverted to cifs.

[Clue in title]

Essex.

Dave

[AndyMH]

Think you read it mid-edit, I'd realised I'd already asked that question

[Clue in title]

To be honest when I read it I thought Andy's suggestion was a bit too easy to be true. I mean "//smb:192.168.1.64" in Nemo & it just pops up! Didn't work. "Failed to retrieve share list from server." Nice try Andy

So on to Altair4's suggestion. As you might have gathered the Linkstation's ip is 192.168.1.64. I also created a mount point at $HOME/linkstation.

On entering the following:

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sudo mount -t cifs //192.168.1.64 $HOME/linkstation -o guest

I got the following:

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mount error(22): Invalid argument

I did a search on this message & was prompted to look in "tail /var/log/kern.log". Output of this as follows:

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Sep 20 15:55:16 ethan kernel: [10117.283309] CIFS: Attempting to mount //192.168.1.64
Sep 20 15:55:16 ethan kernel: [10117.283312] CIFS VFS: Malformed UNC in devname.
Sep 20 15:55:21 ethan kernel: [10122.436614] [UFW BLOCK] IN=wlp6s0 OUT= MAC=01:00:5e:00:00:01:a4:08:f5:89:a5:cf:08:00 SRC=192.168.1.254 DST=224.0.0.1 LEN=36 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=1 ID=0 DF PROTO=2 

Regards
Dave

[altair4]

sudo mount -t cifs //192.168.1.64 $HOME/linkstation -o guest

You cannot mount a host //192.168.1.64. You can only mount a share on that host.

Notes:

[1] It would be best if you state the mount point explicitly - you would have to do that if you set this up in fstab anyway:

/home/your-user-name/linkstation


[2] You will only get read access to that share unless you take posession of the mounted share with the uid setting:

sudo mount -t cifs //192.168.1.64/some-share-name /home/your-user-name/linkstation -o guest,uid=your-user-name

[3] And if your NAS can only speak SMB1 you are missing that directive as well: vers=1.0

sudo mount -t cifs //192.168.1.64/some-share-name /home/your-user-name/linkstation -o guest,uid=your-user-name,vers=1.0

[Clue in title]

Success!

Entered following command:

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sudo mount -t cifs //192.168.1.64/SHARE /home/dave/linkstation -o guest,uid=dave,vers=1.0

The key here was I remembered what the share was named. Interestingly I had tried //192.168.1.64/share but then had a flash of inspiration "Perhaps it's in upper case." I know in UNIX/Linux case is an issue unlike Windows.

Many thanks to altair4 & Andy.

Dave

[AndyMH]

If you now want to permanently mount your NAS on boot, your mount command of:

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sudo mount -t cifs //192.168.1.64/SHARE /home/dave/linkstation -o guest,uid=dave,vers=1.0

translates into the following entry in fstab:

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#linkstation mounting under cifs
//192.168.1.64/SHARE   /home/dave/linkstation   cifs   guest,uid=dave,vers=1.0,nofail    0    0

I've added nofail so that if the NAS is not present on boot, it doesn't hang for 90secs looking for a non-existent NAS. # means a comment.

fstab lives in /etc and has to be edited as root, open your file manager, navigate to /etc, right click 'open as root' and scroll down to fstab and double click to edit. Make a copy of it before you make any changes, that way if the system won't boot, you can boot your mint install media, open the file manager and navigate to /etc on your system, delete the modified copy of fstab and rename the copy to fstab.

[Clue in title]

Thanks for that Andy.

My original intention was not to auto mount it as I don’t expect to use the Linkstation every time I fire up the Mint partition. I have previously added a line to /etc/fstab to mount the Windows partition. Means I have access to my music, photos & documents that were “born” on Windows.

Dave

[altair4]

What you could do is something in the middle. If you add noauto,user to your list of options in fstab:

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//192.168.1.64/SHARE   /home/dave/linkstation   cifs   guest,uid=dave,vers=1.0,nofail,noauto,user    0    0

noauto == the share will not mount at boot.
user == allows an ordinary user the ability to mount the share without being root ( sudo ).

Since the share is in your home directory an icon will appear on the side panel of your file manager and when selected the system will go to fstab, read the cifs mount declaration, then mount it with those specifications.

You can use the same file manager icon to unmount it when you no longer need it.

It saves you from going into a terminal to mount.

[Clue in title]

I like the noauto feature altair4. I will now implement a change in fstab as you describe but without the user option as I am the only user.

Dave

[altair4]

It won't work without the user option.

By default a mount imposes the nouser option. From man mount:

nouser Forbid an ordinary user to mount the filesystem. This is the default; it does not imply any other options.

The user option does the opposite:

user Allow an ordinary user to mount the filesystem. The name of the mounting user is written to the mtab file (or to the private libmount file in /run/mount on systems without a regular mtab) so that this same user can unmount the
filesystem again.

Without user you will get an error when you select the icon stating that only root can mount and the file manager will not prompt you for your sudo password to accomplish the task.

[Clue in title]

Ok altair4. Thanks for the clarification.

Dave

[woccatozmmm]

Probably the simplest thing to do is, open your file manager and in the address pane at the top:

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smb://192.168.0.5

replacing the IP address with the IP address for your NAS.

Thank you AndyMH. I'd managed to keep the smb1 NAS mounted but lost the link with the smb2. So following the simple instructions that you posted, I now can see both drives.