[SOLVED] Does Samba support mounting via cifs?

Support
1

Hi,

I am trying to set up a NAS on my home network.
My first approach was to connect a USB-HDD to my router (FritzBox 7430) directly. Access through Nautilus (smb:) and mounting (cifs) were successfull, but speed to exchange data is limited to 2 MB/s. Usually I have ~50 MB/s, so I guess the implementation of Samba in my FritzBox is the limiting factor.

Next trial would be to attach that HDD to the Freedombox.

  • I guess, I will have to provide extra power as the power supplied by the Olimex LIME will probably not be sufficient?
  • Will Freedbombox be able to provide a higher speed as 2 MB/s?
  • The documentation only mentions smb: in Nautilus. For synchronizing with Unison I need a mounting point, thus cifs. Is this supported?
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    I guess, I will have to provide extra power as the power supplied by the Olimex LIME will probably not be sufficient?

Yes, extra power is needed for an external HDD.

    Will Freedombox be able to provide a higher speed as 2 MB/s?

I get download speed about 10 MB/s using Samba share on an external USB HDD disk with the Olimex LIME2 board.

    The documentation only mentions smb: in Nautilus. For synchronizing with Unison I need a mounting point, thus cifs. Is this supported?

Yes, using CIFS to mount shares is possible.

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3

Mmh, for a trial I attached a USB-Memory stick to the box after installing Samba.
Storage gives me a “/dev/sdb1 safibra /media/root/safibra ntfs”, safibra is the name of the USB.
If I enter smb://freedombox.local/media/root/safibra in Nautilus, I get “invalid argument”, if I just click on FREEDOMBOX in the network section of Nautilus, I get “access denied”.
So, how do I access it?

4

Shares should be listed when visiting smb://freedombox.local. Did you enable specific shares on the Samba app page?

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5

Yes, I enabled safibra Group Share
smb://freedombox.local/ in Nautilus gives an argument invalid.
The memory stick is formatted as NTFS, maybe that’s an issue?
Sorry, I have to jump out for today. Will be back tomorrow.

6

Try with share name included smb://freedombox.local/safibra_group. Maybe listing shares doesn’t work for some reason.

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7

I did a restart of my computer, not the FBx, now the shares are listed. Thanks for your help.
I will report my findings.

8

So copying files to the share works, with nearly 2 MB/s, as seen before when using the router for NAS.
Downloading from the NAS is now at 2.4 MB/s, so a bit faster.

It could be either the old USB stick or - as I rather suspect - some wrong configuration of my Laptop. I have no clue where to start trouble shooting.
With 2 MB/s I will not be able to use the NAS for videos and not even my digital photo album (self made, based on javascript, not Zoph).
Downloading from the internet runs at 50 MB/s.

9

To benchmark network bandwidth, I used iperf3:

On the FreedomBox:

sudo apt install iperf3
sudo firewall-cmd --zone=internal --add-port=5201/tcp
iperf3 -s

On your laptop:

sudo apt install iperf3
iperf3 -c freedombox.local
iperf3 -c -R freedombox.local

You check the performance of your disk on the FreedomBox you can use fio disk benchmark utility. Single-threaded, 4k block, sequential read performance test is likely what you need to mimic video streaming from FreedomBox.

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10

Eventually it turned out to be caused by my WLAN. No clue what exactly it is, but via LAN cable I get full 100 Mb/s speed.

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