My 2 cents on NAS mounted music scan

Hello all

I just finished configuring up my first Volumio setup at home and I encountered one problem others did: Volumio never started scanning my NAS-resident music folder.

My Volumio berry is separate from my NAS berry, where music files are stored amongst all the rest.
NAS berry shares the Music folder via SMB.
When mounted from any PC client, or from other berries (for instance KODY video players), it all “just works”: SMB shared files are accessible, can be mounted, played etc

Volumio seems to start well. Mounts the folders, but scan never actually happens.

I dug into the forum and I found a few threads with some tips here and there buy no conclusive solution.
I think I nailed it in the end, and this is why I am writing this to share my experience hoping it helps others.

The issue is with permissions.

Volumio’s GUI asks for SMB username and password when connecting to the fileserver.
So you think: it shall behave as my other PCs. No way.
After mounting the drive via the SMB “door”, Volumio apparently presents himself to the host filesystem with his own debian username (volumio), instead of the username specified to pass the SMB gate. Which most likely does not exist on there, nor is part of the pi group.

You may fix this in several ways.

I chose the quick, who-cares-about-security approach: I edited /etc/fstab on my fileserver berry to mount my music USB drive with “full open” permissions. You achieve this with the umask=000 directive.

UUID=36FE972EFE96E581 /media/d1 ntfs-3g uid=1000,gid=1000,[b]umask=000[/b] 0 0

Reboot, reconfigure the share into Volumio. Bam! It starts indexing.

Of course you might choose more sophisticated (and conservative) ways like creating a volumio user on the fileserver berry, and add it to the pi group (untested).

Please note: changing permissions to the already-mounted drive with something like

sudo chmod -R 777 /media/d1 

would not work !
For whatever reason (I’m no debian guru) the /etc/fstab directive line has precedence.

Well, that’s it. Have fun

ciao
Alberto