How do I detect and mount an external hard drive through my router?
 

I just purchased a Western Digital My Book World Edition External hard drive and need to mount and format. My router sees the connection but I am now unsure how to proceed. Will linux detect the new device through my wireless connection? I know very little about Unix based or Linux commands. Please advise as to how to proceed.

I'm not sure if you can mount it. You could try to ssh into it though.

Hi,

Open any browser you have on your system and type in the IP address of the external drive. It should give you some kind of prompt for a username/password to be able to access it. Does that work?

Alternatively, you could hook it up directly to your pc, and see what shows up in /media or /mnt if you have some kind of automounting utility running. Then add the partitions to /etc/fstab by ip address or assigned name if already entered in /etc/hosts.

Forgot to ask if you have LinNeighborhood, PyNeighborhood, or some such LAN browser? That should help you find the name and partitions of the netdrive.

Thank you for the response!
I have successfully accessed the external hard drive through the IP address and have defined the necessary user accounts.

I have added the device via pyNeighborhood. Now how do I mount the device? Do I need to format first?

That drive is not an ordinary empty usb drive, it is specially made as a network drive, a bit like the drobo. Part of the price (cost) is the software that comes with it for (windozz and mac). If you format it, you will end up with just another (rather expensive) external drive.
:scratch:

Understood.

So I need to setup a Samba client with smbfs to communicate with the installed software?

Is this done within pyNeighborhood or will I need to manage the Samba client through the interface terminal?

Hmm, I forgot for a moment exactly how I did it in pyNeighborhood. After you add the drive in the network browser, click on the arrows next to the drive till you get to the folder you want to access. Then click the connect/mount icon next to the refresh icon in the left pane window. You should get a prompt to mount it, click the arrow next to mountpoint and put a checkmark in individual mountpoint and you can specify where you want to mount it at. Then you open your file browser (thunar, pcmanfm, nautilus, rox-filer, etc) and open it at the mount point. You can then copy, paste, drag/drop files to and fro the mounted partition on the net drive.

To unmount it when your done, click the disconnect button and you're done.

It depends on your distro, modern distros use cifs

mount -t cifs //server/share /mnt --verbose -o user=username

Hi,

Setting up 'SMB' will work for the network drive.

:hattip:

I guess you need to use samba because that product as many others is tought for being use with a Windows PC, it is running some kind of linux most likely, but it thinks your network is a Windows network

well everyone supports smb/cifs, you could use a mac or game-console whatever