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Newbie: Accessing external disk through FTP

A collection of tips on howto tweak your Bubba.
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Anders_W
Posts: 34
Joined: 13 Sep 2011, 09:22

Newbie: Accessing external disk through FTP

Post by Anders_W »

Hi, everybody!

The home server system is coming together, piece by piece.

Right now, the B3 has got my external HDDs plugged into it, and I am trying to access their content over the internet. This turned out to be harder than I expected.

The mounting points for the HDDs are automatically placed in the folder /home/storage/extern, but since I am using FTP to access the B3 on-line, I only get to my home folder (/home/username). No problem, just SSH into the B3 and make a link (command ln -s) to the extern folder in the home folder, right?

Wrong. In SSH the link works perfectly, but in FTP the link comes up dead. Since Mac OS X's built-in FTP client does not allow me to surf upwards in the B3's file system, I'm stuck in my home folder.


Edit 1:
Making individual links for the HDDs did not work either; these links also turn up dead in FTP. In SSH they are color-coded as "access not authorized".


Edit 2:
Hacking the FTP client a bit, I found that by connecting to <servername>.myownb3.com/../../storage/extern/, I get direct access to the extern folder, but that's the end of the fun stuff, because when I open the subfolders representing each HDD, no content is shown.


Edit 3:
I'm starting to answer my own posts, aint I? :wink:
It turns out that the 'no content shown' was due to the fact that the computer takes a looong time to load the file list for each HDD. I did not notice this, since the status bar in Finder windows is turned off by default in Lion.

Now I have access! Yay is me!

Instead, I have another question: does anyone out there know how to make a Mac load these disks automatically and mount them on the desktop? (I will post such a question in an ordinary Mac forum as well.)

What to do?


All suggestions are greatly welcomed,

Anders
su_root
Posts: 38
Joined: 29 Nov 2011, 06:27

Re: Newbie: Accessing external disk through FTP

Post by su_root »

Short answer, don't use FTP but instead SFTP. If you use FileZilla, just use port 22 instead of port 21
Ubi
Posts: 1549
Joined: 17 Jul 2007, 09:01

Re: Newbie: Accessing external disk through FTP

Post by Ubi »

I don't fully agree on this. For large transfers that do not have high levels of confidence (such as mp3 downloads or so) FTP is great, as transfer is fast and CPU overhead is low.
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