If you want to quickly make a symlink with the same directory name as the target, do something like this one command….
ln -s /media/sda/rsync-dir
then you will get this…
lrwxrwxrwx 1 erick erick 20 Aug 28 14:14 rsync-dir -> /media/sda/rsync-dir
…real easy!
I’ve used USB sticks on the Raspberry Pi before, many times. So I plugged one in for some extra storage. It let me write once and then went into r/o mode. What the hell! Pulled it, plugged it into the PC, no problem. Plugged it into a Windows 7 machine, it complained about drive errors and fixed it. Try again, no luck. So I gave up for a while, it was full of Music that I play through the Sockso Music Server, so no big deal, but I really do want to use it for external storage as the SD card will fill up eventually. Plus I would like to use it as more storage for ftp as well and possibly for Sparkleshare which I intend to install.
It turns out that at some point while fiddling with the USB drive, I formatted it NTFS. I believe that I tried to format it ext4 and then ext2, neither worked. So I used a WIndows machine to make it NTFS, so it would work.
The issue is that the Rasp Pi does not come with NTFS support out of the box. So I needed to install ntfsprogs to get it to work OK….
sudo apt-get install nfsprogs
Otherwise it immediately goes to read only. I have not tested but I assume nfsprogs also installs tools to check NTFS file-systems.
To mount my USB stick, I Need to execute …
sudo mount -t ntfs -o rw,uid=erick,gid=erick /dev/sda1 /media/sda/
I have a symlink for music in my Music dir (/home/erick/Music. Set it to, main-collection -> /media/sda/Music/ , in this manner it points to the music collection on the usb stick and Sockso happily finds the music. Sockso does not like spaces in filenames!
I have a USB stick plugged into my Raspberry Pi for external storage, mostly to put music on for the Sockso Music Server to get at. But I wanted to use it a bit more for generic storage. FTP is great, you can get to it from any machine and the command line for it is the same on Win or Linux. So I can walk up to any machine, not have to install a thing and reach into a folder with FTP.
For instance, I have an infected Windows Machine, I don’t dare stick a USB stick in it. Instead I go to the command line, ftp to the Raspberry Pi and grab the tools I need from there.
The issue was that I tried to symlink from the ftp directory to the USB drive. vsFTP will not follow symlinks for security reasons.
Mount the directory you want under the FTP directory using bind. /media/sda is the USB stick mount point and the whole thing gets mounted under the FTP dir using…
sudo mount --bind /media/sda/ /home/ftpuser/usb-drive/