Monthly Archives: July 2016

USB Stick Fix for NTFS filesystem on Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi, Raspberry Pi Server, , , , , ,

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.

One more look

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/

Symlinks for Sockso Music Server

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!

 

 

Using mount with bind to access usb drive via vsFTP

Info Links, Linux, Raspberry Pi, Raspberry Pi Server, Server, , , , , ,

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

The issue was that I tried to symlink from the ftp directory to the USB drive. vsFTP will not follow symlinks for security reasons.

The Solution

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/

Resources

FTP on Raspberry Pi. An easy way to make shared folders

Alternatives to FTP

https://radu.cotescu.com/vsftpd-and-symbolic-links/

avconv replaces ffmpeg for Video/Audio Conversion

Linux, Raspberry Pi, Time Lapse Photography, , , , , , , ,

Recently I wanted to convert an AVI file to an m4v on Linux Mint 17.3. I tried to use ffmpeg, it’s not there. I can’t isntall it…hmmm. So I did some digging, it has been replaced by avconv. To get avconv….

sudo apt-get install libav-tools

To use

Online, I read that there are some syntax differences between ffmpeg and avconv, so I was reluctant to just symlink pointing ffmpeg to avconv and have scripts break.

But I did a quick test taking a good guess…

avconv -i timelapse-wx-station-4-08-to-7-12-2016.avi timelapse-wx-station-4-08-to-7-12-2016.m4v

…and, it worked. Got me a much smaller file than the AVI and worked it’s magic in a short minute or two.

Video of Weather Station from April 8,2016 to July 12,2016

This was what I was testing out with the conversion. Video taken by using fswebcam to gather a still shot of my weather station once per hour on the Raspberry Pi. Once per day the shots are rolled up into an AVI video and stored in a tmp folder which is mounted in RAM. Well the RAM folder does fill up after a while and I copied the file off and saved it on my desktop. This video shows the weather changing from spring to summer.

Resources

http://askubuntu.com/questions/432542/is-ffmpeg-missing-from-the-official-repositories-in-14-04