Raspberry Pi NAS with Open Media Vault and Plex

Ingredients:

Raspberry pi 4 – I used one with 8Gb of RAM with whatever case is available
1 or 2 external hard disk drives (HDDs) – if 2 are used, a powered USB hub is required, as the pi does not provide enough power for more than 1 HDD
of note also, no RAID configurations are possible with external, USB connected HDDs
USB microSD card adaptor for installing Raspberry Pi OS
raspberry pi power plug
cables: USB for HDDs, internet cable with RJ45 plugs

hardware needed for the setup — Ingredients

Step 1: Install Raspberry Pi OS

Download the Raspberry Pi imager from https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/ and select the image to be installed on the Pi.

For the 8Gb pi I have, I have used the 64 bit Raspberry Pi OS lite from https://downloads.raspberrypi .org/raspios_lite_arm64/images/raspios_lite_arm64-2021-11-08/

main menu for the raspberry pi imager — Raspberry Pi imager

A very cool hack from NetworkChuck is before writing the changes, hit Ctrl + Shift + x to go into a new menu with some extra options including activating secure shell (SSH) access to the Pi from a different computer.

Once done, just insert the card into the Pi and use an ssh connection from a different computer to login into the Pi: username “pi”, password “raspberry”.

Then a quick update of the system with:

sudo apt update

sudo apt upgrade

Step 2 Install Open Media Vault

open media vault dashboard — Open Media Vault dashboard – credits https://www.openmediavault.org

The quickest way to install Open Media Vault is to run the script from the developers GitHub page https://github.com/OpenMediaVault-Plugin-Developers/installScript.

sudo wget -O - https://github.com/OpenMediaVault-Plugin-Developers/installScript/raw/master/install | sudo bash

Once installed, open a web browser page and go the IP address of the Pi (router setting might be helpful to find it).

open media vault web interface — Open Media Vault web interface – credits https://www.openmediavault.org

Default username is “admin” and the default password is “openmediavault”.

The interface is quite straightforward to use. Some initial tweaks might be in order like changing the default password, mounting the disks in the Storage option, creating a file system and enabling SMB and/or NFS.

open media vault main options — Main options

Some user credentials setup will be useful for accessing the drives.

If there are existing folders on the HDD, just create a share with the same name as the existing folder.

Step 3 Install plex on the NAS

Plex logo – credits Wikipedia, Plex Inc. – Plex Media Server

Install the GNU/Linux transport software that allows the use of repositories accessed via the HTTP Secure protocol (HTTPS), also referred to as HTTP over TLS.

sudo apt install apt-transport-https

Add and check plex repositories:

curl https://downloads.plex.tv/plex-keys/PlexSign.key | sudo apt-key add -

echo deb https://downloads.plex.tv/repo/deb public main | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/plexmediaserver.list

Update repositories and install the plex media server:

sudo apt update

sudo apt install plexmediaserver

To access the web interface for plex, open a web browser and input the Pi address with the default port for the plex server. For example:

192.168.1.21:32400/web

Raspberry Pi is a great little computer that is more than capable of providing entertainment for home and backing up those beautiful memories on a very functional NAS.

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