Posted: Fri Jan 13, 2023 18:03 Post subject: DIR-868L cannot get any sharing working
I'm new to dd-wrt, but read through quite a bit before deciding to post since I could not resolve my issue. I cannot get neither Samba nor DLNA working on my router. External storage is recognized, miniDLNA service is working, and I can browser through Windows Explorer to the Sambe share. Unfortunately neither shows me the files on the external drive which is connected to the USB port of the router. As you can see from the screenshots, it has 3 partitions (followed suggestions from https://forum.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/download.php?id=37134). First one is NTFS where my video files are, 2nd is jffs (Ext2) and 3rd one is opt (ext2).
Looking at the screenshots from the linked document above, it shows 3 mounted partitions in the USB tab, while as you can see on my end it only shows 2 (the jffs and opt). However the NTFS is shown as mounted from the logs just below the graphs. Any suggestions what I am missing are appreciated!
@egc I am on 51288. The screenshots from the guide clearly show the other person was able to use NTFS as share. Can you give me any link where it says NTFS is no longer supported? Or any guarantee that changing the FS would actually work?
Ok I am getting further, the NTFS partition is now getting mounted successfully.And Samba share is now working. However miniDLNA is still not picking up the files. I honestly can live without the Samba, but DLNA is essential as it is for the kids and their videos that they watch on either TV. All I did was to restart the router due to an unrelated setting elsewhere.
Happy End, got the DLNA to pick up the files! Apparently now that the NTFS partition is mounted, it wants to have the proper mounth path in the Path column and not in Subdir.
Joined: 18 Mar 2014 Posts: 12837 Location: Netherlands
Posted: Sat Jan 14, 2023 7:09 Post subject:
The NTFS driver (we use the new paragon NTFS3 linux kernel driver) is rather picky and can easily flag an NTFS partition as dirty which will prevent it from mounting, further more there is the occasional crash reported.
So using ext2/4 is recommended (or even exfat) over NTFS.
Using Samba (we use ksmbd) and MiniDLNA can be resource/memory intensive so keep an eye on your memory.
Consider also using a 2 GB SWAP partition to prevent an OOM crash.
Attached my personal notes (only visible when you are logged in), slightly outdated but perhaps they are helpful.
@egc Yeah I've actually just encountered the problem with NTFS this morning and was unsure why the same drives that mounted successfully last night were not being mounted this morning. I am baffled that linux does not yet have a good ntfs driver!
Anyway, would try ext2 as I want to be able to write to the external drive from Windows and Ext4 is a bit problematic in this regards from my experience. I honestly did not know that EXFAT was supported option, if ext2 gives me grief would definitely switch to it.
Thank you for sharing that file, it is essentially almost the same file I linked in my original post with the addition of swap and some other things. However I also read https://wiki.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Linux_SWAP and it states: Swap won't really be needed if your system has a lot of RAM (such as 64+ MB). D-link DIR-868L has 256Mb and I am barely using any at the moment (see attached).
Am I to expect that the samba and dlna services leak memory and would eventually use all of it? I am using an HDD docking station (poor man's NAS) and plan to turn it of when we're not using it. Will this reset the used memory then?
Either way, I have no problem creating swap partition, but it seems over complicated. Do I really need all these tools mentioned in https://wiki.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Linux_SWAP ? Is there an easier way to do this?
@egc So created a swap partition and formatted the main partition to ext2 last night. Copied some videos on it from my Windows machine and the dlna service scanned it and all looked promising. This morning all videos from the ext2 partition are gone like they never were there. Tried a data recovery but it doesn't find anything. MEGA WEIRD. So had enough with NTFS and EXT, I formatted with ExFAT and different problem - the miniDLNA service does not want to index the drive. Honestly I am at my wits end! DD-WRT looks like a great idea, but probably the 868L implementation is lacking .. I don't want to go back to original firmware and have no mental strength to try tomato if there is similar experience over there.
EXT2 is not a journaling file system. God for Memory Sticks. For HD, use EXT4.
You can format the partition in the dd-wrt GUI. No reason to connect the drive to a Windowz Machines.
Except that those HDDs are in a NAS and I want to copy videos directly from various Windows machines over to them. I couldn't find any way to access the EXT4 partition under Windows 10 and write to it. Ideas?
You copy the files to the NAS over the network. That is the main idea.
If you are in for videos, you should have a NAS with an Ethernet port.
That is exactly what I can't do if I have ext4, at least not from a Windows machine and all machines in our household are with Windows OS. I don't need a dedicated NAS machine, a HDD docking station through router's USB port would suffice me well, if I can get it to work reliably. If there was no issue with NTFS driver in DDWRT, I would have forgotten all about it .. alas ..
Use a native linux file system such as ext4 with dd-wrt, ksmbd and minidlna files will be transparent to clients.
If you need to directly connect drive to windows: https://www.paragon-software.com/home/linuxfs-windows/#
Maybe NTFS support will improve or code sync in the future but still makes no sense to use with a linux router.
I understand why extFS would be the preferred choice for a linux based router, but for my needs I really need FS that is Windows friendly. Anyway I was able to track down why miniDLNA would not scan for files when using ExFat or FAT32 - the "Keep Metadata on Storage" setting was the culprit, setting it to Disable resolved the issue. I am not overly concerned about that setting, so all good at the end, but would be nice if there is a FAQ somewhere where such "little details" can be shared, so others do not have to bang their head. Thanks all for the help!