OMV6 Initial Setup

OpenmediaVault 6 Installation and
Initial Setup on a Raspberry Pi

The initial installation on a Raspberry Pi 4 is pretty straight forward. I used the instructions provided
by “NetworkChuck” in his Youtube Video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=gyMpI8csWis&t=1208s&ab_channel=NetworkChuck That got me started. However, from that
point on his video is out of date. I think he installed the default installation from the repository which
at that time was OMV 5 not 6. There are significant differences in 6 that caused me a lot of difficulty,
so I had to do some research to find the answers to basic questions. Here‘s my process for setting up a
very basic OMV installation running NFS services.
Figure 1 Settings
First step is to change the Admin password. This has changed from version 5. To change the Admin
password now you need to click the “Settings” wheel in the top right corner and select “Change
Password”. That’s it. By the way the initial/default password is openmediavault. Initially you will
need to use the user Admin with that password.
The next thing you need to do is to set up your disk(s). I used two on my Pi installation. One is a
500Gb laptop drive that is powered by the Pi, the second is a 2TB external USB drive. For a more
permanent setup I will probably go with a USB docking bay with 2 or 4 drives and set up a Raid
configuration, but that’s beyond the scope of this guide.
Fig 2 Left Menu
The first step is to prepare your disk(s). For me this is at two step process. First I had to wipe my
disks. They had been used on a previous system and were formatted as EXT2 file system. OMV needs
EXT4. So I wiped the drives then created the file system on each drive.
To wipe the drive, start with the left menu, click Storage then Disks. This brings up this screen.
Fig 3 Storage/Disks
Select the disk by left clicking on it then selecting the center icon from the top left menu bar. I think
the icon is supposed to be an erasure. Once that is done, OMV will begin the process of wiping the
drive. Be patient this will take some time. OMV will display a terminal window with the progress of
the wipe. There will be a significant time when nothing is showing in the terminal, be patient. When
its complete you will have to log in to OMV again, be sure to use your new password. Next, you will
need to complete step two, creating an EXT4 file system on the drive. After you have logged in select
the Storage item again from the left menu. Now instead of Disks select the File Systems item. You
will then be presented with the File Systems screen.
Fig 4 File Systems

Here you see the disk I have prepared with an EXT4 file system. You will not see any disks until you
“Create” a file system on that disk. To accomplish that click the + item in the top left, then select the
Create from the drop down menu. That will open another screen where you will select the drive you
want to “format” from the “Device” field.
Fig 5 Create File System Screen

When you click in the “Device” field you should be presented with a list of the disks on your system.
Select the one you just wiped and click Save. Again this could take some time. You will see a
“Terminal” screen showing the progress. Be patient and wait for OMV to complete. When its done
you will have to log in again. Now you will need to select the “Apply” or check mark in the far upper
right hand corner. It will show up as a bright yellow bar across the top of your screen whenever you
have a change that you have made. The system doesn’t actually commit that change until you select
the Apply option in the upper right. That should complete the initial setup. You are now ready to
create shares and implement a Service to allow access to the files from remote users YOU.
Fig 6 Shared Folder Left Menu

To create a share, go to the left menu pane and select Storage then Shared Folders. The Shared Folders
page will open as below.
Fig 7 Shared Folders Windows
To create a new share click the + again from the top left of the menu bar. That opens a new window.
Fig 8 Shared Folder Information screen

Supply a name for the folder, then select the file system where you want the folder created and the
relative path for the folder. In my case the first folder I created was on the 450Gb disk. I planned on
storing all my Youtube videos on this drive and consolidate them in a single place.
Fig 9 Share Folder Creation
The first item is the name of the Share or Folder you want to create. Just type in the name, the next
item , the File system is a drop down that you can select your drive, in my case its sda1 which is the
450 Gb disk. The “relative path” is provide automatically for you and I normally leave it as is. The
permission block is different from the file permissions you may be familiar with. This is just the
permissions that the service, NFS, will use to allow access to the folder. Files have their own
permissions created at the time of creation of the file and dependent on the permissions the user wants
to give it. For example if a user is not in the Administrator or Users group they will have read-only
access to the file, but if the file is set to block members of the Others group, they will not be able to
open the file. Comment is anything you want to add to make the share more user friendly.
Now there are file systems and folders to store files in. But you need to decide how to access these
folders and disks. There are two major types of access. Windows uses the SMB/CIFS service to access
files located on remote servers. Linux and Unix use NFS (Network File Systems) to gain remote
access. Once you have a share you can select a service that will be used to access the folder. To begin
select Services from the left menu. This opens the Services Screen where you can select any of several
services. For this guide I am going to go through the NFS service.
Fig 10 OMV Services
Simply click on the box labeled NFS to activate the NFS service.
Fig 11 NFS Service Config screen

Select the Setting block first to enable the service.
Fig 12 NFS Service Settings.

The screen above shows the Enabled box selected to start the service. Now just select Save to initialize
NFS. Then select NFS from the top menu to return to the NFS sesrvices screen (Fig 11). Now select
the Share(s) that will open a screen where you can select the Shared Folders you want accessible via
NFS. In my case its the Youtube folder.
Fig 13 NFS Shares screen

Click the + button and open a new screen where you can select the folder you want to make NFS
accessible.
Fig 14 NFS Share selection screen.

The Shared folder block is a drop down that displays shared folders that can be accessed by NFS. The
Client is somewhat misleading. Actually what that block is looking for is the Network that should be
allowed access. The OMV documentation states “Enter a single ip, host or network CIDR
notation. Only one entry is allowed at the moment. You can leave it empty if you
do not want network security.” I entered the CIDR notation for my entire home
network for example 192.168.1.0/24. For the rest you can just leave the defaults
which should work fine.
Click Save then Apply and you are almost done. You now have a share that can
be accessed via NFS. But you are not done yet. You need to add a user that you
grant that access to. You can do this by selecting User Management from the left
menu and create a new user. This is a straight forward entry and the
documentation covers it pretty well.
The last thing that you need to do is actually use your new share. I run Linux on
all my systems so don’t know if Windows can access NFS shares or not, but on a
Linux or Unix system you need to “mount” the share to an empty directory. On
you linux machine you can use the mount command to do that and the directory
you want to mount is found under the /export directory.l I missed that at first until
I used the “showmount” command to find the actual share mount points on my
Openmediavault server.
That’s it, you should have an NFS share mounted to and accessible from your
Linux machine.

OMV6 Initial Setup

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OMV6 Initial Setup

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OpenmediaVault 6 Installation and

Initial Setup on a Raspberry Pi

Fig 4 File Systems

Fig 5 Create File System Screen

Fig 6 Shared Folder Left Menu

Fig 7 Shared Folders Windows

Fig 8 Shared Folder Information screen

Fig 11 NFS Service Config screen

Fig 12 NFS Service Settings.

Fig 13 NFS Shares screen

Fig 14 NFS Share selection screen.

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