Jack Wallen guides you to better storage by creating a network share in openmediavault.
The open media vault platform is an excellent option for deploying network storage on your network. It is open source, free, flexible and very reliable. This cost-effective solution enables administrators to create a robust storage system for any business, regardless of size.
The only thing about openmediavault is that it takes some work to get everything up and running. Secure, install openmediavault can be done quickly and easily, but once that’s done, there’s a few more steps you need to take.
One of the most important tasks is to create network shares. After all, you want your users to access this storage device in a trusted way, for example through their operating system’s file manager. And that’s why I’m going to walk you through the process of creating a network share in openmediavault.
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What you need
All you need to do is have a running instance of openmediavault and a user with administrator privileges.
Create a network share
Create a shared folder
Before creating the network share, we need to create a shared folder first. To do that, log into openmediavault and click Storage | Shared folders. In the resulting window (Image A), give it a name, select the file system, set the permissions, add an optional comment, and click Save.
Image A
Access the share page
Log in to openmediavault and expand Services in the left sidebar. Next, expand SMB/CIFS and then click Shares (Figure B†
Figure B
Make the share
In the resulting window (Figure C), click + to create a new share.
Figure C
Fill in the necessary information for the share (Figure D), and make sure to select the new shared folder you created earlier. Read through all of the options to make sure you’re applying the necessary configurations for how you want your share to perform and use.
Figure D
After you have configured the share, click Save. You will then be prompted to apply the changes (Figure E†
Figure E
You also need to make sure that you create users in openmediavault (which I described in How to add users and groups in openmediavault), otherwise users will not be able to authenticate to the shares.
How to access the shares
How you access the shared folders depends on the operating system you are using. For example, on Pop!_OS, I’ll open File Manager and go to Other Locations, where I’ll see all my openmediavault shares (Figure F†
Figure F
Congratulations, you have just created a network share that is accessible to anyone on your network who has an account on openmediavault. Those users can start saving and retrieving files to and from your NAS.
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