New Linux Server - Need Help Mounting USB Drive that was used on Pi

Channels DVR Server Troubleshooting
#1

I setup a server with Ubuntu 20.04 and would like to take the USB drive I am currently using for my Channels DVR via a Raspberry Pi 4 and just restore the config and shows. I am new to Linux so I am struggling to get the USB drive mounted in a read/write mode. I got it mounted with some fstab settings I found but I get an error when I am at the step of where to store DVR recordings and data. I am trying to pick /mnt/usb/ and it tells me Error: no write permissions on dvr directory

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From what I read it's because the drive is mounted as root but Channels is running as my user? How do I get it to auto mount the USB drive after reboots so that Channels can read and write to it?

For now I have put the drive back on my Pi so my family's shows get recorded. Any assistance in this area is appreciated.

#2

Give your user permissions for the folders on the drive, and put the drive in your fstab.

#3

As I said, I am new to Linux. What would those commands be? I am working from an SSH terminal.

#4

what's the output of

cat /etc/fstab

and also

mount

and also

ls -la /mnt/usb

and

ps -ef | grep dvr

#5

Sorry, I missed that. To grant yourself ownership/permissions, and assuming the drive is mounted at /mnt/usb, then:
sudo chown -R USER:USER /mnt/usb
will give your user full ownership and control of everything on the drive. (Replace USER with your username, though.)

#6

I’ll be able to give these a shot tomorrow as the drive is in use with the Pi this evening. Gotta work on it in between recording windows, haha

#7

You need to mount just the exfat partition, which should not require any use of chown. I think maybe mount option to set the user is what's missing

#8

Yeah, I was mounting the UUID for the exfat partition. I am sure you at right it is just some kind of option I am missing in fstab.

It was something like

UUID=uuid_for_exfat /mnt/usb exfat defaults 0 0

I tried a few variations with uid= and gid= but they were for sure wrong because after saving and using mount -a it would error at that line.

I checked and recordings for the evening will be done in 15 minutes. I’ll be able to try things at that time.

#9

You're missing the type field in your fstab:

UUID=... /mnt/usb exfat defaults,uid=...,gid=... 0 2

You may want to check out the Arch wiki entry for fstab, as their documentation is pretty great, and applicable across most distros.

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#10

Yeah, I just missed that, I am working from memory at the moment. I have updated my post.

I will look at that documentation posted as well.

#11

I haven't rebooted yet to ensure it automatically mounts at start up, but I believe I got it. I was able to get past that step in the setup. I was on the right track earlier, I just had the UID and GID in the wrong place.

Thank you all so much for your help and insight so far.

#12

It came back after a reboot, success!

I have one other problem though, I can start a new thread if need be.

I forgot to do a database backup when it was connected to the Pi just before I did the restore on the Linux machine. Is there a process I can do to get the few recordings that are in the TV directory that are not showing up since they were not in the database backup I restored from since they recorded in the time since I took the backup?

#13

Move them to imports

#14

I will keep that in mind for the future. What I did to get what I wanted was connect it back to the Pi, save the database, and then do another restore on Linux. I just had to be careful which I picked because the "latest" one was from the Linux when it booted.

I appreciate you all! This is such a great and responsive community and developers.

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