Setting up OpenMediaVault on a Raspberry Pi in BerryBoot

[fox]

First off - why would you want to do this in a multi-booter like BerryBoot. (1) Because I can; (2) because I can try out other distros on the same card without having to wipe it and start again. There is a version of OpenMediaVault formatted for BerryBoot. I tried that, but couldn't get it to work. So instead, I installed Raspberry Pi Lite (i.e. without a desktop) on BerryBoot, and installed OMV in it. I followed the step by step instructions from this website. You have to start by installing BerryBoot on the SD, which is easy - just download the BerryBoot bootloader from here, unzip it and copy the files to an SD card. Put the card in your RPi and boot it up. It sets up the booter and gives you options for distros you can install. I chose Raspberry Pi Lite (64-bit), but you can also do it in regular Raspberry Pi if you don't mind the extra overhead of a GUI. You can choose to install it on your SD card or on a USB drive if you have one attached; I chose the SD card.

*IMPORTANT*: If you want to have the option of using a wired connection with Raspberry Pi Lite, or any distro you want to try, do your initial setup of BerryBoot connected to Ethernet. If you set it up with wifi, you can't add a wired connection later, whereas if you set it up with Ethernet, it will still allow you to connect with wifi.

The setup instructions are very straightforward. After I set it up, I plugged in a USB pendrive with a media on it, and was easily able to set up OMV to use the pictures, movies and music on it. You can run it headless and access it from another computer with SSH if you want to control the Pi. With everything set up properly, I could access the files from Linux or the MacOS. (I didn't try Windows, but I'm sure it works on it as well.) On Ubuntu, it showed up in Nautilus ("Files") as raspberrypi - SMB/CIFS. Click on that and you server folders are available. I could look at photos, stream music or stream videos that were in these folders with ease.

You can also control OMV itself from a browser, just put in your ip address for the Pi and you'll bring up the OMV sign in page, and sign in as "admin" if you want to administer it. (Default password is openmediavault, but you can change this once you're signed in.

Overall, OMV seems like an excellent system if you want a home file server, and it was plenty responsive on my Pi 4, even when installed on an SD card. And if you like the idea of trying different distros on your Pi without buying a bunch of SD cards, running OMV in Raspberry Pi Lite on the BerryBoot bootloader is a good way to go. Incidentally, if you have multiple distros on BerryBoot, you can designate a default.

[ssfc72]

Thanks Mike, for this info.  I will for sure, try the Berryboot and OMV setup, like you have done, on my RPi 4 2G Ram version.

[Jason]

Sounds pretty cool, Mike. Could you do a screenshot of the web interface or would it expose personal data you don't want to be seen?

Btw, it will be seen on Windows because you mentioned SMB/CIFS which, on Linux, is the reverse-engineered version of Windows networking so it will work. That is, as long as any fancy networking features of Windows are turned off for networking. I don't know if Windows 8.x/10 has it but Windows 7 has a setting called "Simple Networking" that had to be turned off or it might not see files shared from a non-Windows machine (there's a code generated you have to add on each Windows machine). And of course, it's not something supported under Linux. It can be easily turned off, though.

[fox]

Here are some screenshots of OMV, accessed remotely. In this case, I plugged the Pi with the SD running OMV in Raspberry Pi OS Lite (headless), and accessed the OMV control panel from Ubuntu in Firefox by simply putting in the IP address of the Pi. I can shut down and/or reboot the pi from the OMV panel, clicking on the three dots at the top right of the dashboard window.

[Jason]

Ooooh, RAID management. Thanks for the screenshots. Looks quite complete.

[fox]

Yes, I forgot to mention that you can use it to manage RAID. I don't have a RAID setup, so I have never tried this. OMV is pretty complete as a file server, but as you noted before, it lacks many of the auxiliary features one gets with NextCloud.