Posted inInformation Technology

How to Make Manjaro 20.2 work with NAS

seasoned_geek by seasoned_geek1
Network drives

You installed Manjaro because you wanted a modern Linux without Ubuntu bloat. Now you can’t find your NAS.

I gotta tell ya man, it’s getting so you can’t keep anything anymore. Admittedly I’m surprised either my WD MyCloud or the Buffalo NAS I have are still operational. Generally “consumer grade” hard drives meet their 5 year MTB by being powered off for at least 4 of those years.

Every day I come into the office expecting to see one of them dead. Definitely started becoming more and more choosy about what I keep on them. I’ve even bought newer USB drives to plug into them, both expanding their available storage and providing a newer spindle to hold the stuff I would really like to have survive my next round of splattered platter syndrome.

The truly sad part about having 6TB or more of NAS is coming to the realization you either have to back this stuff up or kiss it goodbye when the drive(s) goes. Consumer grade NAS generally have a single drive. Some have a pair of drives, but you have to do a full mirror (cutting storage in half) if you actually want to recover anything. That also assumes the power supply in the unit isn’t what cooks. After that you have to move up to the commercial grade NAS with higher prices and RAID levels. You also have to also keep one of those pricey drives with cartridge on a shelf to swap in at the moment of failure.

Linux distros today are either not installing the pieces of Samba necessary to access older NAS or they are deliberately turning that part off in the configuration. I’ve already written about this problem with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. Thankfully Manjaro didn’t make the issue quite as obscure as Ubuntu. Open a terminal.

sudo pacman -S manjaro-settings-samba

When that runs you will see something like the following.

After the install

It says you need to reboot for the changes, but I’m running the KDE version of Manjaro and Dolphin too to the changes right away.

Dolphin after install

Just to be complete, here is my Manjaro information.

Manjaro version

Happy NAS!

Roland Hughes started his IT career in the early 1980s. He quickly became a consultant and president of Logikal Solutions, a software consulting firm specializing in OpenVMS application and C++/Qt touchscreen/embedded Linux development. Early in his career he became involved in what is now called cross platform development. Given the dearth of useful books on the subject he ventured into the world of professional author in 1995 writing the first of the "Zinc It!" book series for John Gordon Burke Publisher, Inc.

A decade later he released a massive (nearly 800 pages) tome "The Minimum You Need to Know to Be an OpenVMS Application Developer" which tried to encapsulate the essential skills gained over what was nearly a 20 year career at that point. From there "The Minimum You Need to Know" book series was born.

Three years later he wrote his first novel "Infinite Exposure" which got much notice from people involved in the banking and financial security worlds. Some of the attacks predicted in that book have since come to pass. While it was not originally intended to be a trilogy, it became the first book of "The Earth That Was" trilogy:
Infinite Exposure
Lesedi - The Greatest Lie Ever Told
John Smith - Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars

When he is not consulting Roland Hughes posts about technology and sometimes politics on his blog. He also has regularly scheduled Sunday posts appearing on the Interesting Authors blog.