0

I have set up my Raspberry Pi as a storage server. It has a 2TB disk attached to it via USB and I installed ProFTPd to provide access to it. CIFS/Samba had too much overhead, eating away all of the Pi's CPU so the transfers were very slow.

The disk's single ext4 partition is mounted at /mnt/storage and I created symlinks in the users' home directories to that mountpoint. ProFTPd is configured to allow users access to their $HOMEs.

When a user logs in over FTP with WinSCP, the storage symlink is visible and navigable (along with all hidden files). However, when they use Windows Explorer as an FTP client navigating to ftp://user@pi/ (tested with Win7), neither the symlink, nor the hidden files are visible. This is a nuisance, since I'd like to be able to use the "map network drive" feature in Windows to have the share visible in "My Computer" instead of having to use a dedicated FTP client (not all my users are tech-savvy).

Is this a problem with ProFTPd or rather (as I expect), Windows? Can I do anything to make the missing symlink show up?

neuviemeporte
  • 247

1 Answers1

1

Could potentially be an issue with the Windows Explorer not being able to see the ext4 partition on the external drive. See this post regarding a similar issue with ext4 and Windows:

How to read ext4 partitions on Windows?

More than likely you'll need to use WinSCP or a client in order to transfer from the RPi FTP.

As a side note, I'm using a similar setup and am wondering if there is any reason not to use NTFS on the external drive? I used the following guide and have had no issues mapping drives in Windows 7 and Windows 8.

http://www.howtogeek.com/139433/how-to-turn-a-raspberry-pi-into-a-low-power-network-storage-device/

Community
  • 1
Mike Naylor
  • 557