External Hard Drives on Other Devices

    This is kind of a general Linux question, but the device involved is running LibreElec so I figured I’d start here. I’m setting up a Jellyfin server on a Raspberry PI and I’ve successfully mounted my dedicated network drives. The only piece left is a WD My Book USB 3.0 external hard drive. It’s plugged into a Chromebox which is running LibreElec. On a Mac or PC The Chromebox shows up as an SMB shared device and the My Book drive is just a folder. Within Kodi itself I was able to add it with ZeroConference and it displays as 192:168.0.122:445/My Book

    The IP address makes sense, since that’s the address for the device, but I wasn’t sure how the 445 came into play. How does that need to be formatted if you’re trying to mount it using the sudo mount -t cifs command?

    SMB is a file service, which works on top of a block-based file system. So in theory the underlying file system doesn't matter. However, I recently switched from exFAT to Ext4 on my NAS, since I had trouble to access files after a while. I guess Ext4 is easier to scan for errors under Linux, and such scans are triggered periodically. I suggest Ext4 for Linux.

    SMB default port numbers are 139 or 445, so that's OK.

    So when I mounted a dedicated network drive share from a WD MyCloud, after creating the mounting spot with sudo mkdir /media/public the command I entered was

    sudo mount -t cifs -o rw,guest,vers=3.0 //deviceipaddress/Public /media/public


    Would the command formats be the same only substitute the Public for My Book and the IP address as written with the :445 port on the end of the IP address?

    Quote from docsuess84

    The IP address makes sense, since that’s the address for the device, but I wasn’t sure how the 445 came into play. How does that need to be formatted if you’re trying to mount it using the sudo mount -t cifs command?

    You only need to specify port details when a non-standard port for the protocol is used. LE shares SMB/CIFS on default ports so nothing is needed.

    Oh, one thing I was curious about is if there can be spaces when you’re mounting a drive. Should the share be entered as “My Book” or would it be “My_Book” ?

    Spaces are legal but will need to be correctly quoted everywhere else things break. If you want an easier life, avoid naming devices and shares with spaces.

    Quote from Da Flex

    Come on, from what I've seen in your posts, you're not the out-of-the-box guy. ^^

    WD passport/book drives come with spaces in their volume names. Some might be even formatted in the way that older Windows do not recognize their partitions.