How do I access an external hard drive plugged into my router?

Question

I am running Ubuntu 11.10 and I own a Netgear N600 Wireless Dual Band Router with a USB port built into it. Naturally, the router came with instructions on how to mount and view this drive with both Windows and Mac, but nothing about Linux. I have an WD Elements 1 TB external HDD that I would like to plug into the router and share across my home network. However, when I plug it in, absolutely nothing happens on my desktop.

I checked on two different machines and nothing seems to indicate that the drive has been mounted (or is even seen at all) on either machine. I am fully aware that it may not be possible to do this with a Linux system, but I was hoping someone might have a suggestion.

Answer 1

Do you know your router's IP address? (usually 192.168.1.1, but it may vary).

Open a File Browser (Nautilus) window, then press Ctrl+L and in the location bar that appears type

smb://192.168.1.1

that may give you access to the disk, which is usually published to the network via the SMB protocol.

Answer 2

As of 10/23/2012
You need CIFS not SAMBA :

1. sudo apt-get install cifs-utils
2. Add //192.168.1.1/USB_Storage /media/public cifs guest 0 0 to your /etc/fstab

I would not have gotten this far without the original answer so thank you.

Answer 3

I have this same router and just figured out how to access an external drive via Ubuntu. I wrote a blog post with the details but here's the short version:

1. Install the smbfs package (sudo aptitude install smbfs).
2. Create a directory in which to mount your external hard drive (e.g., sudo mkdir /media/public).
3. Add a line to the file /etc/fstab (gksudo gedit /etc/fstab) - at the end of the file add this line: //192.168.1.1/USB_Storage /media/public smbfs guest 0 0
4. Save your newly updated fstab file then remount your drives (sudo mount -a); you should now be able to see your new external drive at /media/public.

Answer 4

I have had similar issues with router a year ago. "roadmr" has a great potential solution, but there is a slight chance you might be on 192.168.0.1

in which case you would enter smb://192.168.0.1 (or other depending on your ip)

...although the most common would be 192.168.1.1 as "roadmr" suggested.

Apologies if you have already tried this, but... enter the terminal and type ifconfig.

---

This will display your IP information

I'm fairly new to Linux, but have worked with networks for a bit, so I just wanted to throw it out there to you that 192.168.1.1 might not be your IP, as I set my router to a more ambiguous IP, or I hide the network altogether.

Answer 5

Good instructions above to make the disk visible, but however, if you want to make it writable for the user, you have to define it with the uid & gid options in your mount command. To find out the uid (numerical User ID) & gid (numerical group ID) of your user, you can use the command:

id <user>

Then note the values in uid= and gid= -fields. Once done, you can test it by giving the following command:

sudo mount -o nosuid,uid=<insert uid here>,gid=<insert gid here> //192.168.1.1/USB_Storage/ /media/public/

If your disk is now writeable, then you can add the same permissions in the fstab entry:

//192.168.1.1/USB_Storage/ /media/public/ cifs guest,uid=<insert uid here>,gid=<insert gid here> 0 0

EDIT: Confirming that this works on a hard drive plugged with USB into a D-LINK DIR-868L (ubuntu 14.04). Instead of USB_Storage you should use the device's name, which can be found on web GUI of the router (Setup -> Storage ->Device). Dont forget to check the IP address as well (it may not be 192.168.1.1).

Answer 6

I used smbfs and after compiled it , you will find mount.smbfs under example script mount. I am sure you can get that from tar file after you installed binary? I used that command to mount. N600 does not seems to understand cifs.