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Recording to a NAS.. my tale of woe

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danmed

Member
Does anyone here successfully record to a NAS device using Whoosh 4.01?

I tried.. and i failed.. miserably.

My thought was to use autofs to mount my NAS drive to record to and then remove the USB HDD.. it seemed to work, i did a test record and it went fine.. HOwever later i went back and turned it on to find a "Failed to record Blah blah, HDD full"... i gasped... It was Eastenders (Thank god for catchup or the H2S wouldn't of been the only thing nearly bricked last night)..

I decided, fine... obviously it's gone to sleep and lost the mount but it was still there when i checked.

Then i found a setting that said "Use instead of HDD" or similar so i turned that on, and i think that was my biggest mistake.

I had recently switched from CrossEPG to the other one, and Eastenders was no where to be found in the guide.. i wanted to switch back so i figured the simplest method was to reflash Whoosh.. I tried to backup my settings and then went wrong.. it couldn't create the TAR file as it figured there was no where to create it (the HDD being unplugged).

Then i decided to just flash anyway as i had an old settings i could restore.. big mistake.. it failed to flash and in red text told me that the box couldn't boot.. i guess i didn't get the whole file in the download or something and it buggered it.. luckily i had Whoosh's base build to hand and all is good with the world again.. however i'm lost as to where i fucked it all up..

If i had done a reboot after setting the Nas to "Use instead of HDD" would things of been OK?
Should i leave a stick in the back of the H2s aswell so it has some local storage?
Does the NAS mount stay alive when the box is in standby..?

i want to try this again otherwise the NAS i just bought is useless.. but i really would like some guidance!
 
A few thoughts

Did you 'initialise' the NAS using settings in menu? If it says full chances are it is still formatted to FAT32
Always handy to do a reboot after changing a setting
Might be good idea to leave a usb in back for EPG and set EPG to it
Then set recordings to NAS
 
It's a linux based NAS formatted to EXT4.. no need to initialise it and recordings worked fine.. just not in standby.. but thanks for the idea.

I use a Micro SD for timeshift, swap file and epg, but it identifies it as such.. a USB HDD is identified differently and it seems to default to using that for things like Whoosh's download and settings backup.
 
I record to my NAS from 3 boxes with no problems but I use fstab rather than autofs.
I think the problem with the HDD is that if you unplug it and plug it back in, the box then mounts it as USB rather than HDD and the mount points are then all wrong for recordings and backup settings etc.
From memory I think you have to go into 'Infos > Infopanel > Plugins > Mount Manager' and highlight the device and click the red button 'use as hdd'
 
So would you advise i leave a USB drive in the back as well? Or would setting my NAS drive to "Use as HDD" be OK?
What i ideally want is :

MicroSD : Timeshift, Swap and EPG
NAS : Recordings
 
danmed said:
So would you advise i leave a USB drive in the back as well? Or would setting my NAS drive to "Use as HDD" be OK?
What i ideally want is :

MicroSD : Timeshift, Swap and EPG
NAS : Recordings
Click to expand...

I have one box that I use with only a 128gb microsd card and I usually plug a USB stick in the back for flashing online etc. I haven't actually set the mountpoint for the microsd as 'use as hdd' but I suppose in theory that I wouldn't need to bother with the usb then. I'll have to try it when I get home.
I also didn't set the NAS drive as 'use as hdd' because i didn't want the zg writing loads of crap to my NAS such as epg, timeshift, swaps etc.
I've got a day off tomorrow so I'll have a play and let you know.

My intention is to go to the devices mount manager and set the microsd setting to 'use as hdd' then reboot.
Set timeshift and epg to record to the new microsd mount.

Go into recording path and set the default movie recording path as the network mount and see what happens.
The issues I had previously is that flashing online etc downloads the zip file to hdd and if it doesn't see one it defaults to the internal flash and then fails.
I don't see why these settings wouldn't work. Anyway I'll have a go tomorrow.
 
Super star, it sounds like that's exactly what i need to do, and the scenario you explained at the end is exactly what i buggered up.

I've got a new Nvidia Shield to play with this evening so you will likely get to the experiment before me, but i await your results!
 
Well the shield is going back.. god bless Amazons return process.. My Pi3 runs Kodi better imo..

I've gone to have a look at this but i cant find where to set the sd card to "use as HDD"... any ideas?
 
Infopanel > Plugins > Mount Manager as far as I remember.
You will have to stop timeshift and disable swap file and then reboot
 
Yes, disable swap, stop timeshift, change mount settings, reboot.
You will then need to download the epg and enable the swap and timeshift again.
 
Thanks guys, unfortunately it doesn't look like that plugin comes with Whooshbuild 4.01 and i'm too much of a dinlow to find it in the downloads list..

I did find Mount Manager under System > Network but it only lists my NAs mount point, not any local storage

Am i being dense or does this plugin i'm missing hold the key to the solution?

It might just be easier fo rme to leave a small USB drive plugged in the back and let it use that as the HDD whilst all my recordings go off to the NAS...

Edit : I've just realised why i got a "HDD full" message the last time i tried this and an auto timer kicked in.. i've specified a folder for Eastenders in the timer itself.. which obviously no longer existed :)
 
Last edited:
Mount Manager is in:
Menu > Info Panel > Plugins > MountManager


Highlight the MicroSD and press the green 'setup mounts' button
Use left and right to change to /media/hdd
Green button to save - then reboot.



You will then need to setup the network mounts (I use fstab rather than autofs) and setup the buttons in file list to point at the NAS if you want.

NAS Mounts.jpg

NAS buttons.jpg
 
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Thanks Willo, i will see if i can get it going on my build first and if not i will switch to yours.
Thanks for pointing out where the mountmanager is, i've found it now.. I'll have to turn off Swap and Timeshift as previously mentioned as pressing red to use MMC as HDD does nothing at the moment.
 
So i didn't end up using your image, however i did follow your lead and now have just an MMC in the box with timeshift/epg and swap on.. The recordings go to the NAS which seems to work perfectly.

Thanks again.
 
I'm getting my first H2S box this weekend and if it goes well, I'll probably be getting another one for another room.

I'm looking into options of keeping recordings in a single location so they can be recorded and viewed by both boxes. I've seen some users running off a 'main' h2s box and all recordings going to the attached usb drive. However, I have a Synology NAS drive with plenty of storage so I'm considering using that instead and the two boxes feeding off it.

I'm just wondering if the recordings are put into the nas 'on-the-fly' or live. My worry is that if I'm using the NAS to transfer files to other users/PC/media devices, will the recordings fail due to low transfer rates into the NAS?
 
I'm using a Synology DS215j and it works great. I have a shared folder called TV and one called Movies and just mounted them as shared drives on each H2S box.
You can record direct to the shared drive and play stuff from it on all the boxes with no problems.
 
Willo3092 said:
I'm using a Synology DS215j and it works great. I have a shared folder called TV and one called Movies and just mounted them as shared drives on each H2S box.
You can record direct to the shared drive and play stuff from it on all the boxes with no problems.
Click to expand...


Good to know. Do you have any recording issues when the NAS is busy serving other users?
 
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