NAS How To

4- Create RAID Device filesystem

Once you create the RAID "device", it also needs to be formatted. This is the step that I usually forget and then waste time wondering why my RAID won't mount. All you need to do is click the device name in Figure 7, set the Create filesystem of type: dropdown to New Linux Native as shown in Figure 8 and click the Create filesystem of type: button. You'll get a screen that logs the results of the format and just wait a bit until it shows that the format has completed.

Figure 8: Creating the RAID filesystem

5- Create the Mount directory

Now that we have our RAID device, it needs to be mounted so that it can be used. This means that it needs to be linked to a directory someplace in the filesystem. I spun my wheels a bit here also, because the Webmin Add mount function doesn't work as described in the documentation and doesn't automatically create mount directories.

I wanted to create a "public" directory that had read/write access for everyone without requiring any sort of login. And I didn't want to use the administrator level directory that the Ubuntu install process created under /home, so I had to create a new directory.

The easy way would have been to log in and run a sudo mkdir command to create the required directory. But I wanted a way to do it entirely in Webmin and fortunately, the Java-based File Manager module did the trick.

File Manager is found under the Others menu and clicking it launches a Java applet that provides a Windows Explorer flavor file browser. I decided to put my mount point under the /mnt directory, using a nested directory of /mnt/raidarr/public.

Figure 9 shows that I clicked on the mnt folder in the left hand pane, then clicked the New folder icon to pop up a small window where I could enter my new folder name. Note that I had to first create the raidarr directory, then the public directory in it.

Figure 9: Creating a new directory with Webmin File Manager

Once the directory was created, I had to set its permissions. This is a bit tricky since it only works when you select the folder in the right-hand pane! But once you get the folder to appear, just click on the Info icon and set the permissions as shown in Figure 10. The full-sized image shows that I also set the folder Ownership to user nobody and group nogroup.

Figure 10: Setting public folder permissions