Setup OpenMediaVault on your Raspberry Pi
How to easily setup OpenMediaVault on your Raspberry Pi
What you need
- Raspberry Pi 3b or newer
- micro SD card (at least 8GB, but if you want to buy a new on for this I recommend buying a 32GB or even 64GB card, because they are very cheap)
- Adapter to connect your micro SD card to your computer
- Raspberry Pi Imager (download from the original site: https://www.raspberrypi.org/software/ or on Linux just use sudo apt install rpi-imager)
- SSH client: to connect remotely to your Raspberry Pi you can use the default ssh client that is preinstalled in Linux, Mac OS or Windows. If you want a richer user experience you can use Remmina on Linux or PuTTY on Windows for example.
- Access to your router
- LAN cable connection for your Raspberry Pi (for simplicity)
How to set it up
1. Install Raspberry Pi OS Lite on your micro SD
Plug in the micro SD to your computer using the adapter if needed and start the Raspberry Pi Imager.
Select “Raspberry Pi OS Lite” as shown above, make sure you select the right storage to write to and press the “write” button.
2. Enable SSH
To enable a ssh connection you need to simply create a file named “ssh” (without any file extension) on the boot partition of your micro SD.
On Linux you just need to go to the boot partition with the file explorer and open a terminal there. Or directly navigate there from your terminal. Then you can use the command touch ssh to create the ssh file and your done.
On Windows you can navigate to the boot partition with the file explorer, right click, create new file, call it ssh and save. Per default Windows will add the file extension .txt to the file so make sure to remove it after saving.
Make sure you create the file in the boot partition not on rootfs/boot.
3. Connect to your Raspberry Pi
Now you can remove the micro SD from your computer, plug it into your Raspberry Pi and boot it up.
Then you open a ssh connection to your Raspberry Pi. You can get the IP address from the web interface of your router.
The default username is “pi” and the password is “raspberry”.
4. Get everything up to date
Now that you have a ssh connection to your Raspberry Pi let’s get everything up to date by using the update and full-upgrade commands for apt.
sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade -y
I experienced some OS issues, because the firmware had some updates, but they could be solved by just starting over from step 1 again.
5. Set a strong password
Don’t skip the security and make sure you set up a strong password, before proceeding. The command for setting a new password is:
passwd
Make sure to update the password in Remmina or PuTTY to.
6. Delete network defaults symlink
To avoid trouble with your network settings when installing OpenMediaVault in the next step use the following command to delete the default network symlink file.
sudo rm -f /etc/systemd/network/99-default.link
7. Restart your Raspberry Pi
Restart the system to make sure all updates are applied.
sudo reboot
8. Install OpenMediaVault
Connect to you freshly booted Raspberry Pi again using the new password you set before and install OpenMediaVault with this command:
wget -O - https://github.com/OpenMediaVault-Plugin-Developers/installScript/raw/master/install | sudo bash
This can take a couple minutes.
9. Restart your Raspberry Pi, again
sudo reboot
10. Set a static IP-address for your Raspberry Pi
Now go to the web interface of your router and set a static IP for your Raspberry Pi. Usually you can find a setting for this by going to the network tab, find your Raspberry Pi there and check a box for static IP.
If you like you can also set a different IP in this to recognize your Pi easier.
11. Open the IP-address of your Raspberry Pi in your browser
You can now go to the OpenMediaVault web interface by just opening your Pis IP-address in your browser. Then you should see this login interface:
The default username is “admin” and the password is “openmediavault”.
12. Set a strong password
Again you should change the default password to a strong one. Just click on General Settings in the left side menu and go to the Web Administrator Password tab. Set you new password and save it. Done.
