How to use BT HomeHub 5 as Volumio NAS?

Help and Support Help
1

For the past week I have had Volumio working well on a Raspberry Pi Model B (rev 2) using Wifi. It’s such a great solution I can already see it’s going to transform how I listen to my music. I’ve got a HiFiBerry DAC on order.

I’d like to use the USB drive attached to my Home Hub 5 router for storing my music files (mp3 and AAC files) but can’t find the right entry to be able to add this as a NAS mount in Volumio.

In Windows 7 and XP, the address for the HomeHub USB drive is \192.168.1.254\usb4 - and the router’s SSID and password act as the user name and password. From there I can access any of the files in a Windows browser and load them as if they were stored locally. In Volumio I select SMB/CIFS, put 192.168.1.254 in the NAS IP address, usb4 in the Remote directory, and then the router’s SSID and password in the Username and Password. But this doesn’t work.

Any advice on this would be appreciated. I aim to have a Volumio setup in at least two rooms, and a 64GB USB drive on the HomeHub router would give me a single store for all my music across the house.

2

Try mounting the smb share from volumios commandline and see what kind of error you get.

3

Many thanks, that does indeed work. It just took me a couple of days to work out how to do what sounds simple but was a mammoth task of learning for me.

So, for anyone else with Volumio on a Raspberry Pi wishing to use the BT HomeHub 5 as a low-power, limited features, limited capacity, but low-cost and super-convenient NAS, here is what you do.

Buy the appropriate size of USB storage stick. At the time of writing you can get 32GB for less than £10. That might not sound very much space but 10 years ago that’s what your laptop could have shipped with as its main drive.

Plug the USB stick into the socket on the back of your HomeHub.

Follow these instructions on computer running from your HH5 to identify the name of the share:

bt.custhelp.com/app/answers/deta … ome-hub%3F

Read these instructions to understand the principle of how to mount the share you have just identified in the previous step. It’s the section for a password protected share that you want to follow. I did the simple one (which is the less secure but easier route - I might fix that another day).

wiki.ubuntu.com/MountWindowsSharesPermanently

This means you need to:

(a) create the folder in /mnt/NAS/ on the Pi where you want the contents (in my case, mp3 and AAC music files) of your NAS share to appear. I created a folder called Tunes

(b) add following line to /etc/fstab

//192.168.1.254/usb? /mnt/NAS/Tunes cifs username=SSID,password=WPA,iocharset=utf8,sec=ntlm 0 0

This is where:

192.168.1.254 is the IP address of your HH5
usb? is the name of your share
SSID is the wireless SSID on your HH5
WPA is the password you have set to protect the Wifi connection on your HH5

I navigated to the /etc directory and used the command ‘sudo nano fstab’ in order to make this edit

The share name (usb?) seems to change with the specific USB drive plugged into the HH5. I guess this is useful but it does mean you need to be careful with your share naming as you try out different USB drives.

I hope that helps somebody. I’ll be giving this a full test over the coming weeks and will post any updates/limitations etc. that might be of interest. I’m going to try and set up my Webradio pls files in the same way.

Just as a reminder, I’m doing all of this so that I can have Volumio set ups in more than one room, all sharing the same music files and, with a bit of luck, Webradio stations.

4

I was so excited to find this, been trying to do this for a while.
All went well, fstab all edited etc
But I just get “Host is down” error messages, did you come across that at any point?
The only difference is mine is the PlusNet badged version of the HH5, but it’s supposed to be exactly the same.
Did you try it without a username and password as shown in the link you shared?
i.e. //servername/sharename /media/windowsshare cifs guest,uid=1000,iocharset=utf8 0 0

Finally, did you try the SnapCast plugin?