Help with external drive access on Webtop
reddit / selfhosted

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omeromano · 2023-10-22 11:07

Hi. I have a file and media server running on OMV 6 on a SFF PC. It
has USB ports available. I want to try file exchange from my drives
locally using a GUI so I spun up an instance of Linuserver's webtop. I
chose MATE.

It looks great! But I don't see my drives anywhere. I managed to
access them via their SMB shares. I also don't see any USB devices
even when I plugged it. Checking on OMV the external drive is
recognized. I wanted to get a plug and play experience, but it seems
to be more complicated.

Any help on how to achieve this is appreciated.

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thekrautboy · 2023-10-22 11:12

https://www.linuxserver.io/support

https://docs.linuxserver.io/

https://discord.gg/YWrKVTn?target=_blank

https://discourse.linuxserver.io/

https://github.com/linuxserver/docker-webtop/issues

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omeromano · 2023-10-22 11:32

Thanks for your reply. That's my issue though. The idea of mounting
paths suggests that it stays mounted. I need it to function as a
portable drive.

What adds to the confusion is when I watch videos of people spinning
up their webtop, there is a usb icon on theirs. Mine has none.

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thekrautboy · 2023-10-22 11:33

Okay?

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mattague · 2023-11-04 12:47

IDK why they are being so passive aggressive. Not sure if you figured
this out but it seems like passing through the USB controller (is
possible in your setup) as a device is what you are looking for. In
docker, it would be as simple as using the

    --device
flag with the appropriate device and then it would function exactly as
you are asking.

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omeromano · 2023-11-04 14:41

Oh wow. Thank you for this. Unfortunately, I don't know how to do
this. Using docker compose, I tried command: "--device..." and the
device: "/dev/..." unsuccessfully.

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mattague · 2023-11-07 02:34

ok, a little bit of searching to make sure my answer is write brings
me to [this reddit post](https://www.reddit.com/r/docker/comments/nb6t
sy/exposing_usb_device_to_containers/). What you want to do is make
sure the USB device is not plugged in. Then access the terminal on
OMV. If you run the command

    ls /dev/bus/usb
You should get what looks like folders. There will be one for each
controller on the computer. Then  run the command

    ls /dev/bus/usb/001
On each of those folders and make note of what it looks like inside
each. Once you do that, plug in the USB device and repeat these steps.
You will see another device show up in one of those folders. You then
need to pass that through to the container using something like this:

      devices:
      - /dev/bus/usb/001/003:/dev/bus/usb/001/003
Note that this is formatted for compose. It will look slightly
different in a run command.