Banana Pi in 2024?

Recently I needed a quick and easy way to mount an external disk with an ntfs file system and share it to the network.

So whatcha gonna do? Connect it to a server, mount it, create a samba share for it - done.

So I thought of my long forgotten Banana Pi M1 as it would an absolutely perfect little machine for the job. I am planning to turn it off most of the time, boot it up by wake-on-lan and auto-mount and share the external disk, which automatically goes into standby when nothing is happening with it. The perfect scenario.

So let’s check out how it goes.

OS installation

First things first, I did not remember any credentials for the definitely too old Debian 9 on there, so I had to install Debian. Here is a quick little guide taken from johang.se for a pre-built installation for Debian Bookworm:

wget https://dl.sd-card-images.johang.se/boots/2024-04-01/boot-banana_pi_m1.bin.gz \
wget https://dl.sd-card-images.johang.se/debians/2024-04-22/debian-bookworm-armhf-phie9x.bin.gz \
zcat boot-banana_pi_m1.bin.gz debian-bookworm-armhf-phie9x.bin.gz > sd-card.img
# on macOS you may use instead of zcat...
gunzip -c boot-banana_pi_m1.bin.gz debian-bookworm-armhf-phie9x.bin.gz > sd-card.img

dd if=sd-card.img of=/dev/disk4

default password: phie9x

-> As always, you want to change disk4 for your /dev/sdX volume (or /dev/diskX on macOS) you want to flash to.

First boot

Since the root password is pre-configured, we need to change that. And if you like, even before that, change your keyboard layout accordingly.

wget https://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/kbd/kbd-2.5.1.tar.gz -O /tmp/kbd-2.5.1.tar.gz \
cd /tmp/ && tar xzf kbd-2.5.1.tar.gz \
mkdir /usr/share/keymaps \
cp -Rp /tmp/kbd-2.5.1/data/keymaps/* /usr/share/keymaps/ \
localectl list-keymaps \
localectl set-keymap de
apt-get install console-common

and finally

passwd

and create any user(add -m) you need.

Next change apt sources to include contrib, non-free and non-free-firmware:

deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm main contrib non-free non-free-firmware

deb http://deb.debian.org/debian-security/ bookworm-security main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian-security/ bookworm-security main contrib non-free non-free-firmware

deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm-updates main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm-updates main contrib non-free non-free-firmware

and update

apt update -y && apt upgrade -y &&\
apt install curl wget htop vim git zsh samba samba-common ntfs-3g [...]# and whatever you might need

install sudo and add your user to it

apt install -y sudo &&\
usermod -aG sudo {USER}

I additionally added a user (and group) called “backupuser” who will be able to mount (and read/write) and rsync files over SSH to my external disk.

This will not be a topic here, you may handle files and remote connections to your liking.

I wanted to write this here because the user actually appears inside fstab later on.

Install some stuff

It is talking long, but it is working ¯_(ツ)_/¯

sudo apt update -y &&\ 
sudo apt upgrade -y &&\ 
sudo apt install -y vim nvim htop zsh wget curl rsync git git-lfs ssh &&\
sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/master/tools/install.sh)"

and alias vim="nvim" >> ~/.zshrc ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Auto-Mounting

Edit fstab: vim /etc/fstab like so:

UUID=aada417f-f8d4-4abd-80b0-765e2f990a0e   /media/EXDISK   ext4   defaults,auto,nofail,user=backupuser   0   0

so that our external disk is being mounted right after boot.

Finishing touches

…would be to create some rsync scripts to copy my files from another server to this external disk.

rsync -rlDz -e "ssh - ~/.id" --progress user@someserver.internal.domain:/mnt/PATH/TO/FILES /media/EXDISK/

Where I would usually recommend options rtlDvz so that times are being syncted as well, and I would add --delete to mirror files completely, removing existing non-in-sync files on the external disk.

Conclusion

This worked as smoothly as hoped!

The first steps were the hardest, finding OS imags for the SD card to flash is getting harder by the day.

In some years this will be impossible, rending this little machine useless, unfortunately.

Following the initial installation (flashing the image to the SD card) I experienced this little single-core machine to be pretty slow but with a bit of patience and depending on the expected workload, of course, this would be an absolutely acceptable file-copy machine.

Banana Pi installation