#bricking stuff

Over a year ago, I bought an ODroid HC2 to build a NAS I could use to serve my media files around my home network.

The first hard drive I bought for it turned out to have an SAS connector, not SATA. Turns out there’s more than just SATA and eSATA. Huh. Wrote off that drive.

The second hard drive vanished from OpenMediaVault’s sight in the middle of building the file system. I attributed this to the ebay seller just dropping it in a bubble mailer for shipping, wrote off that drive.

The third hard drive did the same thing, so I decided it was probably a problem writing to the drive and bought an HDD enclosure so I could format my drives with my PC.

Then I moved. Threw all that equipment in a box. Didn’t do anything with it.

Set up my PC for Windows’ DLNA server thing. Didn’t meet my needs, often buggy. Set up Open Media Server. Met more of my needs, also buggy. Gave up on DLNA and started putting my videos on a flash drive I could walk between the PC and the Android TV (because of course just running a torrent client on the ATV or sending the files around by network is ridiculously slow and buggy for no good reason).

Got a second Android TV. Now I really want my videos in two locations. Also don’t want to have all the prep work of copying junk to flash drive. Guess I better finish that NAS.

Now it is today.

I decide to see if I can crack the disk setup problem. First, I go ahead and try to set up the file system on the drive that’s already on the HC2. First time, disappears in the middle like I’d seen before. Restart HC2. Successfully build file system.

Spend an hour trying to figure out how to actually NAS this NAS. Can’t find the NFS service Windows is supposed to have. Try to set up Samba. Samba can’t find the device on the network. Mess around with server and user settings in OMV. Still can’t find the device for Samba. Mess around more.

Finally try letting Samba browse the network for devices instead of trying to figure out how to format the address. There’s the device. Double click on it. Nothing happens.

OMV is back to saying it doesn’t have a hard drive. Restart HC2. Can’t load the OMV interface. Check router’s interface to see if the IP address has changed. Turns out that despite lights being on at both ends of the ethernet cable, the HC2 does not appear on the network. Restart HC2 a few more times. No change.

Throw all the equipment in a box.