Mediatomb - Could not list directory

[0ak13y]

Hi All,

I am very new to Ubuntu or any Linux for that matter. I am tring to get Mediatomb to work on my system. I have installed the packages and mediatomb appears to be running fine. The problem is that I have an external hard drive that I want my files to be kept on. When I try to add the folders on the external I get the following error:

Error: Could not list directory /media/TeraByte : Permission Denied.

TeraByte is the name of the volume, I have created shared folders on the Volume, but I can't seem to get anywhere with this.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

[sanderd17]

You will have to change the permissions of the folder on the external hard drive. This can be done with nautilus: hit alt+F2 and execute

gksudo nautilus

, go to the folder you want to copy the files to and change the permissions with a right click -> properties -> rights. Change the owner and the group to yourself and apply it to the other files in the folder.

Now it should work

Alternatively, you can do it with command line. All those things done with command line are very good explaned in the tutorial http://linuxcommand.org/lts0070.php (the link is to the page with the permissions tutorial).

If this doesn't help, could you show me (a short version if it's quite long) of the result of the command

ls -al /media/TeraByte

[0ak13y]

Hi sanderd,

thanks for the reply. I tried your suggestion, unfortunately, still not working for me.

This is the result of the comment that you asked for.

drwx------ 4 ryan ryan 16384 1969-12-31 20:00 .
drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 4096 2010-01-06 13:35 ..
drwx------ 2 ryan ryan 16384 2010-01-06 10:01 Movies
drwx------ 2 ryan ryan 16384 2010-01-06 10:01 Music

[buntunoob]

The next problem your going to run in to is that if you start mediatomb before mounting the drive you'll have to reimport again, so if you can now mount the drive at boot.

[sanderd17]

Ok, lets give it an other try, make your disk acessible for everyone:

sudo chmod 777 /media/TeraByte

This is not so safe, so if its works try 755 instead of 777.

If it still doesn't work, try

sudo chmod -R 777 /media/TeraByte

[Mechphisto]

I have the exact same problem.
But changing permissions doesn't work for me because the external HD is using NTFS format; the changes don't take.

Funny, it used to work just fine before I reinstalled the OS. I did so using the same username, so I have no problem accessing my external HD with the file manager. Just Mediatomb doesn't want to access it.

Thanks for any suggestions!

[sanderd17]

Maybe it will help if you mount your disk at startup, like buntunoob said. Follow the next steps:

• mount your external disk with nautilus (just open it and nautilus will mount it for you)
• Check how the partition you want to acces is named (on your hdd it's sda1, sda2,... on an external drive it will be someting like sdb1, sdb2). How can you check it? you can do it with gparted:
  

  sudo apt-get install gparted
  gksudo gparted

  In gparted, select the drive you want to mount and read the partition number. (be sure it has a number and not just sdb).
• now that you have the name, you have to search the UUID. you can do it with the code
  

  sudo blkid

• remember the UUID of your hdd and add a line to your fstab file:
  

  sudo gedit /etc/fstab

  Add the folowing line:
  

  UUID=2713699d-231d-4e8b-9484-5450cededef3 /home/hdd               ntfs    defaults 0       1

  You can change your location /home/hdd to the location you want your files to appear, off course you have to change the UUID to the one you found with blkid. And you'll have also to change the ntfs to ext3 or ext4 if it's not ntfs you use.
• If that is done, do a reboot and see if your external hdd can be read.

[Mechphisto]

Oh that so worked! Thanks.

[Maelgwyn]

I'm actually having the same problem - all my media is stored on the external HDD called My Book.

I've added the UUID to fstab, and it's automagically mounting when I boot - yet MediaTomb is still refusing to list the directory >.<

ls gives me this

nik@ochre:~$ ls -al /media/My\ Book/
total 193
drwx------ 1 nik  nik   4096 2010-02-18 18:40 .
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root  4096 2010-02-18 20:06 ..
-rwxrwxrwx 1 nik  nik    504 2009-07-31 21:58 desktop.ini
drwx------ 1 nik  nik   4096 2009-11-22 11:00 Downloads
drwx------ 1 nik  nik   4096 2009-11-08 13:21 From Jules
drwx------ 1 nik  nik   8192 2010-02-18 18:43 Jarrod's backup
drwx------ 1 nik  nik   4096 2010-02-08 06:08 Misc
drwx------ 1 nik  nik  28672 2010-02-10 10:34 Movies
drwx------ 1 nik  nik  98304 2010-02-16 10:51 Music
drwx------ 1 nik  nik   4096 2010-02-17 18:59 Nik's backup
drwx------ 1 nik  nik   8192 2009-12-10 20:21 $RECYCLE.BIN
-rwxrwxrwx 2 nik  nik    173 2009-12-29 08:43 SBSettings.xml
drwx------ 1 nik  nik      0 2009-10-31 10:34 System Volume Information
drwx------ 1 nik  nik  28672 2010-02-18 09:33 TV Shows

[watsoncj]

For my setup I had to modify /etc/fstab to allow mediatomb access to read the files. The umask=000 is the magic piece. The uid and gid shouldn't be necessary, but if you use them make sure to use the right ids. You can get them by running the linux 'id' command.

/dev/sdb1 /media/win ntfs defaults,umask=000,uid=1000,gid=1000,noatime 0 0