TomatoUSB media management

[dropcap]Y[/dropcap]ou may have just set up your Tomato router and want to add a bunch of files to your server. All of your music, books, movies, TV as well as your personal data can be placed on the server for remote access.
An easy way to manage the data is with samba. Enabling SMB on Tomato USB is a good option. It basically allows you to create a bunch of user profiles so you can share different data with different people locally or remotely. Different people can have access to different folders to separately store things from each other. Most operating systems will let you mount SMB file systems right out of the box, without the need for additional software. FTP is built into OS X but it’s not the best protocol that let’s you manage files. You could use something like FileZilla though.

TomatoUSB media management

First go to the file sharing page on your Tomato webgui. Turn on file sharing. If you want to manage users you can turn on password authentication. I just turned on the allow users to manage and bam. Next make sure the workgroup is set to something you will remember. This needs to be set on the network adapter page of every machine you want to see this disk.
Once it’s set you should see the machine just appear in the left hand panel of explorer and finder.

It’s pretty much just that simple. If you want to access it remotely you need to set up a VPN. Luckily that is built into tomato as well. It allows you to see all of your local network remotely.

As the name implies, File Transfer Protocol is best suited to transferring data. In tomato it is too slow to play video with because the protocol uses a raw stream of data with no buffer, most software for media doesn’t support it either like Plex and XBMC. It’s good if you want to host files for download on a website or to deliver files to people.

THE BEST FILESYSTEM FOR STREAMING MEDIA ON TOMATOUSB isn’t SMB…

Hands down, NFS is the fastest protocol for streaming HD media. It has a low overhead compared to SMB which is necessary for keeping a constant bitrate. It’s not the best choice for tomatousb media management but each tools has it’s use.

It’s not quite as easy to set up as SMB really. But I’ll guide you through it.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *