Sharing the TIPI filesystem with multiple Raspberry PIs

To share the TIFILES between multiple TIPIs in your home network, you will need to mount the TIPI share from one PI onto another over the network. The TIPI sd-image shares the /home/tipi/tipi_disk folder as the share TIPI automatically.

Setting up automatic mount of network share

We only have to configure the PI that will mount the source filesystem. In the example, the PI connected to my primary TI-99/4A with the files I want to share has the hostname tipi4a. In the examples below, it is referred to as tipi4a.local. You can change the hostname of a PI with raspi-config.

Mounting a network share requires credentials (or the mount process will stall). Create the credentials file as /home/tipi/tipisharing.smb with the following contents (if you have changed the tipi user password on the PI that is acting as the server, then you should use that password here as well):

nano /home/tipi/tipisharing.smb

user=tipi
password=tipi

(Press control-o to save, followed by enter, then control-x to exit nano)

Configure the system to mount the network share overtop the local filesystem. Add the following line to /etc/fstab:

sudo nano /etc/fstab

//tipi4a.local/TIPI /home/tipi/tipi_disk cifs credentials=/home/tipi/tipisharing.smb,uid=0,iocharset=utf8,noperm 0 0

(Press control-o to save, followed by enter, then control-x to exit nano)

Alternatively, if you prefer to add the remote filesystem as a sub-directory within you might create the target directory such as:

mkdir /home/tipi/tipi_disk/TIPI4A

And then use that as the destination folder in the /etc/fstab mount information such as:

//tipi4a.local/TIPI /home/tipi/tipi_disk/TIPI4A cifs credentials=/home/tipi/.smb,uid=0,iocharset=utf8,noperm 0 0

Test it

Before rebooting, to verify automatic mounting of the filesystem, let's mount it once manually:

sudo mount /home/tipi/tipi_disk

or, if you went with the subdirectory approach:

sudo mount /home/tipi/tipi_disk/TIPI4A

Now you should be able to see all of the files and directories from the source TIPI on this second TIPI.

ls /home/tipi/tipi_disk

Reboot

To finish verifying that it works automatically on bootup, reboot the client TIPI.

sudo reboot now