Expand storage to AWS S3

If you are using a Raspberry Pi camera (onboard/USB/etc.) to monitor when the alarm is triggered, it is a good idea to backup the photos and videos in cloud - in the case the thief steals you RPi.

The following guide shows how to mount a AWS S3 to the Raspberry Pi.

Requirements

• AWS account
• AWS key and secret

Create AWS bucket

Create bucket: nimha

Create folder: media (this will be nimha/media)

Download packages

sudo apt install s3fs

Raspberry Pi

[2019 March] Current s3fs version available on Raspbian Stretch is v1.81. Installing with apt install can cause problems with the connection due to gnucrypt. This should be fixed in v1.85. It is therefore advised to compile s3fs from source.

sudo apt-get install build-essential git libfuse-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libxml2-dev mime-support automake libtool
sudo apt-get install pkg-config libssl-dev
git clone https://github.com/s3fs-fuse/s3fs-fuse
cd s3fs-fuse/
./autogen.sh
./configure --prefix=/usr --with-openssl
make
sudo make install

Add key and secret

nano /home/pi/nimha/.passwd-s3fs

Insert:

key:secret

Set permission:

chmod 600 /home/pi/nimha/.passwd-s3fs

Create mount point

sudo mkdir /mnt/nimha
chown pi:pi /mnt/nimha

Allow other than root user to access

nano /etc/fuse.conf

• uncomment: user_allow_other

Get user and group id

id

Find your user and group id - could be 1000 for both. They are needed in the umask detail.

Mount

s3fs nimha /mnt/nimha -o umask=1000 -o passwd_file=/home/pi/nimha/.passwd-s3fs -o endpoint=eu-west-1 -o allow_other

Umount (not needed)

fusermount /mnt/nimha

Create system service for auto mount

sudo nano /lib/systemd/system/nimhas3.service

Adjust to your details and insert

[Unit]
Description=nimhas3
After=network-online.target

[Service]
User=pi
Type=oneshot
RemainAfterExit=yes
ExecStart=/usr/bin/s3fs nimha /mnt/nimha -o umask=1000 -o passwd_file=/home/pi/nimha/.passwd-s3fs -o endpoint=eu-west-1 -o allow_other
ExecStop=/bin/fusermount -u /mnt/nimha

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Start on boot and start

systemctl enable nimhas3
systemctl start nimhas3

Avoid startup conflicts

If you are running NimHA through systemctl, it is important, that the S3 mounting is happening first. You need to add the S3 mount as prerequisite.

Open:

sudo nano /lib/systemd/system/nimha.service

And change the "After" line to:

After=network-online.target nimhas3.service