Upgrading the Odroid HC2 to Debian Buster and Openmediavault 5

Back in January 2020, I wrote an article in order to present the latest NAS I built using an Odroid HC2 with Armbian Stretch/Openmediavault 4.

This setup has been serving me successfully since then, but the software used was out of date, so I decided to find an easy way to upgrade it.

Openmediavault have stopped providing up-to-date images for my device, suggesting a clean manual installation based on Armbian and a guide/script that installs Openmediavault 5 on top of it.

Honestly, I was really bored to make a clean install and in addition I craved for a geeky summer challenge, so I decided to manually upgrade everything.

Upgrading Armbian

Armbian for the HC2 is actually a Debian OS for ARM, so I just did what I have been doing on my various Debian machines for a little less than 2 decades now:

sed -i 's/stretch/buster/g' /etc/apt/sources.list
sed -i 's/stretch/buster/g' /etc/apt/sources.list.d/armbian.conf

After changing the sources list to point to latest Debian stable with codename “buster”, I was ready to upgrade the OS:

apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade

The procedure went buttery smooth.

I was asked a few questions in order to choose between my existing configuration files and the new ones coming with the latest packages (I chose to keep my existing configuration), waited patiently and when the dist-upgrade procedure ended, I rebooted to my fully upgraded OS.

Upgrading Openmediavault

I wasn’t quite sure whether upgrading to OMV5 would be a good idea, as I had already read a few “horror” stories, but I had a backup so I decided to proceed with this guide.

Having read about a lot of issues with plugins, I uninstalled them all (openmediavault-backup, openmediavault-flashmemory, openmediavault-diskstats, openmediavault-minidlna).

Then, I executed the script:

wget -O - https://github.com/OpenMediaVault-Plugin-Developers/installScript/raw/master/upgrade4to5 | sudo bash

and after a reboot, I continued with the rest of the commands:

apt-get purge openmediavault-omvextrasorg resolvconf
wget -O - https://github.com/OpenMediaVault-Plugin-Developers/packages/raw/master/install | bash
apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade
omv-salt deploy run nginx
omv-salt deploy run phpfpm
apt-get install usrmerge
omv-confdbadm migrate conf 5.0.0

Finally, I cleaned the browser cache, I logged in re-installed my plugins and checked the system information (this screenshot was taken days later):

Openmediavault 5.6.12 was successfully installed!

Updating pi-hole

As mentioned on my previous article, also use pi-hole on the same box.

My pi-hole installation was out-of-date too, so I gave the following command in order to update it:

pihole -up

Next, I changed the web interface port from 80 to 8080.

I edited lighttpd.conf:

nano /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf

I modified this line:

server.port                 = 80

to

server.port                 = 8080

The last step was to restart the lighttpd service:

systemctl restart lighttpd

Summary

• Debian proved once again how a solid and trouble-free OS it is.

• I haven’t spent a lot of time with OMV5 yet, but so far everything seems to be OK (I mainly use it a samba server)

• Although this isn’t an article about pi-hole, please do a favor to yourself and to your web surfing experience and find a way to install it and start using it today!