How-To: Remote Disk Management in Ubuntu made easy

Disk Management in Ubuntu has become easy with Palimpsest tool called Disk Utility. This application is capable of managing a remote machine disks also. It connects to remote machine through secure shell connection (SSH).

Though this application is the default Disk Management tool in Ubuntu, still the remote management is not supported out of box in Ubuntu since it is considered as new feature and untested one. Refer comment-1 in this bug report. udisks is the package which supports this feature with its udisks-tcp-bridge binary. Ubuntu’s udisks package lacks this binary. This how to is get this udisks package with this binary and how to remotely connect to a machine to manage the disks. My Ubuntu is Lucid 10.04.

In fresh Ubuntu 10.04 installtion, if you try to connect to remote machine through System -> Administration -> Disk Utility -> File -> Connect to Server, you will get error message as shown below.

Unexpected stderr output – expected `udisks-tcp-bridge: Waiting for secret’ but got `-bash: line 1: udisks-tcp-bridge: command not found’

Here is the way to get it done. In Remote machine execute the following steps.

Step-1: Install the secured shell server package (openssh-server)

$ sudo apt-get install ssh

Step-2: Add repository maintained by Marti, which provides udisks package with udisks-tcp-bridge support.

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:intgr/ppa

$ sudo apt-get update

$ sudo apt-get install udisks

Here are some screenshots for the same. Right now I don’t have another Ubuntu machine in my network, so I have connected to my machine through remote channel . Please comment freely for any error.

Local machine disk management

Connecting to remote machine

Browse button shows capable machine in network

Remote machine shown on left side pane to manage disks