SSidera HelpStorage & agents

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Connect your storage

A storage connection points Sidera at one disk, NAS, or server so a portal can serve and receive files from it. You do this once per machine, from a small program called the Sidera Storage Bridge — generate a token in the browser, paste it into the Bridge on that machine, and it takes care of the rest.

How it works

Nothing about the disk itself — its path, its operating system — ever needs to be typed into the browser. The control plane only ever hands out a short-lived token; the machine that actually has the disk uses that token to identify itself and register, then tells the control plane where its shared folder lives. This is deliberate: the workspace admin sitting in a browser rarely has any reason to know a remote machine's exact folder layout, and the control plane never touches that machine's filesystem directly at all.

Control plane issues & verifies tokens Admin's browser config.your-domain Sidera Storage Bridge runs on the storage host ① generate token token, shown once you paste it in — no network hop ② resolve + register online
The token round-trips once through the browser, then the Storage Bridge uses it directly with the control plane — the admin never re-types it anywhere.

1. Generate a token

  1. Open the workspace admin console and start a new connection

    Sign in at your workspace's config. address as a workspace admin, go to Agents, and choose Connect your storage.

  2. Choose "On-premise disk or server"

    Cloud storage (S3, Azure Blob, Google Cloud Storage) connects a different way and is marked "Coming soon" for now.

  3. Name it, and generate a token

    Give the storage a name people will recognize later — "Edit Suite RAID", "Archive NAS - 2nd floor" — and Sidera generates a one-time enrollment token.

    Copy the token nowThe dialog shows it exactly once. If you close it before copying, generate a new one — the old one still works until it expires, it just won't be shown again.

2. Install the bridge on the host

Run this on the machine that actually has the disk — not necessarily the machine you're reading this on. It downloads the Sidera Storage Bridge, then asks you for the token and the folder to share.

curl -fsSL https://your-domain/downloads/install-agent.sh | sudo bash -s -- \
  --control-plane https://your-domain

  1. Paste the token when asked

    The installer looks the token up against the control plane and learns its own identity from it — you never type an ID anywhere.

  2. Enter the local folder to share

    Any path the account running the installer can read and write — e.g. /mnt/media or D:\Relay. This is the only place that path is ever recorded.

  3. It installs itself as a background service

    Survives closing the terminal, restarts after a reboot. Back in the dashboard, the storage flips from Waiting for host to Online within a few seconds.

Already know the token, name, and path?Every value above can be passed as a flag instead — --token, --name, --root — for a fully scripted install with no prompts at all.

3. Assign it to a portal

A storage connection is just a registered host — it isn't attached to anything yet. Open (or create) a portal, and pick this storage from the dropdown as its root. One storage can back more than one portal at once, and one host can run more than one Bridge instance if it needs to serve more than one disk.

Security notes

What the token can and can't doA token identifies exactly one pre-registered storage slot and expires on its own — it can't be used to enroll a different storage, and it stops working once it's expired or once that storage is already registered. Every byte the Bridge later moves travels over a separate, mutually-authenticated connection issued at registration time, not the enrollment token itself.

Troubleshooting

The installer says it couldn't resolve the token

Double-check the control-plane URL matches your workspace's real address, and that you're pasting the token exactly as copied (no trailing space). Tokens also expire — generate a fresh one if it's been a while since you created it.

The storage still shows "Waiting for host" after installing

Confirm the service is actually running on the host (the installer prints how to check), and that machine can reach your control plane's address over HTTPS — a firewall or proxy blocking outbound traffic is the most common cause.

Can I connect a Mac?

Existing macOS storage connections keep working, but it's no longer offered for new ones — repeated background-service reliability issues on macOS specifically. Linux and Windows are both fully supported.