recently one of the drives in my storage pool died. Considering that I already was running out of free space:
#zfs list storage
NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT
storage 3.21T 820G 236K /storage
I decided to not only replace the failed 1.5TB drive but get two 4TB drives and upgrade whole vdev. Imagine my surprise that despite my memory telling me that it should grow on it’s own. It didn’t.
Some searching later I found out that replacing drives is only part of the solution.
First you have to Continue reading Growing ZFS pool →
Today when I woke up my MacBook greeted me with very unpleasant alert:
The network backup disk does not support the required AFP features.
It turnes out that during the upgrade to Lion Apple used their newest set of commands that were not compatible with stable netatalk package in Ubuntu.
To get my network storage to work again I had to upgrade to the latest netatalk 2.2.beta4.
First download all needed files from Ubuntu’s repositories
wget http://launchpadlibrarian.net/73070555/netatalk_2.2~beta4-1_amd64.deb
wget http://launchpadlibrarian.net/74978789/libgcrypt11_1.5.0-1_amd64.deb
wget http://launchpadlibrarian.net/75629511/multiarch-support_2.13-9ubuntu3_amd64.deb
wget http://launchpadlibrarian.net/72120162/libgpg-error0_1.10-0.3ubuntu1_amd64.deb
wget http://launchpadlibrarian.net/74358655/libdb5.1_5.1.25-11_amd64.deb
Then install it:
dpkg -i multiarch-support_2.13-9ubuntu3_amd64.deb
dpkg -i libgpg-error0_1.10-0.3ubuntu1_amd64.deb
dpkg -i libgcrypt11_1.5.0-1_amd64.deb
dpkg -i libdb5.1_5.1.25-11_amd64.deb
dpkg -i netatalk_2.2~beta4-1_amd64.deb
I’ve chosen to keep old version of configuration files, the only notable difference was that now afpd.conf lists -tcp -noddp options as defaults. I added them to my list. Quick restart of netatalk daemon and voila – Time Machine works again.
I am a fan of Apple’s Time Machine backup system since it’s introduction. And I’ve always wanted to implement something similar on my server. Since I have that nice spacious NAS disk right now space stopped to be a problem (at least for a little while). Little googling shows that rsync has a special option allowing me to implement Time Machine’s method of incremental backups using rsync. In that method rsync uses existing backup as additional source for comparing files and if file did not change since last backup has been done a hard link is being created to this file instead of copying. This way I should end up with daily directories of files but only new/changed files will be eating up disk space.
Let’s give it a try. My backup script Continue reading Incremental daily backup with little space penalty – Time Machine on linux →
Recently our collection of storage hard drives started to look a little bit too big. Yet we had several drives with a lot of free space fragmented between them but neither of them has enough free space itself to make you me comfortable. Trying to do something with it I decided to start looking for a solution that would allow me to aggregate those drives and their space providing me with one big logical partition. Oh, and having some kind of security would be nice too.
Browsing the internet I have found nice solution called Drobo. That’s exactly what I want to have. Nice, compact solution providing scalable space at the same time protecting data in RAID like manner. There is only one problem with Drobo (and it’s not the price). Drobo uses proprietary software and from several cases described over the internet it seems like when it goes bad, it goes really bad really quick, usually loosing most of the info stored. And then the only chance you have is to send the box with all drives to the company itself and pray they can restore something for you. That effectively deletes this device from my list.
But browsing further I stumbled upon ZFS. This seems to be ‘the best file system and last you’ll ever need’. It provides ability to create software RAID systems which are supposed to be secure and fast. So home brewing my own NFS server seems to be the best option. Even more appealing as I’ll be able to use the same machine to run our HVAC system.
First step was to get all needed hardware.
- Server. As I do not need performance at any cost I’ve decided to use old Dell GX280 machine lying around and gathering dust. It has 1GB of RAM and P4 2.8GHz processor which should be plenty enough for my needs. Cost: $0
- Hard drive enclosure. I got myself Sans Data Tower Raid enclosure with port replicator that is able to host 5 drives and connects to server via one eSATA cable. Cost $173
- Hard drives. I dissected external 1TB Iomega USB drive which turned out to house Samsung’s HD103SI drive. Not a speed hog but for now will suffice. Cost $0
So far total spent: $173. Not bad I would say.
programmer, administrator, engineer – my everyday fights with reality