Tag Archives: Ubuntu

Home brew NAS, tips & tricks vault

Growing ZFS pool

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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 →

HVAC Zoning, tips & tricks vault

ubuntu’s librxtx with java-6-sun

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If you want to use SUN’s java version with rxtx on any debian derivative system you’d be surprised to discover that jre can’t find rxtx libraries if you installed them using librxtx-java package. It’s because SUN does not adhere to debian naming and placing policies and looks for libraries in wrong place. Quick fix:

cd /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/lib/
cp /usr/share/java/RXTXcomm.jar ./
cd i386
cp /usr/lib/jni/lib* ./

That will make those libs available to SUN’s java and everything should work from now on.

Home brew NAS, Home Improvements, Work

Home brew NAS: RocketRaid 622 on Ubuntu

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All parts are here, time to do some work.

My main goal was small initial cost as well as small footprint if at all possible. I got myself old Dell GX280 desktop with P4 2.8 GHz processor and 1 GB RAM. It has “relatively” new technology onboard including one PCI Express port in which I was able to insert controller card.

The enclosure itself is highly apprised all aver the Internet Sans Digital Tower Raid that can house up to 5 drives. As you can see both are rather small and do not take too much space on/under my desk:

Now onto the setup.

As my server is supposed to serve multiple purposes, including driving my hvac system, I quickly dropped the idea of using one of dedicated NAS distributions (FreeNAS namely) and decided to stay with old mighty Ubuntu 10.04LTS. The installation went smooth and within minutes I had the server running.

But there was nowhere to find my drive inserted into external enclosure. It turns out that the controller provided by Sans Digital is built on HighPoint Technologies’ 622 chip which itself is not supported by Linux Kernel. Thankfully Sans Digital provides source codes for drivers in both RAID and passthrough versions. I’ve chosen the passthrough version as I plan to skip hardware raid provided by the enclosure and use zfs.

First some additional software needed to be installed:

sudo apt-get install dkms

Then we’ll get some sources:

wget http://dl.sansdigital.com/images/downloads/TR8M-BP_TR8MP/Non_RAID_Driver_Linux-SourceCode-v1.0-100421-1320.tar.zip
unzip Non_RAID_Driver_Linux-SourceCode-v1.0-100421-1320.tar.zip
tar -xzf rr62x-linuxla-src-v1.0-100421-1320.tar.gz
cd rr62x-linuxla-src-v1.0/

We are going to use dkms so dkms.conf file needs to be created:

vi dkms.conf

MAKE=”make -C product/rr62x/linuxla/”
CLEAN=”make -C product/rr62x/linuxla/ clean”
BUILT_MODULE_NAME=rr62x
DEST_MODULE_LOCATION=/kernel/drivers/scsi/
BUILT_MODULE_LOCATION=product/rr62x/linuxla/
PACKAGE_NAME=rr62xla
PACKAGE_VERSION=1.O
AUTOINSTALL=yes
REMAKE_INITRD=yes

Now the source neds to be moved into /usr/src folder:

sudo cp -R . /usr/src/rr62xla-1.0

And some dkms magic applied:

sudo dkms add -m rr62xla -v 1.0
sudo dkms build -m rr62xla -v 1.0
sudo dkms install -m rr62xla -v 1.0

Mere seconds later I was able to load the module:

modprobe rr62x

and see this in syslog:

[ 260.187351] rr62x: module license ‘Proprietary’ taints kernel.
[ 260.187357] Disabling lock debugging due to kernel taint
[ 260.190622] rr62x:RocketRAID 62x SATA controller driver Non-RAID v1.0 (Feb 20 2011 11:26:43)
[ 260.190678] pci 0000:01:00.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 16 (level, low) -> IRQ 16
[ 260.190689] pci 0000:01:00.0: setting latency timer to 64
[ 260.190727] rr62x:adapter at PCI 1:0:0, IRQ 16
[ 260.196263] rr62x:[0 0 ] start port.
[ 260.196263] rr62x:[0 0 ] start port hard reset (probe 1).
[ 260.196263] rr62x:[0 1 ] start port.
[ 260.196263] rr62x:[0 1 ] start port hard reset (probe 1).
[ 263.808262] rr62x:[0 1 ] start port soft reset (probe 1).
[ 264.456614] rr62x:[0 1 ] pmp attached: vendor 1095 device 3726.
[ 268.104271] rr62x:[0 0 ] failed to hard reset.
[ 268.104286] rr62x:[0 0 ] failed to perform port hard reset.
[ 269.709009] rr62x:[0 1 4] start device soft reset.
[ 270.360323] rr62x:[0 1 ] port started successfully.
[ 270.360323] rr62x:[0 1 4] device probed successfully.
[ 270.396411] scsi4 : rr62x
[ 270.399912] scsi 4:0:9:0: Direct-Access ATA SAMSUNG HD103SI 1AG0 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
[ 270.401625] sd 4:0:9:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0
[ 270.402425] sd 4:0:9:0: [sdb] 1953525168 512-byte logical blocks: (1.00 TB/931 GiB)
[ 270.402513] sd 4:0:9:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
[ 270.402520] sd 4:0:9:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 2f 00 00 00
[ 270.402565] sd 4:0:9:0: [sdb] Write cache: disabled, read cache: enabled, doesn’t support DPO or FUA
[ 270.402907] sdb: sdb1
[ 270.419594] sd 4:0:9:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI disk

So far so good. All pieces of hardware accounted for and work well.

Now we just have to make sure it will load the module at boot time:

sudo echo rr62x >> /etc/initramfs-tools/modules
sudo update-initramfs -u

And we are set for now.

Referrals:
1. Ubuntu forums.

Home Improvements, HVAC Zoning

HVAC zoning resurrected

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A comment posted under one of my older posts reminded me that it can be a good idea to resurrect and finish my HVAC zoning project I shelved some time ago. Main cause I did so was that I couldn’t get dz compiled. I didn’t have time to mess with it any longer then, but I decided to give it a try this time. It turned out that over last two years Ubuntu project went forward so much that this time dz compiled successfully the very first time I tried. So right now I have a spider web construction on my desk consisting of two 1-wire temp sensors and two servos run by phidget boards. And they work. Servos are opening and closing according to changes in the temperature of my office. They have no influence as they aren’t running registers yet, but they proved to work. Now it’s time to run wires around the house and motorize registers.

Stay tuned.