Build Advice

I've been researching all week and finally settled on a build but I still have questions about certain aspects.

I currently use an Iomega ix2-200 storcenter for all my NAS purposes. Recently I've noticed that the device doesn't perform as well and since they discontinued support I decided to build my own NAS. After researching quite a bit I decided to install OMV on an old computer. I am currently in the testing phase before I migrate any data and I just wanted to clear up some questions I've been having.

Setup:

-HP 6200 Pro SFF
-Intel Core i3-2120 (3.30 GHz, 3MB cache, 2 cores) 64-bit
-16GB 1333 MHz DDR3 SDRAM
-(Not sure exact model of motherboard) Has 4 SATA ports
-Debian 8.6.0 Jessie AMD64 installed with OMV3.0

120GB SSD drive (OS Disk) ext4 - usb to sata enclosure to free up SATA mobo port

1TB SATA (leftover from ix2-200 when I upgraded storage) XFS wiped
2x 3TB WD Green SATA (currently in ix2-200 XFS raid1 mirror)
1x 3TB WD red (brand new)

I installed debian and OMV with no issues. Currently I'm trying to edit the sudoers file to disable linux from requiring a password every 5 seconds which is incredibly annoying. I was planning to use the brand new 3TB drive as parity and remove one of the 3TB drives from the ix200 and use the degraded drive as the data disk. I tried this first with the 1TB drive because it was leftover from when I upgraded my ix200 storage and is formatted the same. For whatever reason I was able to mount the 1TB drive but when I tried with the 3TB I couldn't get the degraded raid to work properly. I found information on how to do it but didn't bookmark and now cannot find it again. Either way I messed it up and had to just format the 3TB drive. I'm using snap raid plugin but it was the file system and disk tab that were giving me trouble.

At this time I have 1TB, 2x3TB all clean formatted into XFS with OMV and 1x3TB still in my ix200 raid1 with content. I'm wary of trying to bring over the last drive that still has data and trying to add it to the snap raid pool. Should I just build the snap raid pool as it is now, migrate the 2.4TB of data over my network to the empty drive, sync, and then once I can test the data add the remaining drive in? I'd rather not do that but I do not want to lose the data since I only have one copy now.

Also, I really messed up by attempting to fix my config file. I labelled the volumes properly so they could be identified but OMV and snap raid kept making it disk /media/uuid everytime. All the config files I see posted have the config file look legible. I changed the drive mount points to /media/drive label before I read that it would screw up OMV and that is exactly what it did. This led to a spiral of mistakes as I tried to fix it that kept breaking things worse and worse. OMV wont let me remove the file systems or format anything because the drive ids dont exist and I cant change the mount point back to the uuid name that OMV recognizes. I was so frustrated with how complicated the drive naming/mounting is in linux that I just totally reinstalled everything from scratch.

I currently have a fresh debian install with additional drives attached that I am going to get built tonight.

Any advice on a safe way to bring that last mirrored drive over with the data so I do not have to transfer it over the wire? I'm not sure I trust my disk skills in linux at this point.

I used XFS because that is the format the data drive is in. Should I use ext4 instead?

Unless anyone has a guide for how to create the disk names/labels so the config file is readable I'm just going to leave it as default uuid names.

Thank you in advance.

I thought I'd update as so far on my second attempt fresh install things have gone well so far but I had a new set of questions.

Here are a couple things I still ran into and how I solved them. I found Zach Reed's guide to be incredibly helpful: Zack Reed Snap Raid

Everything setup quick easily and I didn't run into any issues except for something really strange. I could run all the snap raid commands to sync, diff, etc the drives and it all worked. I even setup a mergerfs pool and got that working correctly but for some reason none of my drives/devices would show up in the snapraid GUI. Apparently you must add the drives to snap raid from the GUI or else you cannot select them or create a shared folder from them. I had to unmount the drives, go back into /etc/fstab and remove the drive settings, reboot, and add them in the GUI. The only issue I have is now is that they all have the UUID for the name and path instead of a nice /media/disk1 disk 2 etc. I can only assume that the way Zack setup the drives in his snap raid guide is not compatible with OMV GUI. That one had me stumped for awhile and I think I found an answer from subzero79 on an old thread here somewhere with that solution.

I also got around the annoying password prompting by making a shorter password. It wasn't so bad once I wasn't messing with drive settings and mount points anymore. I ran into other assorted issues that I chalk up to not being familiar with linux and was able to solve with aggressive googling.

The last thing I did was setup an SMB share. Currently I can access windows from linux but not the other way. I can see my server from windows but it will not let me access it even though the samba workgroup and settings all seems to be configured correctly.

Since I am down to 1 drive on my old storage I wanted to get everything moved over as soon as possible but it looks like I'm maxing out around 30MB/s on the transfer which I initiated via a copy/paste from the linux server since that's the only way I can access the files currently. Any advice to windows-->linux access? Also in Zack's guide above he shows around 110-120 MB/sec transfer rate and I'm wondering how I can achieve that. Jumbo frames? I have both my linux OMV server and ix2 old storage plugged into Cisco 2960G so there should be no bottleneck in speed. I'm thinking the ix2 might be the slow point as it's always been slow to transfer from my windows box to it.

In the future I plan to add Plex, calibre, and possibly deluge for downloads.

Edit: Also what would you recommend for cloning the system once I have it configured and setup the way I want? I did enjoy learning from this but I'd rather not have to fully rebuild in the near future if I make another mistake.

Any other Debian Jessie tips as well? I'm new to Linux but getting the hang of it. I installed Sublime Text to have something familiar and I'm getting used to nano for /etc/fstab updates. Can I just alter fstab and other documents like that in sublime and then save them again?

Zitat von ryecoaaron

You shouldn't need to edit fstab. Not sure where you are using sublime but you shouldn't need that for OMV. The whole idea of OMV is to use the web interface.

I was following the guide I linked in the post. He was using fstab to mount and name the drives. This also created the mount path as disk 1, 2, etc instead of the UUID like snap raid does. I also read that it is best to use the UUID you find through blkid in fstab as that will never change. Again, I only did it the way below because of the guide but he is not using OMV in the guide. I'm not editing the fstab anymore and I'm just dealing with all my drives being named the UUID since that seems to be the only way snap raid allows it.

/dev/disk/by-id/ata-HGST_HDN724040ALE640_PK2334PBHDYY0R-part1 /media/disk1 ext4 defaults 0 2

After I mounted my drives that way through fstab I then edited the snapraid.conf file with nano (now I would use sublime):

content /media/disk1/content

disk d1 /media/disk1/

etc

This all worked and I was able to use the drives and sync them with the snapraid plugin tools tab but the drives didn't show up in the snapraid webGUI and I could not create a shared folder that I could then share via samba since no device would populate the drop down list.

Zitat von ryecoaaron

Usually it is a permissions problem why Windows can't access from Linux. Did you create the user with the same password on the OMV box?

I need to create the same account/password that I use on windows in linux? I have the same username but the passwords are different between the systems. Do I just need to create my windows username/pass in the users tab of OMV?

Thank you

Thanks a lot. Installed symlinks and now my drives are readable and I was able to get the SMBshares working via your advice and that was transferring files at 110MB/sec.

I also made a clonezilla backup so that part is done.

I was also able to sync my snap raid with no issues. After the main sync was finished I had a couple more files to transfer over and noticed during this sync that it was throwing some errors because the Plex plugin was updating the database which is on one of the data disks. I was planning on writing a cron job to run a snap sync job nightly. Are there commands to disable/enable plugins? That way I can disable plex plugin, run snapsyn, enable plex plugin through a cron job?

Edit: Looks like I found it. going to test it out now.

systemctl stop plexmediaserver
systemctl start plexmediaserver