The Class E Network

Zitat von geaves

So further googling turns out Mint does not install Samba, but whilst going through the updates there is an update for Samba, now why download an update if the software is not installed?

Mint doesn't install Samba. That's news. Mint didn't have any difficulty finding Samba shares.
Hum. Maybe I should plug that hard drive in again and check that out.
((BTW: I did something you mentioned before. I set up a workstation for the sole purpose of scanning / cloning hard drives, testing various installations, distro's etc. While I have flat screens everywhere, in this case, I'm using an old style monitor. I have a lot of obsolete hardware in the shed.))

On the MFP and since you like inkjets, have you checked out the Epson Ecotank? While they don't support them, Epson does provide ET-2650 Linux drivers. This model doesn't do "two-sided" printing which might be a priority for you or the wife.
(Also, Canon has something they call a Mega Tank but it's a few more bucks,, um "pounds".)
With your wife needing to print materials for classes and the job, something like the above might work for you. If she prints a lot, it might save on consumables costs.

It seems most printers has a combination wireless interface / print server built in these days. I have no idea how wireless (through the router access) and the provided drivers, would play with cups.

Of course, if needed, you could share out the printer from a Windows VM.
For those purposes, legacy windows software, hardware drivers, etc., I'm waiting for ReactOSto come out of beta. Here's to hoping it's soon.

But,,, (gasp!) it's a Russian OS! They might try to hack my vote!!

Zitat von geaves

No, it installs 'components' including cifs-utils, my problem was I couldn't create a share on this laptop, once I sorted OMV I could connect and access the shares. I was getting an error trying to create a share, the updates actually created a Samba directory with an smb conf file, even if I edited that the share would not display on another machine. The only reason I want this is if I download something on this laptop I may need it to be available on the W7 vm, similar to the setup I had previously.

Fake news comrade

After investigating, Mint is missing the Samba server. The client is there. Given Mint's status, at the top of the heap, one must wonder why they skipped significant functionality like that..? (I didn't like the ominous warnings, RE the packages that would be uninstalled, if the Samba server is installed. Amaroke was listed on the chop list.)
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Yep, fake news has be around for awhile. I've even got on the editor of the local paper for his contribution toward confusing the masses. Consider the headline:

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>MURDER at School Bus Stop!!<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

Then we find that the town drunk was staggering around on the road and got hit, in a "hit and run", at 3AM, on a Saturday night, close to a school bus stop. The drunk, later, dies at the hospital.

Was the headline correct? In a sense, it is, because it wasn't a lie. On the other hand, the event had nothing to do with school children. Hence, the headline is so misleading that it's irresponsible.
This exact thing has been happening in the news, in the US, for the last decade or so and it's getting worse. Now, the media seems to want to dispense with the actual details, "a drunk", "3am", etc., under the auspices of "anonymous sources", to further reinforce the artificially created "gravity" of the story.

While I'm speculating, I think it breaks down as follows:
On this side of the pond, 1/3 of population believes what they see in the news. Also, they want the rest to the population to believe what they read and see in the media. There's another 1/3 who are highly critical of what they read and see in the broadcasts. There's still another 1/3 who don't believe anything they read or see in the news.

I don't know how it is over there but, compared to what I knew back in the day, journalism is dead over here. While some in the younger generation of reporters continue to pretend, what we see in print and in the broadcasts supports a particular "world view". Overall, it's very polarized and that seems unlikely to change anytime soon.

Zitat von geaves

now I'm thinking I could put this Pi to better use as some sort of backup for the omv server, however the current sd card is a bit naf so I'm going to get another on Saturday.

When you boot the Pi with the omv image do you have to connect it to a tv to set it up the same as you would with a flash or hd install? I can do this whilst the lad's away for the weekend at some festival.

I lost another post, again, in answering your post above.
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The R-PI image is "pre-installed" because the hardware is a given - there's no need for discovery and attempts at auto-configuration. On the first boot, I hook the PI up to a HDMI TV, as you mentioned, and use a USB linked wireless KB with touch pad if needed. Generally, you won't have to do anything other than note the address DHCP assigns. (Set your router to permanently lease that particular address to the R-PI.)

The new images may take up to 15 minutes on the first boot so be patient. The partition(s) are resizing according to the size of the SD-card you're using, as I understand it.
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As far as using a R-PI for backup, I've been doing it awhile now with 3 cloned SD-cards as OMV boot drives. The key is to configure up the first copy, making all the changes needed, update it, etc., etc. Then clone it and put the SD card away as an uncorrupted master. (At least that was the idea.) If something goes wrong in an update or in the normal course of events, I pop in one of the two working clones and I'm at it again. I've had to so this a few times over the course of a couple years.

A few weeks back, I bought an programmable AC switch that I set up to turn on at 0001AM, on Sundays, and shut off at 2359. The idea in all of this was to keep the hours on the 4TB Mypassport as low as possible, while keeping its' data directories reasonably up to date.

I spread scheduled Rsync jobs throughout the day, set up a BTRFS scrub job toward the end of the day, then a "collect the scrub stat's job" (the results of which are E-mailed to me) and set the R-PI to reboot at 23:50. (It can't actually reboot on its' own. It goes down and waits for power to toggle.)

In any case, the "crappiness" of my SD cards might be showing. Before I used to keep the R-PI running 24x7, with only an occasional reboot. Usually the reboot was from a power outage or my moving it. Now, the regular reboots seem to be related to increased problems with SD cards, which forces me to swap in a clone.

If I continue to use this AC switch, to shut off 6 days a week, I'm guessing that higher quality SD-cards might be needed / required. On the other hand, this might be a fluke. I'll watch it and report what I find.

I finally got the Win8 GPT/UEFI drive cloned.

I searched everywhere in open source for a package and/or a procedure that would allow cloning a larger drive (with free space) onto a smaller drive, while keeping the Win8 OS and GPT/UEFI intact on the boot drive. In the open source world, it didn't seem to exist. However, on the commercial side of things, Paragon Migrate OS 5 was reasonable ($20, down to a bit over $15 with a discount) and it cloned Win8 from a 500GB drive to a 320GB drive.

With a working Win8 install that I can trash; It will be interesting to see if UrBackup can do a full restore on a GPT/UEFI drive.

Zitat von geaves

1. That's good to know, because it's a pain having to hook up to a TV just to configure...and as you say I can check the router for the IP Address and on my router I can permanently assign the same IP so it's sort of dynamic.
2. Having read some of @tkaiser comments re the Pi and SD cards I have bought a SanDisk Ultra which is a class 10

But, going back to what you said, I would almost certainly invest in another SD card purely as a backup option the same as I have a second Flash Drive, which I alternate every month

3. So once this is done (R-Pi OMV) should I use Rsync or Urbackup

Decisions, decisions, decisions

Alles anzeigen

1. If you do this blind, you have to be patient and wait, like 30 minutes between reboots, so that all is finished. (Do a reboot clean. SSH in and do a shutdown.)

2. I don't think class 10 gets you anything. After the boot process is over, well, the cards' speed has very little effect in normal OP's. (It might have soon impact on loading and serving the various web pages, but nearly zero impact on server OP's.) Just get quality cards, as cheap as possible. Anything over 8 to 16GB doesn't get you much either. Other than log files, the extra space shouldn't be used. If something is using it, as in a misbehaving plugin for example, it may result in a problem.

3. Use the R-PI to Rsync your network shares. While it does a good job of that, I wouldn't use it for anything else.
Urbackup is geared toward Client backups and restoration, and it's an enterprise solution at that. Urbackup will run on a PI but it's s-l-o-w. (Remember - R-PI; 100mbs FD, with actual throughput being far slower. With that limitation, it takes a LONG time to image a client drive with a lot files.) You'd have to limit UrBackup to no more than 2 operations at a time, with 1 preferred. This reason, client backup with UrBackup, is why I bought the i3 server.

In closing, note that if an R-PI is real busy (with Rsync or some other shceduled OP), the Web GUI may not respond to a Web Browser. It may time out. Don't panic and reboot. If you're concerned, first SSH in and run top from the CLI to see if it's busy. Remember $29 computers have limitations.

(Oh, BTW, I got Urbackup to do a files backup the /home partition on Mint 18. I had to mess with it, to get it work, so I'm going to have to recreate how I did.)

Back in a few days.

I'm going to take it that you want to use the R-PI as I do (as a data backup / backup server).

The first plugin you're going to need is openmediavault-omvextras.org Then, you're going to need the Remote Mount plugin. (With this plugin, you can mount remote drives as if they're local. This does away with the need to have an Rsync Server.)

What is the source of your data files? It is a Windows server or client, Linux?

Zitat von geaves

Here's some more interesting viewing....well I thought so anyway

I still need to know, are the source folders on Windows?

In any case, you'll need to create a user on the Windows box (server, client) that has "read only" access to the network shares you want to Rsync. If the data source is a Linux box, the same will be true, but you'd create the user and put it in the users group with access to the share or you could skip the account and give "others" read only. (CHMOD 775 is appropriate for media shares).
A tighter way to go would be activating ACL's (also known as access by name) on the box that's the data source. Using ACL's you can further restrict the single backup user to read only access, which leaves the remainder in the users group with whatever you assigned. ((BTW: On a Linux box, the backup user name can't be named "backup". "backup" is a default system user and I wouldn't add or change a password on a system account. The user name could be something similar, like backup2 .))

In the bottom line, to proactively prevent a disaster or unintended permission changes, I wouldn't allow a Linux box to have write access to a source data folder. Read only or read / execute is what is needed to do the job. No more.
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From the video: I got a kick out of the way that guy pronounces aluminum, as if it's spelled aluminium.

I have to admit, that guy's fabrication skills are awesome. He made pretty precise cuts using a utility knife, a hack saw and using a counter top as a sheet metal brake. He did a lot with things found around the house. The end item looked great and was nicely finished. But what was most impressive of all, was the overall design.

I subscribed to that channel. After we move, I'm going to get back to doing things like that. I'm looking forward to trying out 3D printing as well.

Zitat von drinks2go

1. I was surprised to find this is a valid spelling, and I think it's more common in commonwealth countries, hence the fancy pronunciation.
2. Curious how come you don't just endeavour to set up smb/cifs and rsync on rasbian instead of via omv? Seems a little overkill to just rsync?

1. Back in the day, I traveled through London from time to time on the way to the dark continent. (It's the way flights are scheduled and routed in that area of the world.) One of my favorite things was to eat breakfast and listen to the little old ladies conversing on the news and local gossip. That's when it became clear to me that Americans do not speak English. (The Queen's version of it, in any case.)
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2. It takes a bit more than an Rsync client to replicate Windows shares, Linux shares or, for example, QNAS shares. To use Rsync end-to-end, a server is required. OMV has a plugin, "Remote Mount", that effectively removes the need for an Rsync server. Adding to that, with the Web GUI console for ease of management and very low overhead (when compared to a desktop), OMV is a good choice. Also, there's tons of other functionality if needed.

The exercise I'm describing will be setting up an R-PI, using OMV, to replicate an on-line servers network shares. In the process, shares (smb/cif) will be set up, tested, and the Samba server will be turned off.

This is how I like to do backup. Copy everything to another server, VIA Rsync, replicate changes at regular intervals and setting the secondary server up to become the primary, if needed. All that is necessary is to turn the Samba server on, VIA the GUI, and the R-PI's shares appear on the network.

Back from the salt mines. (And going back soon.)
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First note I was hasty in putting this together so please overlook any "English" errors.
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OK, since you're Rsync'ing an OMV server, I'd do the following:

The preliminaries:
The way I do it is to set the base shares (under Access Rights Management, Shared Folders), on both boxes, with the same share names and permissions. To keep it sorted out, I give the remote mount names, different names. To get an idea of what that looks like in the end result, take a look at the following:

1. In setting up a Remote Mount connection.
The Remote Mount Permissions issue has two possible solutions:
- Create a user name "backup2", "backup-", "Backup", whatever. It just can't be "backup" (all lower case). You could use extended ACL's to give that user read only access to your primary server shares.
(Or)
- Your shares could have "Others" with Read / Execute. In that case, an anonymous login would have Read access.

2. I'd replicate all Linux users with passwords to be identical between servers and if you've set up Samba users, I'd replicate those users / passwords as well. (The user names and passwords should, also, be identical to any windows users and passwords, to insure that Windows client users can connect to network shares, adhoc, without having to mount a network drive / share.)

3. Set up Remote Mount with your backup user. (Since this share replicates a Windows share, I can get away with user name "backup", all in lower case.)

If you use a user that has read only access, when you save the above, you'll get an error. Ignore it and after clicking the save button, if necessary, close the above with the "X". The Remote Mount will take effect. Note the name I chose for the above, Backups_R. (This helps to keep things straight on the shared folders page.)
Since I used identical share names on both boxes (which will help your users if your backup server goes on-line), I set the name of the Mount from the backup machines perspective. (Backups_R is the Backups share on the remote server.) These names are important to understand, at a glance, to know "what" is "where".
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If all goes well, the above new Remote Mount will show up under File Systems. The following is what I have. (Notice that the name you assigned above carries into this screen.)

4. Set up Rsync

This is the permissions I have on this share. (In my case, I don't allow LAN users to change the contents of this particular share. If you had storage on your server for users, you'd want to give them write access to that share.)
In any case, note that since you're setting up the same users, passwords, etc., you'd want to duplicate permissions as well.
(The behavior of the backup Server should be the same as the primary, to avoid user confusion, if you need to put the backup on-line.)

And here's the Rsync Job confg.
(When setting up, NOTE these are, Type: "Local" Jobs. Remote mount removes the need for remote Rsync jobs, and the need for an Rsync server.)
Note the data source is the Remote Mount named "Backups_R", which is the Backups share on the remote server. The destination is a shared folder, named Backups, on the local data drive with the full path of Serverfolders/Backups/

Note the extra parm's in the 2nd (bottom) of the screen shot and they're needed. If a new file is created, as a result of the Rsync copy Job, it gets permissions assigned by the default create mask - Owner:root and Group:root.
The following changes that when new files arrive from a foreign file system. These lines, chmod and chown, should match the permissions for the same share on your primary server.
(Of the three items not pictured, I have "Times" ON, "Compression" OFF and Archive "ON".

Since you have an OMV server on line, I'm guessing that you know a few things about configuring Samba so the following is offered as my approach.

Note the extra parm's in the following screen shot. The write list would allow me to write a "read only" Samba share, "if" write access is consistent with the file / folder permissions on the base share. In this case, it's not consistent, so I (floyd - a regular user) can't directly write to this share from a client. Regardless, if it's consistent with the base shares permissions, a write list overrides the Samba "read only" property for those named. This can be done for a users group as well by using the line: write list = @users

In the second line, an important item thing I've found for access consistency is the protocol line. As it seems, when a client attempts to access a Samba share, there's a negotiation process where Samba sets the protocol level appropriate to the client. (Much as it is with Ethernet auto-neg, if all goes well...)
SMB3 is designed for Win7 and above, so I set the line option accordingly. I've had no timeouts or other problems.

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After all is setup where I can see and access the shares on the network, and after a bit of verification that the secondary server works just like the primary, in Samba General Settings I simply disable Samba. (Two different servers on line, at the same time, with the exact same content,, well,,, it's not a good idea... If users write something to the backup server, the way I currently do things, the next Rsync job would summarily delete it.)

On the other hand, if the primary server crashes and burns, it's a simple matter of enabling Samba on the backup and all data (as of the last Rsync job) is available to all users just as it was before. The only difference is the server name.

With some variation on permissions, for public media shares (Music) and writable shares for users (Users), that's about it.
If you need some clarification or have a question, let me know.

Lastly think about error modes:
- I have Rsync set up to delete files in the destination, that are not in the source. That's not, necessarily, a good idea. If something happens to the primary server where the network share is on the line but the contents are gone, as of the next Rsync job, Rsync would delete all the files in the backup server shared folder. I'm giving thought to disabling that particular feature and keeping deleted files. For house keeping purposes, I could manually run Rsync jobs every 6 months with the delete option on, for clean up. (This would also retain files, for a time, that may have been accidentally deleted by a user.)
- If your primary server does crash, before attempting to doctor it, the first thing you'd want to do on the secondary server is disable all Rsync jobs. I'd leave Rsync off on the backup, until the primary is fully restored and all data is copied back.

Let me know how it goes.

I finally got Win8 onto the 120GB hard drive. What a process.

Paragon helped in copying a GPT/UEFI booting disk (500GB), to a smaller 320GB disk.

With original 500GB disk copy set aside:
After checking to see if it would boot (if did), I disabled the page file on the 320GB drive.
I used Gparted on the 320GB disk to reduce the size of the primary partition to 90GB.
As is usually the case on a partition resize, chkdsk /f was required to remove "errors" from the main partition.
I used Paragon again to copy Win8 from the 320GB drive, to the 120GB drive.
(chkdsk /f was needed again on 120GB drive.)

Finally, I imaged the working 120GB drive with Urbackup. Now, we'll see if Urbackup can do a bare metal restore on a GPT/UEFI disk.

Zitat von geaves

But going back to that video I just thought what an ingenious way of using a damaged but working laptop....it was the soldering that scared me though, my soldering skills have never been that good, but saying that I did managed to replace a blown resistor on my Dell monitor.

I've done more than a bit of soldering back in the day.

The keys to good clean soldering are (in order),
1. A damp (not soaking wet) sponge to clean the tip, before starting.
2. The right size tip and temp rating for the job.
3. While not absolutely necessary, I liked using a temperature controlled soldering station.
Much can be done to compensate for a hot tip, with speed, but all is lost if the solder job overheats IC's.