Hi,
I've been spending the last couple of days trying to get OMV to run on the WD My Book Live. The reason I did this is because WD is no longer updating this drive, resulting in outdated software packages and complimentary security issues. Device specs: 800 MHZ PowerPC CPU and 256 MB ram.
In this topic I will list my findings and questions. I hope that other people can benefit from my journey as I was unable to find any good resources for this combination of hardware and software.
High level steps
First you need to get rid of WD's custom OS; they made so many changes that it doesn't allow you to install new packages without breaking the device in the process.
1) Follow this guide to get a clean debian system on your MBL. Credits to Martin for making such a comprehensive write-up of the process!
At the time of writing, the sources.list in the write-up state "stable". Make sure that you change it to "wheezy", otherwise the installed version will be Jessie! (There is no MBL/APM82181 driver for Jessie and OMV doesn't run on Jessie yet)
Since the MBL is running on a PowerPC board, there is no deb package on the repo to install it. This means that you have to install and compile some of it yourself.
2) Follow this guide to get OMV running on your MBL.
Q: I'm hoping that Volker will be kind enough to add the PowerPC architecture to the repo's, as this will make things much easier on the installation part.
OMV testing
Date and time
Since the MBL doesn't have a bios battery, it will lose track of time as soon as you power it off.
Setting date and time in the config page seems sketchy. Setting it to obtain time via ntp doesn't seem to work unless I manually set the date and time close to the actual setting, saving, selecting ntp updates and saving again.
Notifications
I've set up notifications using a free google account with authenticated SMTP relay. Make sure you set the port to 587 instead of 465 that google's guide is saying. I'm getting a ton of notifications now (too many really), which I will elaborate later.
Q: I'm wondering how I should have set up postfix for this as it is soaking up 9% of the MBL's ram. I've selected "Internet Site" during postfix installation, resulting in this chunk of memory use. If I setup postfix as "no mail", will the notifications part of the OMV suite still work (and lower the memory usage)?
Power management
I've turned on "Specifies whether to monitor the system status and select the most appropriate CPU level."
Q: However, I doubt that this option has any use on this PowerPC system. Since it is already a low power system, it doesn't really make sense to do power management by CPU throttling?
Monitoring
I briefly mentioned being bombarded with notifications earlier. As soon as I turn on monitoring, my mailbox is flooded with nagging (and memory use rockets to 126MB, compared to 107MB without monitoring). Seems rrd and collectd are resource hogs for this kind of system.
Resource warnings
ZitatAlles anzeigenmonit alert -- Resource limit matched localhost
Resource limit matched Service localhost
Date: Thu, 13 Aug 2015 12:00:41
Action: alert
ost: JUPITER.lan
Description: loadavg(5min) of 1.2 matches resource limit [loadavg(5min)>1.0]
Your faithful employee,
Monit
I pretty much get these messages non stop. Can't seem to change the values in the webgui, so I need to delve deeper into the config files there. (And hope they don't get overwritten during service restart)
Degraded raid array
mdadm also reminds me every half hour that my raid array is broken.
ZitatAlles anzeigenDegradedArray event on /dev/md0:
This is an automatically generated mail message from mdadmrunning on JUPITER
A DegradedArray event had been detected on md device /dev/md0.
Faithfully yours, etc.
P.S. The /proc/mdstat file currently contains the following:
Personalities : [linear] [raid0] [raid1] [raid10] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4]
md0 : active raid1 sda2[1]
1999808 blocks [2/1] [_U]
unused devices: <none>
While mdadm is right, I don't need it to tell me because I did this on purpose. sda1 and sda2 are part of a raid array that WD uses in their firmware update process. They remove one partition from the raid, update on that partition, and if the update went well, they restore the raid array and reboot.
OMV is installed on sda1, WD's OS is still on sda2. If I ever wanted to go back to WD's stuff, I simply add sda1 back to the array and sync it.
Q: How do I turn these messages off?
Q: Since no raid functions are needed on the MBL, can I install OMV without RAID support (mdadm) at all?
Drive space
ZitatAlles anzeigenResource limit matched Service rootfs
Date: Thu, 13 Aug 2015 12:11:20
Action: alert
Host: JUPITER.lan
Description: space usage 80.1% matches resource limit [space usage>80.0%]
Your faithful employee,
Monit
I had to install a ton of tools to compile the missing PowerPC components. I could remove those tools, but i'd need them again to do the compilation if a newer version of OMV is released. Unless the PowerPC version of OMV is added to the repo
As I'm writing this, I've received about 22 emails about resources, degraded arrays, drive space and other things. Turning monitoring off again...
Update manager
The update manager throws an error:
The index of upgradeable packages does not exist. Please re-synchronize the package index files from their sources.
In particular this message is of interest, but it is to be expected:
Unable to find expected entry 'main/binary-powerpc/Packages' in Release file
Plugin manager
The same issue as with the update manager is encountered in the plugin manager section.
Physical disks
I've configured the disk (WDC WD30EZRS-11J) as:
Advanced power management: 1 - Minimum power usage with standby (spindown)
Acoustic Management: Disabled
Spindown time: 30 minutes
Write cache: off.
Q: Will turning drive-cache on have any effect? Found the answer myself: works wonders. Turned off throughput speed in Samba shares is about 3MB/sec write. Turned on: 50 MB/sec.
(I'm guessing it is the disk's internal ram buffer, but I'm not sure. As I feel this is a potentially dangerous option, I've decided not to touch it yet.)
Q: The drive doesn't spin down at all. Does anyone have an idea how to fix it?
Q: OMV is installed on sda1 and there is only one drive. I'm guessing that's the reason why it won't spin down. WD's firmware has a ramdrive of a couple of MB to store /var/log and other files that require frequent reads/writes. Every night at 3 am, a cronjob rotates these logfiles to the drive so it can remain in standby most of the time. Perhaps we can come up with something similar?
S.M.A.R.T.
I've left S.M.A.R.T. disabled as I'm unsure what good it does. If I enabled it, I would choose Power Mode: Standby to prevent the disk from spinning up. However, the disk doesn't spin down at all.
The devices tab shows the disk and the temperature (59 degrees celcius now). I can edit the drive and select "Activate S.M.A.R.T. monitoring", but I think it won't work if the service is not enabled in the settings tab.
Any advice is welcomed.
RAID management
This page shows my broken raid array. I don't dare click the recover button, as that will definately fudge either the WD partition or the OMV partition.
Q: Is there a way to disable raid management in the config pages?
File Systems
I see three partitions:
md0 (broken raid array) not mounted
sda1 (ext3) mounted
sda4 (ext4) mounted
Since the OMV installation and the data reside on the same drive, I ran into issues making shared folders. On a separate testing machine, I solved it by unmounting the sda4 partition via the webgui and remounting it.
For some reason, unmounting on the MBL doesn't work and it throws me this error:
Failed to get configuration (xpath=//system/fstab/mntent[dir='/media/c6cbd09a-4cef-465a-a0dc-b1b2307d638b'])
Checking the filesystems via ssh tells me there is nothing in the /media folder. sda4 is mounted in /mnt/data (result from the clean debian guide).
I unmouted /dev/sda4 and then I was able to mount it in the OMV webgui again. This allows me to make shared folders.
Shared folders
Trying to set ACLs results in errors. One user has read/write, the other has read only.
ZitatAlles anzeigenFailed to execute command 'export LANG=C; setfacl --remove-all --recursive -M '/tmp/setfaclOLFdzf' -- '/media/c6cbd09a-4cef-465a-a0dc-b1b2307d638b/shares/Movies/' 2>&1': setfacl: /media/c6cbd09a-4cef-465a-a0dc-b1b2307d638b/shares/Movies/: Operation not supported
Error #4000:
exception 'OMVException' with message 'Failed to execute command 'export LANG=C; setfacl --remove-all --recursive -M '/tmp/setfacloUHY2W' -- '/media/c6cbd09a-4cef-465a-a0dc-b1b2307d638b/shares/Movies/' 2>&1': setfacl: /media/c6cbd09a-4cef-465a-a0dc-b1b2307d638b/shares/Movies/: Operation not supported' in /usr/share/openmediavault/engined/rpc/sharemgmt.inc:1182
Stack trace:
#0 [internal function]: OMVRpcServiceShareMgmt->setFileACL(Array, Array)
#1 /usr/share/php/openmediavault/rpcservice.inc(125): call_user_func_array(Array, Array)
#2 /usr/share/php/openmediavault/rpc.inc(79): OMVRpcServiceAbstract->callMethod('setFileACL', Array, Array)
#3 /usr/sbin/omv-engined(500): OMVRpc::exec('ShareMgmt', 'setFileACL', Array, Array, 1)
#4 {main}