I did a couple of memtests, and all passed, no problems. The USBs are new, so I have tried a whole bunch of different ones. Installing Linux Mint boots done, even from the oldest USB, but OMV won't install or boot on any of them now.
OMV using a USB drive
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I switched the two new USBs around and it worked, so weird. I tried rewiring them, no luck, but switching them worked...
But it was a pointless, as it's not finding the right dev to boot from still
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I wiped the installer USB, then plugged it in as well (so it'd mount as SDA, making my bootable OMV USB sdb).
This worked, but I get to the login prompt and it hasn't identified a network interface for some reason???
It also will not login, it just dropped back to this same login with no error ...so where I was stuck last time I tried installing OMV around Christmas time.
I don't know what else to try now, except maybe shifting USB ports or something...?
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Ok, I read to try logging in as root. That gives me an error when trying to configure network interfsces,:
Failed to execute command, which says something about monit monitor collectd cannot create socket? Connection refused
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Ok, fudged my way along to the point that I got it working with adding port 2812 to the iptables and then omv-firstaid again to configure network.
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I'll be taking images at each point, so that I hopefully don't have to do this all again
But so far so good, I'm in the Web GUI, and just setting everything up again from scratch it seems...
Rebooted and everything is fine too. I'm so frustrated I wasted all that time, but really happy and relieved to be able to be able to keep using OMV
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So far so good, a few small hiccups (I guess they are learning opportunities), but I have y shares and Plex working again
I have made a few backup images of the OS drive, and tested flashing that and it worked fine, and also documented the key steps so I remember what I did
Still need to backup my camera and other files that have been building up, and then get my script that backs up to external hard drives working again to make sure it's all backed up in multiple places.
Then I had bought a spare 8TB drive for a parity for SnapRaid, so I'd like to get that working and use my SnapRaid script for scrubbing and syncing.
Tgeb, probably house keeping...I have lots of data all over the place that needs to be organised and de-duped carefully...
And also, the Hauppauge tuner driver didn't load again, so I'll try installing that when I get all that done, and I have spare time.
Thanks for all the advice and motivation to keep persisting, fingers crossed I have a more stable build now
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Using a flash memory drive can be fine. Or it can be a serious problem. Which depends on you.
The reason is that flash memory has a limited life. It survives only a certain number of writes. This means that thumbdrives and SD cards can be expected to die quickly if you are writing to them a lot. SSDs have a similar problem, but they are designed to withstand many more writes. However it is possible to destroy a SSD as well by writing to it too much. But then you have to make an effort...
Many SBCs use SD cards to boot. For other systems, using a USB thumbdrive to boot frees up SATA ports for data. In a normal OMV install the boot and root filesystem only takes up a few GB, making the size of a SD card or a USB thumbdrive an ideal fit. Also OMV can be configured to write very little to the root filesystem, using the flash memory plugin.
All is fine. A thumb drive or a SD card used like this can be expected to survive for many years, if not decades.
BUT... Then someone decides to do something more with their OMV install. Use it not only as a simple NAS but also run some server applications on it. Perhaps with metadata databases and caches and other very frequently written data. Perhaps install plex or emby. Or run dockers. And this can break OMV...
Typically /var/lib is used by the new applications to store caches and databases. Dockers by default use /var/lib/docker for storage. This can be Bad™. Using the normal partitioning /var/lib is part of the root filesystem. And if this is on a SD card or on a thumbdrive, then that SD card or thumbdrive can be expected to die or show errors soon.
Another problem is that the application data will quickly fill the root filesystem. Causing a spectacular crash when it is full. In addition it will make backups of the OMV server configuration difficult. Typically the root filesystem is just a few GB and easy and fast to clone. But add application data and caches and the root filesystem can grow quickly to many hundreds of GB.
There are (at least) five ways to handle this.
1. Partition the filesystem so that /var/lib is on a drive that can handle a lot of writes.
2. Put the root filesystem on a drive that can handle a lot of writes. SSD or HDD.
3. Configure the software to store data in a folder located on a drive that can handle a lot of writes.
4. Buy super high quality flash memory. A SSD in a thumbdrive or SD card form factor.
5. Buy thumbdrives and SD cards in bulk and replace often.If you use docker then you can change the docker base path to a shared folder on a HDD or a SSD. That is #3 above. And it works great. The root filesystem will keep small and can be stored on a 16 GB SD card or thumbdrive without any problems. Easy to clone for backups. And using the flash memory plugin it can be expected to last for many years.
Another trick to further improve the life of a SD card or thumbdrive is to overprovision. Decent quality SD cards or USB thumbdrives use simple wear leveling. You can use a 32GB or 64GB card/drive and only partition 8GB. The extra "unused" storage will be used for wear leveling, spreading out the wear from writes to many more memory cells. This can be expected to significantly increase the life of the drive.
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Hi, I'm completely new to OMV and I'm trying to install it on a 16GB USB drive and use a hard drive as storage. I just want to stream my media from plex. Are the above configurations enough for me?
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I would install docker and plex to the storage drive, rather than to /var/lib on the USB stick. Avoid putting docker and plex on the USB stick. Or at least use a high quality USB stick or a small SSD.
The easiest might be to do a test install, and during install simply change the default suggestions shown so that dockers and plex are not installed under /var/lib but on the storage drive. Verify that plex works as it should.
A more advanced way, that I usually do, is to add an extra partition to a fast storage drive and change fstab so that partition is mounted as /var/lib. Or even add an extra SSD just for /var/lib. After that you can use all the default settings. Nice. Just make sure the partition for /var/lib does not fill up.
Please note: OMV is remarkably easy to use and install. But it does require some knowledge and experience and a willingness for some experimenting, DIY and tinkering. Experience from using Linux and especially Debian/Ubuntu in other contexts is a great help. Especially when you add stuff to it, like docker and plex. There is a reason why expensive ready-to-run NAS are being sold. They require even less knowledge, tinkering and work.
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