Posts by yaque

Quote from malibu

I run OMV5 on an ancient armel NAS that still does the job. I've turned off the SMB encryption to help the CPU. Even then, the SMB performance is about half the speed of Netatalk (30 vs 60+ MB/s).

For that reason, I've decided to install Netatalk manually. The good news is that the installation is so simple the lack of a plug-in is no big deal.

Let's assume you have a running OMV5 with existing shared folder(s) with the correct access rights. All you need to do as root is:

1. "apt install netatalk" to install all the necessary packages

2. "nano /etc/netatalk/afp.conf" to create the configuration file. Below is an example config file to be adjusted based on your needs.

Code

[Global]
    hostname = NAS - AFP
    spotlight = no

[Share1]
    path = /srv/dev-disk-by-label-data/Share1

[Share2]
    path = /srv/dev-disk-by-label-data/Share2

[Share3]
    path = /srv/dev-disk-by-label-data/Share3

[TimeMachine]
    path = /srv/dev-disk-by-label-data/timemachine
    time machine = yes

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3. "systemctl restart netatalk" to take the new config into account

Done!

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Just to confirm that this is working with OMV 6 . Both the normal shares and the TimeMachine shares are working. I like it a lot because:

- I can easily set a quota for a Timemachine share!!!

- It is a lot faster than SMB, to list content of shares and reading content

- Easily enable or disable Spotlight for a specific share.

Here is my config file afp.conf

[Global]
    hostname =myHomeNAS
    spotlight = no
    mimic model = RackMac 


[film]
path = /srv/[...]/Film


[myshare]
path = /srv/[...]/PersonalShare
spotlight = yes


[TimeMachine-macmini]
path = /srv/[...]/TimeMachine/macmini
time machine = yes
vol size limit = 250000


[TimeMachine-mbp]
path = /srv/[.../TimeMachine/mbp
time machine = yes
vol size limit = 250000

cheers

Thank you macom !!! This was the answer to the problem!

For the record, I used

mkfs.ext4 -L "[yourlabel]" -m 0 -v -E lazy_itable_init=0 /dev/sdb2

Now the disk is completely silent when I mount it!!!!

cheers,

Thanks both for your comments

I am pretty sure this is not a hardware problem.

- When OMV creates the ext4 partition, the drive is completely silent when I mount it.

- If I manually create an ntfs partition, the drive is completely silent when I mount it.

- The abnormal activity is present only when I mount an ext4 partition if it was manually created by me.

I used the previous facts to discard a problem with the hardware. I also checked this disk using badsectors and other tools, and it is in perfect condition. In the second post I added additional information that may be relevant to the situation.

I was wondering if OMV uses special instructions when it creates the ext4 partition, or if OMV add some configuration in the system that may help to solve the problem.

Information that I think is important to share about my problem:

1. The ext4 partition is manually created using gparted and then

mkfs.ext4 -L "disk1hd" /dev/sdb2

If I eliminate the reserved space the problem is the same. for this i used:

tune2fs -m 0 -r 0 /dev/sdb2

2. The abnormal activity starts as soon as I mount the manually created ext4 partition. The noise stops as soon as I unmount the partition.

3. There are NO abnormal activity when I mount a manually created ntfs partition. I also formatted the ntfs partition as vfat. No noises if I mount the vfat partition.

4. Problem was identified on OMV 5.6 (which I installed two weeks ago). I upgraded to OMV 6 and after repeating all the tests, the problematic outcome is exactly the same.

5. When OMV makes a full disk ext4 filesystem, it takes like 3 minutes to complete the task , showing the message "writing inode tables". When I manually create a full disk ext4 filesystem, it takes like 5 seconds to complete the task. Why the difference?

6. The manually created partition doesn't have files aquota.group aquota.user . Is this somehow related? How do I generate those files for the manually created partition?

7. tune2fs -l shows only one difference between the partition created by OMV and the manually created partition: the latter has "Filesystem features: needs_recovery " . However this flag goes away by doing e2fsck -f so both are identical.

8. Problem is present if I mount the partition using the webadmin, or with CLI via ssh.

This is my first post at the forum. Since I can't find anything like this anywhere and also I am new to OMV (like 2 weeks), I will try to give all relevant facts at once.

Generalities

I need 3 partitions on my external USB disk, so I manually created them. Two partitions are type ext4 to be used for OMV (the third is ntfs). The drive is a new Seagate Expansion 14TB USB drive .

Problem.

As soon as I mount any of the two ext4 partitions that I created manually, the harddrive starts with an activity as if it is reading every 0.5seconds. The situation gets worse when the second ext4 partition is mounted (activity increases to like 4 clicks per second)

why is this a problem

The abnormal activity may generate a failure of the disk.

Mitigation

If I use OMV to make the ext4 filesystem, when the partition is mounted, there is NO harddrive activity at all. Note: this also corroborates that the disk is healthy (I had previously "burn" it with badsectors and checked it).

Why mitigation is unacceptable.

If I shrink the partition made by OMV, and manually create the two additional partitions that I need, when I mount the second ext4 partition, the disk have the same abnormal activity. Note: no noises are generated if I only mount the shrunken partition that was created by OMV.

Possible source of the problem

OMV is creating the partition differently to my manual process to create the partitions?

What do you suggest to stop this abnormal activity?

Maybe the source of the problem is different of what I am assuming?