Posts by gregor3000

great. that's good to know. wait a bit now. I downloaded the latest and I need to test it first, see how it works if bugs were ironed out I will do an install. previous system disk was bricked (I think power outage caused it, I have no UPS yet). it doesn't matter since I didn't have much data on disks yet. The stuff I did have I can move overnight. I actually wanted to install Ubuntu server but I am having a trouble with installer (it freezes on formatting at 33%). looks like a well known bug. but I found it was in Debian as well. still if OMV works well I could just redo the whole RAID array (which seem to be the cause of the behaviour of this user: http://unix.stackexchange.com/…n-stucks-at-formatting-33).

if it all works and If I decide to install OMV again, then I will post for help on forums then with specification and picture of how I planned the VPN. it's a long road until then.

also I have some money saved and I am considering either a USB HDD for system drive or to stick an SSD/HDD in the now empty CD drive. but their SATA donnection is a bit strange and without 3rd party firmware it gives IDE speed.

the partition setup was:
/ - system disk on 8GB USB
2 TB sw raid 1:
/var/log - 2GB
/swap - 2 GB
/data - the rest of the disk

downloaded 2.x to see how it goes.

as i remembered those errors were also spamming the email besides spinning up the RAID1 disks.

@tekkb - I was trying to set it up myself. that didn't work and I am not sure why. I received extensive help from IRC, tried various commands, was pointed to some workaround, posted various logs and troubleshooting outputs... - in the end no one on IRC knew why it was not working. spent an afternoon on that and got nothing in the end - that's how easy it was. put a newbie in front of the interface, see if they understand it and can set it up without reading any extensive manuals. don't judge the user interface by yourself (if you by any chance know how to configure the darn thing manually by heart).

i remember how in the 90's you basically needed a book to install Red hat in dualboot if you didn't have any prior unix knowledge. they thought the interface is as easy as it get's. Well nowadays in Ubuntu you just have to do a few clicks and you are done (Windows had that kind of installer even earlier). Even latest CentOS is few click and you are installed. Clearly the UI in 90's wasn't as intuitive as they all thought it was. else they would probably keep it.

all I am saying when you guys develop, the people testing it should also be newbies.

OpenVPN make it intentionally complicated to set it up (both server and client), so that people would buy their services.

Quote from WastlJ

What exactly do you want to archive with your post?

I was asked on IRC to explain to OMV community what is bothering me and what made me go away, so perhaps someone might fix it (since it was the bugs that bothered me). obviously no one cares about disks on home server that spin constantly for no good reason. unless this was no already resolved?!

Quote from subzero79

Omv is not webmin. The openvpn is simple and I found it a very effective and practical solution presented as it is. If you want more control use the OPENVPNAS.

I never did expect a webmin. in fact I tried but din't like webmin.

Quote from tekkb

hehe I need a emoticon that is shaking it's head.

I on the other hand would need a facepalm when I saw how some things are done well and others.... no comment.

In autumn I will retry OMV. maybe sooner since Debian install got corrupted and I found out that backup copies were corrupted as well (partclone said all was good when I created the OS image, but on restore it was a different interpretation of good). BTW Ajenti worked well when it was up (very usefull feature there that would be nice to see in other server WebGUis is virtual terminal in webgui), but overall OMV has better plugins.

So it was in autumn last year when i almost made up my mind about OMV. But then i decided to remove it.

The major issue was constant file loging. It keep spinning disks up an down. And what was logged was a fake error. A debian bug that won't get fixed in Debian 7. since i do not access the box constantly i expected it to use as minimum electricity as posisble. so now it is logging only important things and accesses disk it seems about once every hour (at maximum). unless there is a break in attempt (fail2ban).

i also could not configure easilly some thing i expected them to be easy due to a plugin (e.g. OpenVPN). fiddling with interface provided no solution. it wasn't just the OpenVPN if i remember correctly. Anyway since i would have to extensively deal with various config files to setup the server i might as well have no GUI interface then.

So i removed OMV, but still i later decided to replace it with Ajenti to at least have some GUI on server. i configured most on server using via command line but administration is easier (to me at least) with a GUI.

in my opinion this is a good solution for LAN and if you do not expect too much from it. but if you want more you need to go into manual configuration anyway. i wish the GUI had all or most avaialable settings. settings should also always be propperly explained/named. otherwise there is no point in having a GUI. i also wish that the debian bug would be solved or at least would have a good workarround. as it was now disks keep on spinning up and down. both of them. just to log some error that is no error at all.

So anyway i will be sure to give out a next version a try (in virtualbox first of course) and hopefully i can use that one instead of Ajenti. I very much liked how the GUI was made, but there was something missing.

oh an one more wish if i can - make it available on Ubuntu LTS as well.

decoding (i.e for viewing ) not transcoding.

excelent idea. thanks. i though it had to be built in. forgot about the eSata plug...

Quote from 0rtega

It's a pity that the BananaPi is not compatible to something like this.
I have purchased one recently and works great with my N54L.

what is advantage an dsisadvantage of such a device ( i mean since there are PCi slots on N54L)

1. HP N54L - with the server came a note with cryptic URL. After entering it I was redirected to a website. on the website is basically a procedure to backup USB (or USB key) and an emtpy USB stick smaller than 2Gb is required :-O

Is there any other way to get this key besides formatting a smaller USB stick ?

2. Is it possible to boot from the outside USB ports?

I am currently using inner USB for OMV OS on a USB stick, software RAID 1 array is for logs (2 HDD) & swap (which wasn't used yet) and data. Let's see how that goes. There is way too much logging done by OMV and various errors of unresolved bugs.

and if I may - some comments on the product:
- I like the form factor
- the HP logo light is too bright it illuminates the whole room during the night.
- I like how HP marked the spare parts - I am thinking of proposing something like that in my company ( I work in spare parts after sales in white goods company) - note: this is my first brand name computer - so it could be this is industry standard?1
- i don't like it that there is no new gen micro server with power efficient CPU and good price. the gen 8 is way too expencive for home use.

Quote from carpler

I will use the HP as a media server.
I know the processor of the N54L is not particularly powerful, and would not be able to transcoding high resolution video (1080p).
It's possible to remedy this with an additional graphic card? OMV would be able to take advantage of this for transcoding?

you have PCI slots and radeon 4200 chip (though with a VGA output).

too bad it has only 1 sata port. I guess for media and file server this is good enough.

excellent! I've been checking collectd pages. I am not familiar with code or git... but is this some kind of fix?:
https://github.com/svn2github/…272c85afc46e6724f5ca4cfd0

or is this just a proposal for a solution from Openmediavault?

I will either try to implement your fix in some way (read only config or maybe to get notified if file changes) or maybe just turn it off completely until it gets fixed. The logs stay more or less quiet after this is turned off. I am off to find other tools for monitoring I could use.

Never expected such issues from Debian stable and it's official packages...

no it's a df debian bug (explained in another thread).: mass errors in syslog (clean install upgraded to .6)
solution provided by chrunchbang (http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?id=25901) doesn't solve the collectd issue though it does make the logs look slightly nicer.

What Aaron suggest works but as he noted

Quote

This change will be overwritten with certain changes in the web interface or possibly an omv update.

for update it would be an easy fix (e.g. with a script) but changes to web interface....

So again my question is - is stopping collectd a good workaround? or do I break anything else with that? I use ext4 and as I understand here the collectd is only collecting system data for display.

another option would be to make that file read only after that change, however again I am not sure what that would mean when

Quote

certain changes in the web interface or possibly an omv update

appear.

ok. so not a good solution.

but here is what I did:

monit stop collectd

what is the downside of this? besides not getting constant information I actually do not need. I mean if I need to monitor I can probably also do it with some other CLI tools.

Would this be a good work arround until a fix is found or at least until Jessie is out? Or will it break some other thing?

I tried it only in virtualbox and it seemed to stop the logs and I ahvent' noticed any side effects, but I did this just before going to work so I only had a min or two to do the checks.

a bump and an updtae. this happens on normla openmediavult install as well as if install is made on debian.

how to remove or disable the app doing the logging without breaking the omv?

or change to another service as i now realised why there is so many writes.: mass errors in syslog (clean install upgraded to .6)
debian works just fine on all those raspbery Pi & sd cards and openmedivault shouldn't be doing any more writing than debian . except maybe in /var/log/ which i planned to move to hard disk anyway. so the USB is mostly (99%) only read.

by the way same issue is with SSD - give them enough writes and they fail. unless you buy expencive pro version which can handle about the same as plate drives.

can i temporarily turn off the graphs or something to stop this error from constantly logging? i mean even when i move the logs to HDD it will constantly have the drive spun up even when no user is actually doing anything.

script on chrunchbang forums just reduced the number of errors i think. they still get logged every 10 secs.

or could i send this "error" to be logged at /dev/null somehow?

Quote from WastlJ

However - Think about using a cheap usb to sata (external HDD) enclosure. You will bite you in the arse if you have any errors and you don´t even know where they are coming from...

cheapest one I saw was 13 EUR and would still need a hard drive. might as well buy the whole external drive for 47 EUR. don't have any old ones left as they were all repurposed.

then I was thiking esata but again expencive enclosures. will do some more search. do you maybe know of one? it's kind of too bad this server doesn't have USB 3.0. ok it's an old model. had to import it. but it was cheap and form what I read reliable. so I am ok with that now. also even now from testing flash disk (aside from boot and install) server is fast & responsive (Ubuntu+Ajenti GUI+Owncloud)

I think SSD has similar issue but the issue appears much later in time (especially with newer and better ones). so it seems something spinning would be better.

I have Openelec on PI. it's been running for almost a year now. so far so good. though that one might have less logging to do?!

I still intend to use USB stick for the OS. How is swap handled by OMV since it is all just one disk / one partition? is a file used?

Can I still install Debian and then add OMV to it? I was thinking of putting /swap and /var/log to hard disk keeping the rest on USB that should reduce read/write wear of USB. if this is not possible I will just use USB for as long as I can. an 8GB use costs 5 EUR ( probably could get them cheaper if I bough a batch), 32GB SSD costs 30 EUR (and probably has same issue with swap). might search for external drive in that price range later on when I have the money - saw an eSata external plug on server...

I just installed latest version in vbox yesterday and I must say I am impressed with the work done. and it moved to top of the testing list immediately.

Quote from "davidh2k"

USB no good idea if this does not support static wear leveling.Otherwise it will be grilled within weeks if not days.

what else then? i've seen a couple of reviews on youtube suggestign one can run the OS form USB in this server. i mean if you move the stuff that is written down the OS is not really accesing the disk that much or am i wrong? should i use some other media storage program instead? or will all have the same issue?

Quote

Oh, and there are no partitions in OpenMediaVault.

what no partitions? not even /swap? i have to look into this then.

I have my eyes on one of these and OVM for a while now.

I see they sell them for 180 EUR with 4 GB ram and no HDD. I am not after some complex setup, but mostly it will provide accesss to shared files as well provide a backup of these mostly static data files.

I was thinking of running the OS from internal USB, put the logs and such from the OS on disk and then use another disk to keep backups (or perhaps use snapRAID setup?!). Part of files would be backups from website, so those would change every week and would have to have versions. I am thinking that these should be on separate partition from data files. data disks would be a faster blue one for serving files and a more reliable NAS drive for backups. is that a good plan?

server would be connected via electric socket connection (TP-link, encrypted) to router or switch. haven't decided yet if I really need to add a router for this as the other "server" on this same internet connection would be the Rpi with OpenELEC where I sometimes use torrent.

3 computers would connect to server via LAN and 2 over internet. I have an even mix of windows and Linux PC.

This small serve could store 3HDD and potentially as I understand via PCI card one could add 4 2,5" drivers in the DVD slot. there are also many USB drives where one could later add external drives maybe to put older pics and videos not accessed often.