Posts by Zelgadis

Quote from ryecoaaron

The kvm plugin allows you to convert your virtualbox drives to qcow2 (kvm format). You could create a tiny OMV VM and attach that drive to it. Then share it via nfs or samba.

A sharedfolder OR smb/nfs share OR something else?

shares/shared folders are just folders on a filesystem. You wouldn't actually delete the filesystem. If you want to remove a folder, just delete it.

Try the filebrowser plugin or use WinSCP to connect via ssh.

It's just a regular shared folder but you answered my question, thanks.

I didn't realize the KVM plugin could do that. That does sound useful. I have a bit to think about in how I'm going to approach things now.

Overall, I like the idea of converting my Windows install to a VM. I know I've seen some convoluted directions somewhere before on how to do that. As an alternative, I can install Windows from scratch, which would probably take a while longer.

My current thoughts are that I'll do this:

Copy the appdata share I made for docker containers in a VDI on the host OS SSD directly to the SSD. This step will take a while.

Reinstall Docker and the Plex, Jellyfin and Shoko containers in Manjaro using the config data that I copied in the previous step.

Prepare and copy Windows into a virtual disk. I'm a little fuzzy on the details involved.

Install and setup OMV on the old server. Install the KVM plugin and add the Windows VM.

Delete the OMV VM from the new server, clean up anything leftover and carry on from there.

That's about as far ahead as I've thought at the moment.

I read this guide but it doesn't really mention how to add an existing VM or set one up from an existing install. [How-To] Use the Openmediavault-KVM plugin

Quote from ryecoaaron

I think this is your best option. OMV and SnapRAID don't need 16GB of ram and you could run a Windows VM on that system using the kvm plugin.

Thanks for suggesting the KVM plugin and confirming that as my favored path forward. If you have any other suggestions for easing the transition like, I recently found a video about Virtualbox having a file manager, I would appreciate it. The fact I can just copy the config for Plex, Jellyfin and Shoko off of the VDI and onto the main drive will make migrating them out of the VM a lot easier.

Since Mergerfs can easily recreate a pool, just by adding the same hard drive and giving the same name is great but I do have a question about that. What if I want to delete a share from the pool? Like, I have a Media share and a Users share and I'm thinking about deleting Users or renaming Media. How would I do that and have the old file system show up? Simply deleting the share doesn't remove the files and renaming a share seems to create a whole new file structure with the old files missing from it. I'm guessing I could rename whatever root folder was involved through WeTTy or SSH but I was wondering if there was a way to do this in the GUI. How would you go about it?

Quote from ryecoaaron

20 years of running VMs and I've never heard of someone hitting the max number of usb ports. I honestly don't know if VMware allows more. OMV running on hardware would definitely eliminate the problem. I wouldn't go back to windows since virtualbox would be the same.

Do you have another computer? If you could rdp into a Windows VM running on the OMV box with kvm plugin, that would be the best situation. Do not try to run a desktop on OMV installed on hardware. Or maybe you should consider removing some of the usb drives from their enclosure and putting them in the system itself connected via sata port.

I had this really long reply written out but my conclusion was that I should do one of the following.

Note: My "new server" is an 11th gen NUC with 2 core/4 threads and 32 GB of RAM. My "old server" is a custom build with a 4 core/8 thread Xeon and 16 GB of RAM. The new server has an iGPU capable of encoding/decoding newer codecs like x265, the GT 710 on the old server cannot. 16 GB is the limit of the motherboard on the old server and cannot be upgraded. Neither has space for internal SATA drives.

Listed in order of least effort to most:

Install OMV on the new server, use the old server as a Windows workstation. The biggest downside is the loss of the NUC as a Manjaro workstation, which would actually be a little painful considering how well the hardware favors it.

Install Windows on the new server, retire the old server. The biggest downside here is Windows and the unstable, insecure mess that involves. Obviously, I wouldn't have spent a month trying to make OMV work, if I was a fan of this idea.

Install OMV on the old server, use the new server to run Manjaro and Plex. The biggest downsides are the complete loss of Windows. and having OMV and SnapRAID limited to 16 GB of RAM, which will be a bigger deal for long term hard drive upgrades.

I actually favor the third option but that would require a lot of work to get setup, due to having a very complicated setup that I'd have to untangle and migrate over from Windows to Manjaro, somehow. Reinstalling OMV on the old server would basically be the easy part.

As far as I can tell, there's no fix for this. It's a hard limit with Virtualbox and there's no solution or workaround. Feel free to correct me, if I'm wrong.

The thing is, I have all of my files stored on external drives (I have 3x 18 TB, 3x 12 TB, 4x 8 TB, 2x 3 TB and a 2 TB drive.) I've been running into another issue other than just the limit of how many hard drives I can connect. I'm also experiencing slow transfer speeds. When I try to watch videos, whether through Plex, Jellyfin or even directly from the share in a local video player, I get severe buffering issues. I also found out that passing through hardware encoding to Plex is a bit of a pain.

My goal with this machine was to have it pull double duty as a workstation and a media server running Plex and various related apps.

Originally, I had thought to just throw Windows, Stablebit's Drive Pool, Plex, Shoko and so on directly on it. However, for various reasons I want to get away from my reliance on Windows. I also really like the features of OMV, Mergerfs, SnapRAID and Docker.

I went with Manjaro as the host OS, simply because it appealed to me and I needed a simple way to test that the new hardware worked. I put OMV in Virtualbox because I don't have a lot of experience running VMs and VIrtualbox seemed as good as anything else to me.

I've spent the better part of a month trying to get OMV and Plex to work in the VM; most of that time was spent shuffling files around. I don't feel great about the idea of starting over at this point but I've hit a few walls here, most notably the limit on USB ports for Virtualbox.

So, my question is, can I make this VM work somehow, whether through another software like VMWare or by a fix I don't know of? Should I just give up and install OMV without the VM? Would it be better to just go back to what I know, Windows?

This thread suggested installing webtop in OMV as a way to run a desktop and OMV at the same time and I find the idea intriguing. If I install OMV without a VM, this sounds like a good approach. The only thing I find disappointing is that I liked the idea of easily being able to migrate the VM to new hardware or backup/restore it. OMV MAY NOT HAVE A DESKTOP ENVIRONMENT !!

I'm running out of spare time to play around with this. Rather than continuing to just stab in the dark, I thought I'd ask here to see if anyone has advice on where I should go with this. I've found this forum to be generally helpful with my previous problems, so I'm asking here. Any advice is greatly appreciated, thank you.

You're right. I logged in as root and it worked.

I don't need it at the moment, since I fixed the file access issues with reset permissions. However, it seems like it'll be a useful tool to have later on.

Currently, I'm trying to get Plex running in Yacht. I'm in the middle of copying over the 62 GB, 1 million file config folder. That's excluding the cache folder and log files.

I couldn't get webmin to work. It expected to have user home folders and there are none for root.

I tried using resetperms plugin, only this time I went nuclear on permissions by giving everyone read/write access. That finally fixed my ability to access files. I would have preferred to have at least some restrictions based on users but I'll settle for simply having things work. This is no less secure than my existing windows shares.

I attempted to enabled home folders, so I could get webmin working but there was no such luck. I'm not even sure the home folders are working properly because I can't even login from Windows. It just automatically connects in guest mode and refuses to even prompt me for a login. When I disable guests, it gives errors saying I don't have permission again. I'm just going to give up on user permissions entirely at this point. It's not worth the headache.

Thanks, this sounds like exactly what I'm looking for.

I setup a mergerfs pool and shared it. Everything was working fine until, suddenly it was really not fine anymore.

At some point while trying to get Plex installed, I suddenly lost access to the share. I tried numerous things to fix it but permissions were completely broken. I could view the share but that was it.

I reinstalled OMV and recreated the share and, while I can make new files/folders and delete those, I can't change anything that currently exists. I tried installing File Browser and that can move/delete existing files but I can't find any way to give myself access to them. It took the better part of a week to copy files onto this share, I would rather install Windows and run a basic windows file share than to have to spend another week copying files.

Anyone have a clue how to gain access to these files again?

Quote from ryecoaaron

The problem is they might get logged out the web interface and then wouldn't know when it was done. The system might be rebooted in the middle and then things could be in a bad state.

I'll add it to my never ending list of requests.

You could put an rsync command in the Scheduled Tasks section (not rsync plugin).

rsync -avr /path/to/dir1 /path/to/destination

I can't customize it. Either on or off. I will turn it off. It can show up other places if Volker wants people to see it.

Display More

Thanks for the info. I'm sure I'll find the rsync command handy rather soon.

It's a shame there isn't a persistent place you could keep track of the progress but I understand how that would be a problem.

Weird, I would have thought you'd be able to edit it somehow. I actually like stuff like that, normally.

I just wanted to note, the balance function finished execution perfectly last night, in spite of the fact the host desktop crashed rather hard. I have OMV installed in a VM with Manjaro as the host. The Manjaro host was fairly hosed, it was mostly unresponsive and I had to cold reboot the whole system to get it working again. Meanwhile, OMV was rock solid and I was even able to tell it to safely shut down from the web interface.

I now have to figure out if there's something wrong with the integrated GPU, if the cooling in it is just that bad or if this is some glitch with KDE Plasma. I googled "hdmi connection dropping and reconnecting" and got zero results that seemed even remotely relevant. Considering the fan was running rather hard and it was a bit hot, I'm thinking it's overheating just enough for the iGPU to crash. Well, this has nothing to do with OMV.

This is making me question whether there's even a point to the Manjaro host or whether I should just run Manjaro headless.

With those thoughts aside, I'm marking this solved.

Quote from ryecoaaron

I feel that way about FreeNAS/TrueNAS but most users of that software would say the opposite. OMV also is very flexible which keeps it usable for advanced users. Being that flexible might make it seem not so intuitive for some.

The defaults do "work". They just didn't do what you wanted. I used to have the default of "mfs" but many complained that their files were all over the pool (which doesn't cause any problems since they are still visible in the pool). And since most people are switching to epmfs, I changed the default to that. I can't win.

If they were video, they were probably getting old. If people helped, we probably wouldn't have that issue.

I probably won't put something like this in the web interface since it could take days on some systems to run. To write a script to do it wouldn't be very hard.

I think I can turn off the tribute in code. I will do this since it is confusing to some.

Probably, the only way to make an interface everyone likes is to make one that you can completely customize and has presets to match common interfaces people are already likely familiar with. It'd honestly be a real pain to make something like that but I have spent more than a few idle hours thinking about how to make one. It's difficult because you need a balance between useful presets and in-depth customization.

I would have thought the normal "most free space" would be the more useful default but I'll admit, it was my fault for not even reading what they did.

It really is difficult to maintain an active and helpful community. That said, I do like a lot of what I see in OMV. It's why I was feeling rather frustrated when I suddenly stumbled over something simple.

You could always just put in a warning label, so people will know that removing a hard drive that way could take days. At the very least, it would be helpful if you published a script for it. I don't even know how to use Rsync. All the options I see are for scheduling regular jobs, not a one off thing.

You don't necessarily have to turn the tribute off. You could just attach a message at the end to clue people in that it's nothing serious and they should just click Start. If I see something like that and there's a clear indication of what I should actually be doing, it's my own fault for falling for it at that point. I'm not saying I wouldn't fall for it, I'm just saying I wouldn't even be mad and I definitely would have figured it out after getting it wrong a couple times.

Quote from ryecoaaron

It isn't asking for a password. That is just lines printed on the terminal for humor as a tribute (OMV does this). If you click the start button, it will just start.

What do you expect when you pick that policy? You are explicitly telling mergerfs to keep the files in the existing path. It can't balance anything unless those folders exist on the other drive(s). Read the mergerfs policy descriptions again (there is a button to take you to the docs in the plugin).

All the info you need is in the mergerfs docs which the plugin provides a link to.

What critical things? Is there something not in the mergerfs docs? Where would you expect to find this info? We are working on a wiki to help but since no one else helps, it takes a while. Remember we are volunteers with limited time.

The plugin runs this. No need to login as root and try to figure it out. As I mentioned above, your problems are caused by your policy.

What command did you use? I find it strange that it works from the command line but not from the plugin. The command isn't hard to use with a lot of parameters.

Display More

So, I've been pranked by a reference I didn't get. I'm guessing when I tried to type the password and hit enter, I was effectively just hitting Close instead of the seemingly highlighted Start.

The OMV interface isn't terrible but it's not the most intuitive.

I'm used to default options that don't require extra work to make them, you know, work. I had no idea what those options even meant when I did an initial setup to test things. I was just following (or trying to) the youtube guide for it. The ones pinned in this forum.

I just used the basic "mergerfs.balance <dir>" command. I'm sure the GUI option would work, if I had realized I just needed to hit Start.

One thing I would like to see is an option to mark a drive for removal and have it automatically shuffle off the files to the rest of the pool, rather than having to remove it from the pool and then manually copy them back to the pool.

Well, I still don't know how to make the button in the gui work but I did work around it by using the command line option in Wetty. It took a couple tries to figure out that the path it wanted was the absolute path listed in the share but it's now balancing the pool.

So, I setup a mergerfs pool with the default option of "existing path - most free space" and ended up with it filling up the first hard drive and then giving the error of being out of space. I changed it to "most free space" but the damage is done, the one drive is filled to the limit. I tried to use the "balance pools" function but it asked for a password and then did nothing. How does this function even work? I have googled for the better part of an hour with no answers at all.

As you might guess, my experience with mergerfs and OMV in general is basically zero. I wasn't expecting this to be a Windows level plug and play experience but why are critical things just not explained at all? Any information I find on the topic is obviously ancient and outdated because they still call it unionfs and it took a while just to realize it's now called mergerfs.

This is all it says in the readme.md on the project:

Quote

mergerfs.balance

Will move files from the most filled drive (percentage wise) to the least filled drive. Will do so till the most and least filled drives come within a user defined percentage range (defaults to 2%).

Run as root. Requires rsync to be installed.

I have rsync installed and I entered the root password when it asked for a password. This really isn't helping at all. What do I do to make this function work? It'd almost be faster to just wipe the drives and start copying everything again and it took 3 days to copy enough data to fill the one drive!