Few simple questions

[JoshTheBlack]

First off, I'm new to Amahi. Almost done migrating from WHS. So far, I'm loving it. After some newbish mistakes with 4TB drive on 32bit windows causing a near catastrophic data loss, I think I've just about got things running smoothly. There are a few things I want to change for the sake of order, but I'm afraid to do so without a bit of guidance. My questions are:

1. Can I safely move the drive mount points without causing issues? During the migration, I mounted several NTFS drives to copy data off onto the ext3 drives, then formatted them to ext4 and added to the drive pool. My drive pool now includes "/" (I understand why this is ill advised, and am prepared to handle the issues that may arise), /var/hda/files/drives/drive4, and /var/hda/files/drives/drive7. This is not preferable, I would like to mount the drives in /var/.../drive1 - /var/.../drive4. The drive mounted in drive7 is still empty as I haven't added storage pooling to it yet, so I imagine I could easily edit fstab to mount it to /var/.../drive3 (as it is in the 3rd drive bay.) drive4 has 1TB of data (and rising) already migrated to it via share pooling. If I were to edit fstab and mount it as /etc/.../drive2, then run a greyhole -fsck, would that fix everything proper? Or would I essentially ruin all the past 3 days of work i've done?

2. Is there an easier way to remove user folders from samba shares than editing the samba.conf? i.e. After logging in via ssh, the user folder /home/username/ is created and automatically shared via samba. It does not show up in the amahi dashboard anywhere as such, I cannot enable pooling, and I see no reason to have it shared. (I'm running a headless server, so local logins won't happen.) I edited the user folder bits out of the samba.conf file, but I was wondering if there was an easier way to handle this.

3. Will having a newly added file constantly accessed keep greyhole from moving it out of the landing zone? Say I were to download the latest ubuntu iso via torrent file and have my client store it on the network share, would greyhole go ahead and move the file and create the symlink, or would it wait until the file was no longer being accessed?

4. Is it safe to delete the greyhole log file? I see there are several logs that have been gzip'd as grehole.log.1.gz, mysql.log.1.gz. Can these be deleted? Does it happen automatically?

FYI: I installed Ubuntu Server 12.04.2 LTS 64-bit without any issues.

[bigfoot65]

1. Can I safely move the drive mount points without causing issues? During the migration, I mounted several NTFS drives to copy data off onto the ext3 drives, then formatted them to ext4 and added to the drive pool. My drive pool now includes "/" (I understand why this is ill advised, and am prepared to handle the issues that may arise), /var/hda/files/drives/drive4, and /var/hda/files/drives/drive7. This is not preferable, I would like to mount the drives in /var/.../drive1 - /var/.../drive4. The drive mounted in drive7 is still empty as I haven't added storage pooling to it yet, so I imagine I could easily edit fstab to mount it to /var/.../drive3 (as it is in the 3rd drive bay.) drive4 has 1TB of data (and rising) already migrated to it via share pooling. If I were to edit fstab and mount it as /etc/.../drive2, then run a greyhole -fsck, would that fix everything proper? Or would I essentially ruin all the past 3 days of work i've done?

What I typically do is create the mount points I want and then change it in the /etc/fstab. You then need to unmount them from the old location and then when you mount them in the new location, all should work fine.

I typically use sdb, sdc,sdd, etc for my names. You can use anything you desire, just remember to unmount before you try to mount to the new location. Also ensure you have created the new mount point too.

Once you change everything, when you run Greyhole it should correct everything. You will need to remove the old mount points manually or there will be a ton of file copies just hanging out there.

2. Is there an easier way to remove user folders from samba shares than editing the samba.conf? i.e. After logging in via ssh, the user folder /home/username/ is created and automatically shared via samba. It does not show up in the amahi dashboard anywhere as such, I cannot enable pooling, and I see no reason to have it shared. (I'm running a headless server, so local logins won't happen.) I edited the user folder bits out of the samba.conf file, but I was wondering if there was an easier way to handle this.

Yes, add them using the Amahi Dashboard. Then you can remove them from the dashboard which should remove them from Samba. I could be wrong here. It's not wise to mess with the samba.conf as Amahi automatically regenerates it and you will lose all changes.

There is guidance in the wiki for adding certain options to shares such as a recycle bin or guest access. The user folders are created by default. Leaving them there does not hurt anything and they take up little room. If you choose to remove them, its your server. Just remember it could cause issues later if you don't do it correctly. Might be some guidance on the internet about whether your method is sound or not.

3. Will having a newly added file constantly accessed keep greyhole from moving it out of the landing zone? Say I were to download the latest ubuntu iso via torrent file and have my client store it on the network share, would greyhole go ahead and move the file and create the symlink, or would it wait until the file was no longer being accessed?

Depends. I have seen it react instantly and sometimes it takes a while. I typically work on my clients for tasks such as this and move them to the HDA once I am done.

4. Is it safe to delete the greyhole log file? I see there are several logs that have been gzip'd as grehole.log.1.gz, mysql.log.1.gz. Can these be deleted? Does it happen automatically?

You should be able to remove old log files, just recommend you don't delete the current one. It could cause problems.

Hope this helps answer your questions. We will be happy to try and answer more if needed.

[JoshTheBlack]

For future reference, if anyone is planning on changing mount points of their pooled drives, you have to delete the metadata before it will recreate symlinks. I have spent the past several hours trying to figure out how to get all my symlinks back in the shares. The files on the drives that I had changed mountpoints for disappeared. I will detail what I did, in case some brave person wants to attempt this in the future. Some of these steps might be unneeded or superfluous, but its what worked for me, I don't want to try again with all my data, so YMMV.

1. I edited /etc/fstab to change the mount points.
2. Rebooted the system in the HDA settings menu.
3. It came back up with the new mount points and I went to HDA>Shares>Storage Pool and checked the new mount points (old drives) and unchecked the old mount points.
4. Rebooted again for good measure.
5. Ran a "greyhole --fsck" (I learned that using -fsck only runs if samba.conf or greyhole.conf have changed. Running as --fsck always runs.) No dice.
6. Ran "greyhole --fix-symlinks" and watched all my files disappear. (symlinks were trashed)
7. Ran "greyhole --fsck --find-orphaned-files" No dice.
8. Ran "greyhole --fsck --find-orphaned-files --dir=/var/hda/files/drives/drive1/gh" No dice.
9. Ran "greyhole --fsck --delete-orphaned-metadata" and watched my files reappear!

All seems fine, I've tested a couple of the files and they appear to work properly. I'm just hoping I didn't lose anything in the process. Nothing irreplaceable on the box. Months of work ripping and encoding my DVDs and Blurays could have been lost, but I COULD have redone it all if I had to. I'm pretty sure anyone attempting this could probably get the desired results with steps 1-4, 9. If that doesn't work, I would try the --fix-symlinks, then do another --fsck. As the orphaned metadata was being deleted, it was searching for files and adding them back to the shares as symlinks.

[bigfoot65]

Good point. Might be something worth adding to the wiki. Would you be willing to help with the documentation?