Greyhole issues

[sonofmof]

hi,

I have added additional drives to my server, 5.3 today and have followed the wiki to set them up and added them to the pool. i formatted as ext4 primary and followed the add to pool section.


How long does it take for greyhole to start balancing out the drives ?

everything currently seems to be written to the primary drive and the secondary drives are not sharing the load ?

It does appear that the system is under high load from CPU and the HDD light is continuously on (yet i'm not doing anything) but does anyone have an idea about how long it will take greyhole to balance everything ?

Thanks

Chris

the shares are all configured to use the pool.

balancing.tiff (77.7 KiB) Viewed 5125 times

[gboudreau]

How long does it take for greyhole to start balancing out the drives ?

Greyhole will not balance the data on your drives unless you ask it to (there's a command-line option to force that), but I don't think it's relevant at this time. When new files are added to the pool, they will always be added to the hard drive with the most available space. So Greyhole should balance your available space while you add files into your pool, through the shares.

everything currently seems to be written to the primary drive and the secondary drives are not sharing the load ?

A screenshot of your Shares > Storage Pool page would help.
Without that, I'll have to guess: you added both .../sda1 and .../sdc1 in your storage pool, but not /

Under that assumption, /var/hda/files/* is now your landing zone (i.e. where files 'land' when you add them via a share). Greyhole will then take them from there, and move them to the storage pool. It will start doing that 10 seconds after the write operations have completed.
So if you add files to your shares using the shares (i.e. not by copying files into /var/hda/files/* on the HDA itself, which you should never do), your storage pool will be used as fast as your hard drives can move the files around.

If you copied the files into /var/hda/files/* on the HDA itself, Greyhole won't be aware of those files until it does it's nightly check. During this check, it will find files in your shares that have not been moved to the storage pool, and will proceed to do that. You can also start this scan manually from a terminal: "greyhole --fsck"

It does appear that the system is under high load from CPU and the HDD light is continuously on (yet i'm not doing anything)

You can check if Greyhole is doing anything in it's log file: /var/log/greyhole.log

[sonofmof]

Thanks for the fast reply.

here is the screenshot which seems to show all are in the pool.

Storage Pool.tiff (71.93 KiB) Viewed 5119 times

I just added a 300 meg home movie to the movies share and it has again been added into the primary drive /

see the below

Balancing 2.tiff (66.38 KiB) Viewed 5119 times

the log file shows no activity after adding the 300 meg file



i think I must have done something wrong in my setup......... do I need to add the primary drive to the pool with the fstab entry ? or is it configured by default ?



Thanks for all your help

[gboudreau]

here is the screenshot which seems to show all are in the pool.

You shouldn't include your / partition in the pool, unless you don't have a choice (all other drives are filled to capacity, or close to).
But that's just best-practice; it shouldn't affect anything in your current situation.

[sonofmof]

so should I untick the / drive ?

[gboudreau]

so should I untick the / drive ?

Yes, but it won't help you with your current issue.

the log file shows no activity after adding the 300 meg file

Are you shares using the pool? There's a checkbox for that in the Shares page.
See the text at the bottom of the Storage Pool page. Using greyhole is a two steps process.

[sonofmof]

I un-ticked the / drive, as you say, won't help, but its best practice.

I ticked the pool box when I created the shares. Some have replication (photos,) others don't

Thanks again for all you help I guess I screwed it up somewhere.

When does the nightly script start ? I could wait till then and see if it balances by tomorrow

[sonofmof]

after unticking the / drive from the pool the log says, Greyhole Daemon Started ?

[gboudreau]

I ticked the pool box when I created the shares. Some have replication (photos,) others don't

Thanks again for all you help I guess I screwed it up somewhere.

As soon as you copy a file into a share from a remote computer, it should appear in /var/log/messages, then Greyhole should see it and act on it.
Is your Greyhole service running?

Code: Select all

service greyhole status

If should also log a line every 10 seconds in /var/log/greyhole.log if it's running.
You can also verify that Samba is correctly configured to use the Greyhole storage pool:

Code: Select all

cat /etc/samba/smb.conf | fpaste

Post the URL you receive from that command. In particular, we're looking for "vfs modules = greyhole" and "dfree command = ..." lines for each of your share.

When does the nightly script start ? I could wait till then and see if it balances by tomorrow

Midnight. You can start it yourself now from a terminal:

Code: Select all

greyhole --fsck

But this won't help you much if Greyhole doesn't do something when you add files in your shares...

after unticking the / drive from the pool the log says, Greyhole Daemon Started ?

Each time you change a Greyhole settings in the Amahi Dashboard, the Greyhole service is restarted. That's expected.

[sonofmof]

the service says it is running.

there doesn't appear to be a log every 10 seconds. the greyhole.log file was last modified nearly 1 hour ago

the URL it gave was http://fpaste.org/hGQG/

no mention of VFS modules, but VFS objects are there


hope this helps.

Thanks
Chris