Having trouble setting up landing zone

[TommyDJ]

Hi there,

I'm having trouble setting up a landing zone for Greyhole to move my files before moving them to my storage pool.
This is my situation: I have Amahi installed on a small SSD drive, so no space for a landing zone. I have two storage drives, 1x640GB and 1x750GB. I created a 40GB partition on the 640GB drive to be my landing zone. The other 600GB are also a partition and the 750GB is one partition, so three partitions in total.

When I mount these with 'hda-diskmount' this works fine, it mounts them in /var/hda/files/drive/drive1, drive2, and drive3, with drive3 being my landing zone partition. Also when I add these entries into /etc/fstab and reboot they are still mounted.
Now I read in the wiki how to add more hard drives to my HDA, so I've been following that. Here it states I can mount a partition in /var/hda/files for this purpose. If I do so and add the line 'UUID=blablabla /var/hda/files blablabla' (where hda-diskmount reported it as /var/hda/files/drives/drive3 instead) to my /etc/fstab file, it seems to corrupt my other mounts: Under 'Storage pool' it doesn't report the size correctly anymore and under storage it shows ':-('. If I change that value in /etc/fstab back to /var/hda/files/drives/drive3 and reboot, they "un-corrupt" again. I thought it might do this because the original shares are still in /var/hda/files, but removing these beforehand doesn't work either.

Now I know there is another option, which is pointing the share location to a place like /var/hda/files/drives/drive3/Videos, but that doesn't work either. When I try to open those folders from a client (W2K8, Win7, W2K3, doesn't matter) it says 'The network path cannot be found'. When i create a share with the same name but pointed at /var/hda/files/Videos it opens just fine on my clients.
But of course, this is not an option: I don't have any space in /var/hda/files (SSD, remember?).

What am I doing wrong? I got this working before (I had to reinstall Amahi that time), but now I can't seem to do it again.

[HHCosmin]

i want ot start by clearing things up that i'm no linux expert but i banged my head against amahi/fedora lately to learn a trick or two. i'm in fact a microsoft developer looking for whs alternative. however i have an amahi server up and running using 3 disks and soon it will get the 4th so you can asume that what i can say works. let's begin...

it's very good that you have an ssd for os and leave it that way.
the landing zone is the zone where stuf goes when you write to the sahres and then they are moved around from there, leaving symbolic links behind.
it's best that the landing zone partition is the biggest as stuff wil stay there until amahi decides to ballance stuff
while talking to the greyhole developer he assured me that i can use the partition mounted to /var/hda/files in the pool. i know this seems a bit confusing but i will tel you how i see this working best. i asume you have nothing of value stored so this is the procedure starts from greyhole having no drives in the pool and the data drives blanc. backup you stuff before you start experimenting.

• leave the os on the ssd
• on the 750gb create a single ext4 partition as large as possible so you get a 750gb partition. use gparted as it's easy to use.
• same goes for the 640gb
• run hda-diskmount and get the suggestions about the lines to ass in /etc/fstab
• for the 750gb partition use the line in /etc/fstab as it is but replace the /var/hda/files/drives/drivex to /var/hda/files... this will make it your landing zone
• for the 640gb copy the stuff as it is in /etc/fstab
• comment out other lines (by adding # at the begining of the line) that have UUID besides /, /boot and your 2 new partitions
• reboot

hope i did not confuse you. below you have my /etc/fstab:

Code: Select all

UUID=afc7ffdd-6bcc-4807-8175-7dc9733b5738 / ext4 defaults 1 1 UUID=36adc38f-fd3c-4d82-a89c-384d52532d66 /boot ext4 defaults 1 2 UUID=a754b118-7884-4e24-b6b3-06a95c0cab66 /var/hda/files ext4 defaults 1 2 UUID=a9d07217-8b6b-4149-b863-1250e9ae482d /var/hda/files/drives/drive1 ext4 defaults 1 2 UUID=7cbe645f-faee-4983-a44c-c57c60db5c3a /var/hda/files/drives/drive2 ext4 defaults 1 2

this can be identical to what you have, besides the uuids. the 1st and 2nd line should be on you ssd. the 3rd is a whole drive used as landing zone. the 4th and 5th are simple data drives. 3,4,5 are all mambers of the pool. never add the / to you pool. there are some lines that do not start with uuid. Do not change them!
hope it helps .

[TommyDJ]

Thank you for your reply!
So if I understand correctly, I can just use a drive in my storage pool as my landing zone? I didn't know that, i thought I needed a seperate location for that. I'd rather have it that way, too (that way I don't risk filling up my landing zone unknowingly while filling my shares).
I'll go ahead and try it this way and report back.

[TommyDJ]

Well, I just tried it, and I think it just really doesn't like me mounting stuff at /var/hda/files. Same error.
When my /etc/fstab file looks like the following, I have four drives under the 'Storage' tab: / (root, SSD), drive1 ':-(', drive2 ':-(' and /var/hda/files (-750GB drive)

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UUID=<id of 640GB> /var/hda/files/drives/drive1 ext4 defaults 1 2 UUID=<id of 750GB> /var/hda/files ext4 defaults 1 2

When my /etc/fstab file looks like this, I just have three drives under storage tab: / (root, SSD), /var/hda/files/drive1 (-640GB), /var/hda/files/drive2 (-750GB)

Code: Select all

UUID=<id of 640GB> /var/hda/files/drives/drive1 ext4 defaults 1 2 UUID=<id of 750GB> /var/hda/files/drives/drive2 ext4 defaults 1 2

What am I doing wrong?

[HHCosmin]

before you operate the changes you should unmount the data partitions, both 750, 640
we asume you will use the 750gb for landing zone aka /var/hda/files
in terminal mount the landing zone to your 750 partition either using the uuid or the /dev/sdx name
then make the changes in /etc/fstab for the landing zone this time using the uuid only
then run the hda-diskmount so it will pickup the yet unmounted 640 partition and tell you what to write for that in the /etc/fstab
hda-diskmount, as i understand, does 2 things: mounts all the unmounted partitions (wich you can do by hand) and tells you what the line to insert in /etc/fstab. you want to override this only for the landing zone mounting. the rest of the drives should be added using the procedure described in the wiky.
then in amahi->shares area select the 2 partitions named: /var/hda/files and the other one will most likely be /var/hda/files/drives/drive1.

[TommyDJ]

I do this after rebooting with an emptied up /etc/fstab, so I remove the 'bad entries' from /etc/fstab and then reboot. The drives are then unmounted. Bu using hda-diskmount you mount them to /var/hda/files/drives/driveX, but when you edit the /etc/fstab file and change it to /var/hda/files and do 'mount -a' in the terminal, it mounts according to the /etc/fstab file.

So my steps are: 1) make sure they're not mounted by reboot, 2) mount using hda-diskmount, 3) insert into /etc/fstab, changing the line to /var/hda/files, 4) doing 'mount -a' in terminal so the drive is correctly mounted in /var/hda/files.

It does all this correctly, but as soon as I mount something in /var/hda/files the other mount(s) become corrupted...

[HHCosmin]

you can unmount any mount by using disk utility or gparted at any time. so unmount both partitions are remove the lines in the /etc/fstab
fill in the line data for the landing zone in /etc/fstab "by hand" using the guid. do not run mount or hda-diskmount yet.
reboot
check in the disk utility or gparted to see if the landing zone is still mounted correctly
if ok then use the hda-diskmount and do what it says for the second drive.

not sure what you say about the

as soon as I mount something in /var/hda/files the other mount(s) become corrupted

[TommyDJ]

not sure what you say about the

as soon as I mount something in /var/hda/files the other mount(s) become corrupted

By that I mean:


This is with the following in /etc/fstab:

Code: Select all

UUID=<id of 640GB> /var/hda/files/drives/drive1 ext4 defaults 1 2 UUID=<id of 750GB> /var/hda/files ext4 defaults 1 2

With the following in /etc/fstab, I get this in the Storage tab:

Code: Select all

UUID=<id of 640GB> /var/hda/files/drives/drive1 ext4 defaults 1 2 UUID=<id of 750GB> /var/hda/files/drives/drive2 ext4 defaults 1 2

So... strange eh?

[TommyDJ]

Even after a re-install it won't work... I mounted the complete 640GB drive to /var/hda/files. This goes all well.
However as soon as I plug in the 750GB to my motherboard and do the mounting thing, and it mounts it to /var/hda/files/drives/drive1, I get the Storage screen as above...

WTF

[HHCosmin]

did you first remove all the partitions from the pool in the Shares->Storage pool area?