Storage Setup

[kleggy]

Hey Guys,

Completely new to Linux and amahi. Recntly i was using WHS for my server software and found it to be to unstable, and just wouldnt work half of the time. Heres my current set-up. I would like to know the best way of setting it up storage wise so it works out the best in the long run.

CPU: AMD Phenom X2 550
MB: Gigabyte
RAM: 6GB
HDD1: Boot (500gb WD Sata)
HDD2: 1TB WD Black SATA
HDD3: 1TB WD Black SATA
HDD4: 1TB WD Black SATA
HDD5: 1TB WD Black SATA

Just wondering how should i setup my install. Swap Sizes/Root and home what sizes should these be in the initial installation. Then how do i setup the greyhole landing zone, and get it to pool my HDD's?? Any information would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

kleggy

[ghstryder]

If it were me, I would use a couple of gb for swap and the rest for /. You do not need a separate /home. To keep things simple, don't use LVM.

The landing zone will take care of itself, don't dump every piece of data that you own on it in one shot to prove you can fill it. Start with some reasonable amount, watch the log until you know how *your* system responds. You only have to move the data once.

Install your drives using the wiki page for adding a second drive. Do them one at a time, and mark them so you know which one is which - you can then easily look at a UUID and *know* which drive it is. After they are installed, follow the Greyhole instructions - check the box that adds them to the pool.

Life is good.

[kleggy]

If it were me, I would use a couple of gb for swap and the rest for /. You do not need a separate /home. To keep things simple, don't use LVM.

The landing zone will take care of itself, don't dump every piece of data that you own on it in one shot to prove you can fill it. Start with some reasonable amount, watch the log until you know how *your* system responds. You only have to move the data once.

Install your drives using the wiki page for adding a second drive. Do them one at a time, and mark them so you know which one is which - you can then easily look at a UUID and *know* which drive it is. After they are installed, follow the Greyhole instructions - check the box that adds them to the pool.

Life is good.

Thanks for the tips. What do I use instead of LVM, standard partitions? Also what about root, and what extension should I use, if I have both windows and Mac computers on the network? NTFS or ext3....??

Any more information or tips would be awesome. I wanna set it up properly and only once. :p

[ghstryder]

Thanks for the tips. What do I use instead of LVM, standard partitions? Also what about root, and what extension should I use, if I have both windows and Mac computers on the network? NTFS or ext3....??
Any more information or tips would be awesome. I wanna set it up properly and only once. :p

Select swap for your swap partition. For your / partition, select / as the mount point, format it with Ext4. You don't need a separate boot partition either. It should come up with sda selected by default, it will write to the mbr on that drive. Your other machines will be able to see the data just fine once you have Greyhole handling your drives.

Don't try to make it more complicated than it is. That first Linux install seems like a huge undertaking, but it really is not, taken one step at a time. Also, be aware that a lot of the information you will find with google is very dated. That doesn't make it invalid, but it might. Things have been changing fast. You can find information on parts of Linux that don't even exist today. A lot of the old info was written when disk space or memory was expensive, or written for enterprise servers, where storage is still not cheap. Thinking back to my first Linux install, finding and using old info was probably the single biggest problem I had.

Doing it right, and doing it once is an admirable goal. Let me ask this, though. How many times have you installed windows? Are you being fair to yourself to think you will master Fedora and Amahi with one shot? Don't commit your data until you are confident. If you have to turn it off and start over, it is not a big deal. Now, there is no reason you can't do this once, but don't put that out there as a goal, just concentrate on getting it right and having at least a tenuous grasp of what you are doing.

[radioz]

Note that if you use Greyhole, you should not use LVM.

[moncapitaine]

Have a look here: http://wiki.amahi.org/index.php/Fedora_14_install_guide. That shoukld walk you through the process.

[RobRoss]

With a 30GB harddrive only, what should the setup be?

I'm just trying to setup a home server to store pics, music, files.

Where are the OS files stored?
Where are my music and pics stored?

I would think i would want to make the place where the pics and music are the largest.

Sorry for the lame questions, but i am completely new to this, just want to experiment.
Rob

[livesonwater2632]

With a 30GB harddrive only, what should the setup be?

While you can set up a separate partition for your files, it will be easier to just use the entire disk, especially because your new. One thing to note is that you're not going to want to use Greyhole with only one drive. It's not recommended to use Greyhole on the root partition

Where are the OS files stored?
Where are my music and pics stored?

The files for any shares that you set up are stored in /var/hda/files/<share_name> if you don't use Greyhole. If you do, the actual files are stored in a separate gh folder on the root of the drive while symbolic links are left in /var/hda/files/<share_name>. The files for Amahi specific features are located in /var/hda/*. Here is an overview of the linux filesystem that describes where OS files are: http://tldp.org/LDP/intro-linux/html/se ... t_03_01_03.