Amahi Forums

hi guys,

hoping someone can provide some details as to how grey hole works.

i have an HP Microserver, which i am using as an ESXi hypervisor. on this hypervisor, i then have a few virtual machines (VM's).

i want to split my home network between the VM's i use for Amahi and movie steaming to my XBMC HDTV, the other half as an independent test lab for work (Microsoft AD infrastructure, etc)

with the above in mind, and as i expected no reason otherwise, i allocated my Amahi VM to have an 11GB vmdk file for the O/S.

i recently added a 2TB WD Caviar Green HDD which i intended to use as part of my media library. when creating and adding this new disk to the 1st grey hole storage pool disk, i followed the standard instructions to add a second disk from the wiki

however, if i try to upload a larger file than is available on the system volume (11GB total) any samba transfer to the samba share "movies" fails with disk space issues. smaller files seem to complete transfers successfully and shortly after move to the large 2TB disk adding a symbolic link in the original "movies" samba share.

if my explanation is correct, my presumption is that i would need enough free space at the /var/hda/files/movies location to handle the largest possible file i might throw at the infrastructure?

does anyone have this same design? and/or workaround solutions that they have used? given the size of full blu-rays, i don't want to allocate an endless amount of disk space to this Amahi VM to allow greyhole to function, if my understanding is correct...

(as a separate discussion, in case anyone has tried what i am doing, the transfer throughout for samba transfers seems be around 4MBps. quite low for a LAN network. any one see similar results? options for improvements? or hardware limitations as the CPU isn't the most powerful...)

hoping someone can offer some insights, cheers

Yeah, greyhole apparently uses a 'landing zone' on /var/hda/files, so you need enough space to hold files transferred in temporarily.

This issue has come up multiple times so I would suggest looking through the forum posts to see how others have solved the issue.

I'm sorry I can't be more helpful, but I don't use greyhole on my system so I don't have any experience with it. Hopefully an expert will drop by and help out. Another good resource is the IRC channel if you run into problems.

@radioz
thanks for the info. yeah, as i had posted, i did more digging on the subject, and found more detailed documentation on greyhole and forum threads as you say with others with the same issue.

i guess i need to look at altering my storage design if i want to use this functionality. either by:
1. expanding the size of the Amahi VM's O/S vmdk/disk to have at least enough free space to handle 1 file finished being copied to the unit and Greyhole processing it to its proper location while the next file is being copied to it
2. moving the LZ location onto the bigger disks (2TB) that i have.

the problems for these scenario's, as i see it are:
1. knowing how much space i would require. this should be based off the largest size of file i would be copying onto this volume. basically the HD movies, but if was to take a raw Blu-Ray rip, that could be 40GB...!
2. if i moved the LZ location to the 1st "storage pool disk" i have, when i add further disks to the pool, will this not appear lop-sided to Greyhole? 1 disk will have the root "/var/hda/files/" location on it with all the shares beneath and the other disk(s) will not...

have i explained that so it makes sense?! haha

You will find your answers here: https://github.com/gboudreau/Greyhole/w ... andingZone

Good luck!:)