Background
I had been using Amahi with Fedora 14 for about 2 years. The setup was seven storage pool drives (total ~12TB, not full), an OLD AMD Athlon 64 (~2004 era) and 2 gigs of RAM. None of the drives were in any RAID configuration (JBOD if you must) and I used CrashPlan as a backup, mapping backups to each drive in /var/hda/files/drives/driveX so drive recovery would be straightforward in the event of a failure. Sabnzbd, CouchPotato, and Sickbeard (henceforth "The Holy Trinity").
As some of you may know, as storage pools grow CrashPlan starts to take up a lot of memory. A friend of mine was getting ready to junk a perfectly good Athlon 64 X2 4200+ with an Asus MOBO that could support 8 gigs of RAM. I snatched it up, bought 8 gigs and 2 WD Black laptop drives (for the OS and a backup clone) and went to work swapping out the Mother Board, Processor, Memory, HDD, and OS. So that's all I'm really prepared to talk about doing, and really, this was extremely easy.
What you need to do before you do anything
- Read all instructions before doing anything.
- Download Ubuntu. I recommend Long Term Support (LTS) flavor, but you may want to see what Amahi is recommending at the time. Also, torrents can be much faster than downloading directly from the link.
- Make sure you know what your shares in Amahi are called (e.g. Movies) and where they live (e.g) /var/hda/files/movies (notice the caps difference). You'll need to create these shares exactly the same on your new install. There may be ways around this, but I'm just describing what worked for me.
- Make note of your installed apps. For The Holy Trinity I actually booted up the old server and copied my settings one by one once I had completed the new installation. I didn't want to have to think too hard about anything and this was super easy.
- Make note of, or use the technique used above, to get all your static IPs and any other special network settings in your old HDA.
- Make a copy of couchpotato.db (/var/hda/web-apps/couchpotato/html/) and sickbeard.db (/var/hda/web-apps/sickbeard/html/). I'm not sure if Sabnzbd has an equivalent, but I didn't make use of it. I've read some suggestions say you can actually copy the entire couchpotato and sickbeard folders from your old server and after installing on the new server replace the new directories with the corresponding old ones. I don't know if this works. Better safe than sorry.
- Make a copy of your old server's /etc/fstab and /etc/greyhole.conf files. These are EXTREMELY IMPORTANT.
- For simplicity's sake, I recommend using the same username on your new server as you did on your old one (case sensitive). I would suspect that not doing this will cause headaches.
- Install Ubuntu as recommended by Amahi.
- After installation, edit the new server's /etc/fstab file to include your storage pool drives as listed in the old server's /etc/fstab file. You just need to append the storage pool drives to the end of your new server's fstab file (be sure to include a trailing return). These will look like:
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UUID=e4fba906-2897-448d-afc9-cf83eac65060 /var/hda/files/drives/drive1 ext4 defaults 1 2- Do the same thing with greyhole.conf. In the old server's greyhole.conf file copy everything after "# here in multiple lines" and append that info to the end of the new server's greyhole.conf file.
- Create the directories where your storage pool drives will need to be mounted. In my example above, the drive is mounted at /var/hda/files/drives/drive1 - so go create this directory.
- Shutdown your system and connect your storage pool drives.
- Turn on the beast. If you're prompted with anything saying that a drive could not be mounted it's likely that there's something wrong with your fstab file, or something wrong with the mount point (i.e. the directory for the mount point was not created, or was created in the wrong place/wrong name).
- Run "sudo fdisk -l". Hopefully you'll see your storage pool disks available. I also enjoy "sudo lshw -class disk". In ubuntu you'll need to assign a root password if you haven't already. This is handy and a good time to do it so that you can "su".
- You should be able to navigate to the Amahi desktop with "hda" or the IP for your HDA in a browser. At this point, recreate the shares exactly as they were in your old server. This is important. I had the case wrong on my "tv" folder and it didn't get picked up.
- If everything is going well so far, you're ready to rebuild your storage pool. This is the moment of truth. Word of caution, when I did this initially, I did it over ssh and had a connection problem in the middle and it made me scared when the command was interrupted, so I'd recommend doing this at the server terminal. Log in as root (su) and:
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greyhole --fsck- You can watch the number of operations and tail the log:
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watch -d greyhole --view-queue
tail -f /var/log/greyhole.log- Hopefully this completes successfully, because this is rebuilding your shares so you can access all your stuff in the spectacular ways you're used to. If it doesn't work you likely misspelled (case sensitive) or had the path wrong to one of your shares.
- Now it's time to reinstall your apps and reconfigure network settings (static IPs, aliases). For The Holy Trinity, you can assign settings by looking them up on your old server. For sickbeard if you replace the new sickbeard.db file with the old one, it should rebuild your history. I tried the same with couchpotato.db but it didn't work. Sickbeard was the one I was really concerned about anyway though.
- One final word on the server DNS; in order to get it working where I could type "sickbeard" and have it load the app, I had to:
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apt-get update
apt-get install hdactl
hdactl-hupIf you plan on using your old Fedora 14 install to look at as you configure your apps and network settings, make sure before you shut it down to disconnect the drives to edit /etc/fstab to not include the pooled drives. In my experience, when Fedora 14 cannot mount the drives in /etc/fstab, rather than skipping it fails to load the OS, and you'll have to use a live disk to edit the fstab file not to include the pooled drives.
