My experience converting from WHS to Amahi

[sritter]

First off, I have too say the WIKI for Amahi is great. I thought I would make a post of my experience and hopefully help some others out. I am really pleased with how it came out. I am running Greyhole with a 5 disk 8TB pool.

I started off with this article:
https://github.com/gboudreau/Greyhole/w ... ateFromWHS

I did some research on the forums and decided to remove a 2TB drive from the WHS pool to use as the main drive and installed it in a different PC.

Even though my server doesn't usually have a keyboard or monitor I wasn't sure about going headless so I decided to use a Fedora 14 x64 disk (4 GB of RAM) and followed these instructions:
http://www.amahi.org/support/instructions

For partitioning I used this guide to not use LVM.
http://wiki.amahi.org/index.php/Install_without_LVM

I ended up with a 1.8 TB or so Landing Zone which was good because I had about 3 TB to transfer from WHS.

After following the installation instructions the system was up and running. I removed two more disks from WHS and added them to Amahi. I used gparted to format them to ext4 and ran hda-diskmount. I copied the lines output to /etc/fstab using nano. Restarted to make sure they mounted automatically and then I used the setup URL to add them to the pool.

The next couple days were spent checking in periodically as data copied from the WHS shares to the Amahi shares making sure the landing zone wasn't filling and there were no errors copying. Finally it was done. It was time to move the drives back to the server machine.

I removed the rest of the drives from the WHS machine temporarily and re-added the 3 I had setup in the spare machine with Amahi. I booted up and the only issue I had was with the NIC card being different. I fixed this through the GUI. I then added the rest of the drives to the server, partitioned them, added them to the pool, and added them to /etc/fstab.

I ran greyhole -fsck to clear the landing zone and realized that 1.8TB was going to be too much for a landing zone in the future as I'll never copy that much up in one day again. I booted up with a Mint Live CD and resized the root partition to 300 GB with gparted. I logged back into the HDA created a new partition from the newly freed space and added it to the pool. Next, I set up extra copies for the really important shares.

Lastly I installed VNC so that I could remote into it if needed using the manual install and method 1 from this link:
http://wiki.amahi.org/index.php/VNC#Manual_Install
After reading that "This change will open the VNC display with a Gnome desktop, even if the server is starting in Init 3 by default" I realized that there was no reason to have X running all the time. The fact is I hardly use VNC at all, just SSH and the Setup URL. So I changed it to 3 and restarted:
http://wiki.amahi.org/index.php/Runlevel

I spent some time learning how to verify that the NIC was running gigabit (ethtool) and that the drives were running in UDMA mode (dmesg).

The last thing is be sure you check your greyhole attic every so often, this is where the files go when you delete them and you have to manually clear it every so often. You can also set up a recycle bin/trash can for each share instead but I didn't.

I am really loving it so far, no issues to report at all. Great work on the system and the docs.

[bigfoot65]

Awesome! Always glad to hear about the positive experiences users have when moving from Windows to Linux. Thanks for sharing.

[nefarious]

Good to hear it was successful for you. I'm giving thought to converting my 21 harddrive 18TB WHS server over to amahi. I have 14TB full at the moment, so I have a big project ahead of me.

[sritter]

I am very happy with it. I'd say go for it, especially since MS took drive extender out of the new version of WHS.

[bigmango]

Great report. I also have converted from WHS and I'm very happy with Amahi.

One more thing I recommend doing on your setup is to add these lines to /etc/rc.local

Code: Select all

#power drives down after 10 minutes idle /sbin/hdparm -S120 /dev/sda /sbin/hdparm -S120 /dev/sdb /sbin/hdparm -S120 /dev/sdc /sbin/hdparm -S120 /dev/sdd

(replace /dev/sdX with your drives)

This will power the drives down after 10 minutes. It makes the system run much cooler and power efficient (especially on a Home Server you are rarely using all of the pool drives at the same time).

[sritter]

Thanks, I'll add it!

[borud]

Great post!
I'm just about to convert from WHS my self.
Same situation with discs and everything.
Thanks for the pointers!
As I'm quite new to the linux platform, it's good to know I've got all this help available in the forums.

Looking forward to becoming another satisfied Amahi user!

[apastor]

Great report. I also have converted from WHS and I'm very happy with Amahi.

One more thing I recommend doing on your setup is to add these lines to /etc/rc.local

Code: Select all

#power drives down after 10 minutes idle /sbin/hdparm -S120 /dev/sda /sbin/hdparm -S120 /dev/sdb /sbin/hdparm -S120 /dev/sdc /sbin/hdparm -S120 /dev/sdd

(replace /dev/sdX with your drives)

This will power the drives down after 10 minutes. It makes the system run much cooler and power efficient (especially on a Home Server you are rarely using all of the pool drives at the same time).

Thanks for the code. I will use this as well. my home server runs 24x7. This would also save some wear and tear on the drives as well.

[sgtfoo]

for anyone moving over to linux from windows I highly suggest reading up on terminal usage in linux.

www.linuxcommand.org helped me out a lot.

[sritter]

Thanks for the top, apastar, added!