@scotth said in I tried NAS4Free, FreeNAS, OMV, ... Lots of suggestions to move to Linux. I'm willing. Point me please.:

I'm running XenServer 7.2, Xen Orchestra Community (nice script, btw - I used Jarli01) and am fine with it so far. I played around tossing in a few distros and with a little more futzing around, I'm going to move my storage to a Linux distro, at least I'm leaning that way.
My default SR is local and I want to create reliable storage for a backup target. I have a decent box here, two 4T drives and have run Linux on it before.
Any faves, honorable mentions, quirks, hazards?
TIA
Scott

Personally I like md + LVM + XFS. XFS and btrfs are both completely valid avenues as well. Just stay away from the "NAS" distributions like FreeNAS. Better off managing it yourself the vast majority of the time.

@shuey the broadcom chip is enough to me.

@travisdh1 said in NextCloud: Insuffienct Storage:

Which base OS is being used? Debian/Ubuntu or RedHat/CentOS/Fedora? Log files will be different between the two that I'd want to look at. Either way probably looking for the apache/httpd log.

Fedora -

@dashrender said in IT Environment update questions:

@scottalanmiller said in IT Environment update questions:

@msff-amman-itofficer said in IT Environment update questions:

@dashrender said in Greenfield (OK not really) setup questions:

Additional options: use something like Salt to create network mappings for the computers.

I am interested to hear about:

"Salt to create network mappings for the computers."

Since salt works only when minions connected, and for reason my NAS and windows clients loses the connections every 2-3 days and requires the user to re-input username/password (maybe related to Windows limtiation)

how will you effectively use salt for that purpose ? just put script to run at user login ? any other neat ways to do this ?

Salt is meant to run continuously. For example, mine run every 10 minutes or so to verify the environment. So if a mapped drive failed, it would be fixed again in a few minutes.

The same goes for GPO. It refreshes every 15 min I think by default.

Every 90 minutes with a 30 minute flux. So every 60-120 minutes for GPO.

@Dashrender said in SMBv1 is removed in the Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 16226:

@scottalanmiller said in SMBv1 is removed in the Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 16226:

@dafyre said in SMBv1 is removed in the Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 16226:

@scottalanmiller said in SMBv1 is removed in the Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 16226:

Not quite the same as NFS 3 and NFS 4, but we intentionally use NFS 3 much of the time today even though NFS 4 is old.

This may be good for a fork...but why hang on to NFSv3 instead of stepping up to NFSv4??

Because the work differently and having the overhead of NFSv4 often does not make sense.

Can you give more detail?

They are very different protocols with a lot of different features. NFSv3 is much lighter than NFSv4.

@Dashrender said in How Do You Use USB HD for Veeam on Hyper-V:

@scottalanmiller said in How Do You Use USB HD for Veeam on Hyper-V:

@JaredBusch said in How Do You Use USB HD for Veeam on Hyper-V:

Don"t use USB disks.

If you want a USB disk that can be removed, use a NAS with a USB port that can replicate data in a certain folder to the USB.

Or use a NAS with Starwind VTL so that you get the behaviour of tapes. And the protection of RAID.

I'm going to have to look at that

It's a cool product.

@dafyre said in Kooler on DFS-R Issues:

With Starwind's coming Linux release (or has it already been released?)... Would this not be done in a Linux VM? That would eliminate concerns about licensing and such.

StarWind Linux VSA is released

There's no problem to install anything like us into parent partition, question was is it OK to use it as a file server with a free version of Windows

@dafyre said in Linux RAID Question - Software or "Hardware" ?:

@anthonyh said in Linux RAID Question - Software or "Hardware" ?:

@anthonyh said in Linux RAID Question - Software or "Hardware" ?:

@dafyre said in Linux RAID Question - Software or "Hardware" ?:

@marcinozga said in Linux RAID Question - Software or "Hardware" ?:

My money is on fake RAID you got there. So use md.

@marcinozga said in Linux RAID Question - Software or "Hardware" ?:

My money is on fake RAID you got there. So use md.

Also because you already use MD. :-)

You know what, I can even move the two disks to my new workstation and not have to transfer any data.

I think the answer may have been found... :D

Actually even better, I can break the RAID 1 on my current box and convert it to non-RAID, then move one of the disks to my new workstation and convert it back to RAID 1. If done right, I think I can do it all without any data loss too.

I'd prefer to just move the two disks and not have to transfer any data... but that's just me.

Yeah. I'll need to copy my home directory to the SSD in my current box before doing that though. That might be easier than breaking/re-creating the RAID. I'm not quite ready to "switch" yet. Hmm...

@Breffni-Potter said in HPE SANs Not Designed for Reliability in the Australian Tax Office:

Listening to any vendor consulting will lead to a p*** poor system but for the vendors profit.

Yeah, they brought in the wrong people here. Fundamental business flaws. Listening to the sales people instead of hiring someone whose job it is to know what is needed.

This won't be an overnight fix. My first step though is complete. The Synology is now in RAID 10 with 1 hot spare disk. One thing to note; the disks in this Synology are WD reds :(. So even though the storage connects to the Hyper-V host via iSCSI, the VHDX stored on it, which contains the data for our file server is at least not living on a RAID 5 anymore.

Next will be dealing with the local storage situation on the Hyper-V host (the two-drive RAID 1 and the three-drive RAID 5). The only "production" VM storage left on the RAID 5 is our Spiceworks VM, which I'll move to the RAID 1 storage. The other VMs that have their VHDs on the RAID 5 are non-production / testing VMs, so if they're lost, it's not a big deal to just rebuild them.

@JaredBusch said in Hardware Design for SAM-DR Small Rackmount Backup Device:

@matteo-nunziati said in Hardware Design for SAM-DR Small Rackmount Backup Device:

@scottalanmiller just a question (sw not hw) why veeam rather than say.. altaro. Just curious!

There is no backup software on this device. It is a storage target. One assumes that @scottalanmiller will be using some base OS that lets you setup basically any type of connectivity.

Ok! Got it wrong! Thanks for clarifying

That will be amazing. Looking forward to that for sure.

@scottalanmiller said in Disk expansion - CentOS:

Can't wait to move to it in production.

I know. I didn't even bother installing it yet for testing. I'll wait for RC 2 for that. :)

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/28/optane_in_pcs_is_as_good_as_it_will_get_for_years_says_analyst/

As long as you don't delete all my datas because my online account has issues!

So much development on many fronts, great job guys.

And another +1 To backup storage. That's actually what ~70-80% of our customers do with their SANs when swtiching to StarWind HCA or even VSAN.
Another interesting approach which I see less often is to use 2 existing SAN boxes as a storage capacity addition to the new HCI, with some of that storage actually mirrored between the SANs through the HCI storage virtualization layer. This is where customers can actually keep both backup and testing workloads without breaking the SANs into islands of resources.

@scottalanmiller said in FreeNAS Gets Hit by the Jurassic Park Effect:

HCL

Yes, agreed!

That's what I get for posting before I'm totally awake. This is what I get when I run the command on my group:

BackupTarget> show member Name Status Version Disks Capacity FreeSpace Connections ---------- ------- ---------- ----- ---------- ---------- ----------- 16TB online V7.0.7 (R3 16 11.34TB 6.72TB 2 97085) syr-8TB online V7.1.2 (R4 16 5.66TB 3.69TB 3 02088) 4TB online V7.0.7 (R3 16 2.83TB 1.84TB 2 97085) BackupTarget>

I think the command is showing the free space on the volumes after creation, not before since I think I have mine fully provisioned.

Just type:
show
and it will scroll through all the things under the show command and you should be able to figure out the size of your member. This is just the first of like 4 pages:

BackupTarget> show ______________________________ Group Information ______________________________ Name: BackupTarget Group-Ipaddress: 192.168.100.21 DateAndTime: Thu Apr 20 03:32:04 2017 TimeZone: America/New_York TotalVolumes: 3 VolumesOnline: 3 VolumesInUse: 3 TotalSnapshots: 0 SnapshotsOnline: 0 SnapshotsInUse: 0 TotalMembers: 3 MembersOnline: 3 MembersInUse: 3 TotalCapacity: 19.83TB VolumeReserve: 7.58TB VolumeReportedSpace: 7.58TB SnapReservedSpace: 3GB SnapReservedSpaceInUse: 0MB ReplicationReservedSpace: 0MB FailbackReservedSpace: 0MB DelegatedSpace: 0MB DelegatedSpaceInUse: 0MB FreeSpace: 12.24TB TotalDisks: 48 OnlineDisks: 45 SpareDisks: 3 OfflineDisks: 0 FailedDisks: 0 Collections: 0 Snapcols: 0 CustomSnapcols: 0 ThinProvFreeSpace: 122.49TB TotalSpaceBorrowing: 0MB Connections: 7 _______________________________________________________________________________

@msff-amman-Itofficer said in FreeNAS 10 Has Been Recalled:

@scottalanmiller

True, adding the whole virtualization aspect and container support might caused this. I genuine when testing it out didnt like the new theme or steering me away from being storage server into something else.

I agree, I think that FreeNAS feels like it is drifting now. Is it storage, is it a hypervisor? Any BHyve for normal users, really? The new interface looked cool, but failed to even run when I tested it. They are a tiny company with few resource trying to do way too much. The old FreeNAS product was bad enough, I know loads of places loses data or access to data either because FreeNAS itself was glitchy or because it failed the "front loaded engineering" design principle and left customers in a tight position leading to failure.

I saw something about this the other day... It is interesting to say the least.

@jt1001001 said in New StarWind Virtual SAN Free - All restrictions removed!:

In case you didn't see, the webinar is now up on their site:
https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-san-free-all-restrictions-removed

THanks