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Thoughts on drive layout/mounting

Offline sages

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Thoughts on drive layout/mounting
« on: May 12, 2021, 07:49:55 AM »
While pondering the life of dragons laying dying at my feet during a recent finger mishap combined with memories of previous upgrades I have been pondering if the disk mount/layout is optimal.
I typically run a raid 1 setup on my various physical servers with two drives (ie no hot spares). The slowest part of all of my upgrades has been the extra saving and restore of the data component of a system.
In the case of the most recent sme9-10 update I upgraded the motherboard as well as the operating system. In the past I would have done my normal backups and then degraded the raid array, keeping one disk untouched, reinstalled the operating system then either restore the data from backup or mount the original saved raid drive, copy the data to the new operating system drive then reinstall the old drive as part of the raid array. As sme 10 wasn't keen on installing on a degraded raid 1 array (or once again i've missed reading the documentation ) two drives were needed for a raid install. And I didn't have a suitable spare.
Regardless of the mechanics I've typically seen around 6-10 hours to copy all the data from my existing server to either an external drive USB or NAS storage. (In this case my old motherboard only had USB2 hardware). Then a similar time to restore the data.
In my case I have around 1TB of data on my primary server.
If I was to have a separate mount for the data then no data copying time would be required, just the operating system update.
Yes, it would require at least one extra drive for the operating system (or 2 for raid) and enough space in the box etc.
My argument would be something along the lines of:
1/ Operating system drive, single drive as the time to reload the operating system is acceptable.
2/ Data on a separate raid 1 pair

I have an Openmedia vault NAS setup running mergerfs with snapraid as my external backup storage for the SME server. Predominately due to the USB2 hardware speed restrictions on my old sme hardware.

What are other people doing with their setups? Are they just running vanilla sme with raid 1? Am I being a sook and should I just 'do the time' for an upgrade and just suck it up for the update every couple of years?
 
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Offline TerryF

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Re: Thoughts on drive layout/mounting
« Reply #1 on: May 12, 2021, 01:49:38 PM »
If I was to have a separate mount for the data then no data copying time would be required, just the operating system update.
Yes, it would require at least one extra drive for the operating system (or 2 for raid) and enough space in the box etc.
My argument would be something along the lines of:
1/ Operating system drive, single drive as the time to reload the operating system is acceptable.
2/ Data on a separate raid 1 pair

This is what I have been running for over 4 yrs now, started with  2x500gb HDs in raid 1 for OS and all the iBays and shares etc mounted to a seperate 1 TB drive as per wiki..

Upgraded this to 2 x 120gb SSD in a Raid 1, OS, and 2 x 1TB HDS looking after ibays and a data share..

Now fully upgraded to sme10 a single 250gb SSD for OS, and 2 x tb drives for ibays, shares and a mirror of the sme repo..

now do a clone of the data drives semi regularly as a safeguard and put the spares away

Data iBays drives etc setup as per this wiki entry https://wiki.koozali.org/AddExtraHardDisk#Mapping
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qui scribit bis legit

Offline sages

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Re: Thoughts on drive layout/mounting
« Reply #2 on: May 12, 2021, 03:27:09 PM »
Sounds like what I'm thinking of. I'll see how many dragons I can aggravate splitting the OS off to separate drives.  :-D
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Offline TerryF

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Re: Thoughts on drive layout/mounting
« Reply #3 on: May 12, 2021, 03:41:13 PM »
:-) makes moves etc and system upgrades a PoP

Just a quick edit of fstab, new ststem and hardware, re-edit fstab, add mount point, add data drives and away she goes

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Offline sages

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Re: Thoughts on drive layout/mounting
« Reply #4 on: May 13, 2021, 02:26:29 AM »
Have you done any tuning wrt to the ssd and number of drive writes?
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Offline TerryF

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Re: Thoughts on drive layout/mounting
« Reply #5 on: May 13, 2021, 12:15:38 PM »
Have you done any tuning wrt to the ssd and number of drive writes?

No, however its why I chnaged to the one ssd no lvm no raid, just to reduce the activity, my backup sans whats on the data drives is around the 48gb mark when I changed over to sme10
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Offline sages

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Re: Thoughts on drive layout/mounting
« Reply #6 on: May 13, 2021, 01:49:20 PM »
I'm wondering if having an extra partition on the hard drive for log files to get the writes off the ssd would be worth the extra complexity?
ie
ssd /, /boot, /boot/efi
raid 1 hd /home/e-smith/files, /var/log
...

Offline TerryF

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Re: Thoughts on drive layout/mounting
« Reply #7 on: May 13, 2021, 03:09:43 PM »
hmmm, I had toyed early in the game with puting more on the data drives, however I changed to less was better and just do main stuff now..never actually backup the data drives only the OS drive..

Keep to the principle of KISS, when its all sweet then extend the cutting edge :-)
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Offline Jean-Philippe Pialasse

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Re: Thoughts on drive layout/mounting
« Reply #8 on: May 14, 2021, 06:07:27 PM »
all is possible. 
i have one server with only /home/e-smith/files and one with few mount points to different partition of an extra pair of drives with raid and lvm.

you can also think of bind mounting directory from one drive

Online warren

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Re: Thoughts on drive layout/mounting
« Reply #9 on: May 15, 2021, 03:44:03 PM »
This is what I have been running for over 4 yrs now, started with  2x500gb HDs in raid 1 for OS and all the iBays and shares etc mounted to a seperate 1 TB drive as per wiki..

Upgraded this to 2 x 120gb SSD in a Raid 1, OS, and 2 x 1TB HDS looking after ibays and a data share..

Now fully upgraded to sme10 a single 250gb SSD for OS, and 2 x tb drives for ibays, shares and a mirror of the sme repo..

now do a clone of the data drives semi regularly as a safeguard and put the spares away

Data iBays drives etc setup as per this wiki entry https://wiki.koozali.org/AddExtraHardDisk#Mapping

Terry, what mapping option do you use ?

Offline TerryF

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Re: Thoughts on drive layout/mounting
« Reply #10 on: May 16, 2021, 03:15:08 AM »
heres my fstab

#------------------------------------------------------------
# BE CAREFUL WHEN MODIFYING THIS FILE! It is updated automatically
# by the SME server software. A few entries are updated during
# the template processing of the file and white space is removed,
# but otherwise changes to the file are preserved.
# For more information, see http://www.e-smith.org/custom/ and
# the template fragments in /etc/e-smith/templates/etc/fstab/.
#
# copyright (C) 2002 Mitel Networks Corporation
#------------------------------------------------------------
#
# /etc/fstab
# Created by anaconda on Tue Mar 30 19:25:25 2021
#
# Accessible filesystems, by reference, are maintained under '/dev/disk'
# See man pages fstab(5), findfs(8), mount(8) and/or blkid(8) for more info
#
UUID=a32157ac-70db-4c68-aee7-37e922a9589a /                       xfs     uquota,gquota        0 0
UUID=aa52432c-a8ec-40ed-97bc-0a48ac5fdc56 /boot                   xfs     defaults        0 0
UUID=7829dc97-96e6-4460-8369-910255609175 swap                    swap    defaults        0 0
UUID=566cf197-313c-4109-95f7-155d4913a747 /home/e-smith/files/shares  ext3    usrquota,grpquota,,noatime,acl        0 0

went all UUID

When I have wanted to update OS drive etc, I simply rem out the external drive, reboot do what I want, remove the rem and reboot, as you can see I stay away from the mail etc, did have ibays as well in previous setup, decided the KISS principle and left it on the OS drive..they have little traffic.

This alternate 1 https://wiki.koozali.org/AddExtraHardDisk#Alternative_1:_Use_.2Fhome.2Fe-smith.2Ffiles_to_mount_the_new_disk

Note my fstab - usrquota,grpquota,,noatime,acl        0 0 - the 0 0 is mine and only my choice, it stops the fsk
I found that my constant reboots etc as part of sme10 testing would trigger the fsk at a reboot when I wanted a quick restsrt for a result :-)  and would take ages to finish..yes I know...my choice
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Re: Thoughts on drive layout/mounting
« Reply #11 on: May 29, 2021, 12:45:59 PM »
all is possible. 
i have one server with only /home/e-smith/files and one with few mount points to different partition of an extra pair of drives with raid and lvm.

you can also think of bind mounting directory from one drive

Thanks, that's the type of structure I wanted to build, I'll now know that it works!