kid2/kid3 : new disk situation

So now kid3 only has two remaining disks: 500GB for system(s) and 2TB for btrfs /home

The WD 2TB drive has been moved to kid2 and after twiddling with the BIOS boot order kid2 went online again and happily started a full backup of run12l.

So I have a little bit of time to fiddle with the btrfs again.  Here's the situation (in addition, there's still an unconnected HDD in kid2, don't know what it is).

Systems are on /dev/sdb : 149,1 GiB, 160041885696 octets, 312581808 secteurs
btrfs small part on /dev/sda1 : 596,2 GiB, 640135028736 octets, 1250263728 secteurs
btrfs large part on /dev/sdd : 1,8 TiB, 2000398934016 octets, 3907029168 secteurs
So /dev/sdc is the WD migrated from kid3:

Disque /dev/sdc : 1,8 TiB, 2000398934016 octets, 3907029168 secteurs
Unités : sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 octets
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x000ef301

Périphérique Amorçage     Start        Fin   Secteurs   Size Id Type
/dev/sdc1                  2048  976575284  976573237 465,7G 83 Linux
/dev/sdc2             976576512 3907029167 2930452656   1,4T 8e LVM Linux

So after:
sudo btrfs device add -f /dev/sdc1 /var/backup/urBackup/

I get:
Label: none  uuid: 4881245e-bed5-4526-b9ff-3b5ba39b283d
        Total devices 3 FS bytes used 1.10TiB
        devid    3 size 596.17GiB used 567.03GiB path /dev/sda1
        devid    4 size 1.82TiB used 567.03GiB path /dev/sdd
        devid    5 size 465.67GiB used 0.00B path /dev/sdc1

Then to free the small 640GB drive I can use:
sudo btrfs device remove /dev/sda1 /var/backup/urBackup/

Disks swaps in kid2, btrfs continued...

Disk (end of) life

Kid2 is happily running the urBackup system for 3 windows laptops but doesn't really have the disk space required to continue the lifesize test (i.e. backuping my most disk-intensive Linux systems). So I ordered a 2TB drive from Amazon. Got i/o errors then sent it back. Still waiting confirmation for the refund, not a terribly good experience so far. I recycled two 2.5" hard disks, one from an older laptop and another from a thrift store, so I could continue running urBackup in the meantime. Then I got i/o errors from the PATA drives (both of them, the 6.4GB from an older desktop and also the 200GB from the thrift store). Long story short, I did order another 2TB drive from eBay this time, it arrived yesterday so I mounted and tested it. I removed the PATA drives and currently the 300GB is still in the box but not connected due to lack of SATA power cables. Benchmarked the new drive, seems OK:

Add to btrfs

Like so:

sudo btrfs device add -f /dev/sdd /var/backup/urBackup

Then:

 sudo btrfs filesystem show
Label: none  uuid: 4881245e-bed5-4526-b9ff-3b5ba39b283d
    Total devices 3 FS bytes used 145.29GiB
    devid    1 size 465.76GiB used 74.03GiB path /dev/sdc1
    devid    3 size 596.17GiB used 74.03GiB path /dev/sda1
    devid    4 size 1.82TiB used 0.00B path /dev/sdd

Make some use of the new available space:

sudo btrfs balance start /var/backup/urBackup

 WARNING:

    Full balance without filters requested. This operation is very
    intense and takes potentially very long. It is recommended to
    use the balance filters to narrow down the scope of balance.
    Use 'btrfs balance start --full-balance' option to skip this
    warning. The operation will start in 10 seconds.
    Use Ctrl-C to stop it.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Starting balance without any filters.

....after...a...long...while...

Done, had to relocate 75 out of 75 chunks

Label: none  uuid: 4881245e-bed5-4526-b9ff-3b5ba39b283d
    Total devices 3 FS bytes used 148.21GiB
    devid    1 size 465.76GiB used 50.00GiB path /dev/sdc1
    devid    3 size 596.17GiB used 51.03GiB path /dev/sda1
    devid    4 size 1.82TiB used 51.03GiB path /dev/sdd

Add a new Linux client

Host run12l is a good candidate now that we have more space available.  It has a 300GB HDSSD quite filled up with photos and videos.  It used to have a client already installed, so it was just a matter of reactivating it and defining it in the "Unix" group so that the /home directory becomes the default backup directory instead of the C:\Users windows default.  First full backup started, looks good.

kid2 status

I didn't try booting but I opened the (unbranded) tower to check the motherboard model (GA-945PL-DS3) and installed memory (1Gb+1Gb+512Mb of DDR2 PC2-6400). According to the Gigabyte site, this board only supports a maximum of 2GB anyway, so I removed the 512MB DIMM.  I'll need to get a power cable and hook up a screen, power cord and mouse to try and reboot it.  I'll probably need to reset my overclocking attempts in the BIOS too.  On the other hand, I now have switches and Cat5 cables around so I will not need to play with the cheap Wifi dongle that I found back in one of the USB ports.  I didn't bother to check wich hard drives are installed (2xSATA drives are connected).  As there is an IDE interface too, I could also install some more disks in there if needed (doubtful).
I really should try and find a SBC capable of replacing base with a much smaller environmental footprint... but then I'd still need power adapters to feed the drives that I need.  So probably a dead end route.  I could also re-test the power management (powering off via cron when not in use and waking up hourly).  That was kind of fun, but unfortunately it sometimes froze and I didn't troubleshoot that to see if I could easily fix it or not.