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/

LVM hiccups

LVM doesn't start OK anymore

This happened yesterday on kid3 (oops - allmost all my data lives there)

Symptom: boot interrupted (can't mount /home in mount -a during boot).  Troubleshooting: turns out that /dev/mapper no longer contains the required links.  Also, it seems to contain snapshots probably created by the urBackup agent but that's another story.

Cure: wait for the maintenance login promt, re-create the missing links with vgscan --mknodes, mount /home again.

Further plan: remove the 2TB seagate drive from base (Packard Bell) and install it in kid3 (ACER).  I will need an extender cable for the SATA power to be able to reach the DVD drive, due to rerouting its power cable to the drive coming from base.  Create a btrfs on that disk instead of the LVM+ext4 configuration that the other 2TB drive currently has.  Mount that under /home2 and:

sudo rsync -vaxHAX /home /home2

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.

Starting use of btrfs

So I had this "new" 200GB PATA disk to play with.  I started with some reading from howtoforge and created my first btrfs partition on it.  Initially I formatted the entire disk (/dev/sda) like this:

mkfs.btrfs /dev/sda

Then I changed my mind and recreated a partition table and a primary partition just for clarity.  It doesn't seem to help much but it also doesn't seem to be a problem and I reformatted using:

mkfs.btrfs /dev/sda1

So far so good.   186GB available.  I updated /etc/fstab to use the new btrfs partition for urBackup data and activating lzo compression on it:

UUID=5b775601-11bb-42d9-8b43-e106fb288c8e /var/backup/urBackup    btrfs compress=lzo 0 2

I moved the contents of my 300GB ext4 partition there after stopping the urBackup service:

sudo service urbackupsrv stop

Then restarted urBackup and checked it was running fine.  However I had to first change the permissions because urBackup runs as a normal user:

sudo chown urbackup:urbackup /var/backup/urBackup/

At this point the urBackup service seems to be happy from its new home:

sudo service urbackupsrv status
urbackupsrv.service - LSB: Server for doing backups
   Loaded: loaded (/etc/init.d/urbackupsrv; generated; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: active (running) since Sat 2018-01-20 12:15:56 CET; 14min ago
     Docs: man:systemd-sysv-generator(8)
  Process: 1131 ExecStart=/etc/init.d/urbackupsrv start (code=exited, status=0/S
    Tasks: 25 (limit: 4915)
   CGroup: /system.slice/urbackupsrv.service
           └─1301 /usr/bin/urbackupsrv run --config /etc/default/urbackupsrv --d

jan 20 12:15:50 kid2.lan systemd[1]: Starting LSB: Server for doing backups...
jan 20 12:15:56 kid2.lan systemd[1]: Started LSB: Server for doing backups.
jan 20 12:16:51 kid2.lan urbackupsrv[1301]: Login successful for admin from 192.
jan 20 12:19:52 kid2.lan urbackupsrv[1301]: Login successful for admin from 127.

From there I recycled my 300GB SATA hard disk and added it to the btrfs pool, thus making it a multivolume filesystem:

sudo btrfs device add -f /dev/sdb1 /var/backup/urBackup

 Pretty happy at this  point.  Even more available space:

sudo btrfs filesystem show

Label: none  uuid: 5b775601-11bb-42d9-8b43-e106fb288c8e
    Total devices 2 FS bytes used 43.80GiB
    devid    1 size 186.31GiB used 2.01GiB path /dev/sda1
    devid    2 size 298.09GiB used 43.00GiB path /dev/sdb1

Or else:

df -h /dev/sda1
Sys. de fichiers Taille Utilisé Dispo Uti% Monté sur
/dev/sda1          485G     44G  440G  10% /var/backup/urBackup

The space above is shown after I had let urBackup run and soon after I had my backups done from the two Windows clients that are defined.  Can't wait now to add a third, bigger hard disk to this filesystem...