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.

kid2 role, revisited

So on the ACPI side, the BIOS+LXde settings seem to be able to suspend the system, resuming (sometimes) with a double click on the mouse.  However this is not what I'd want from a server that is supposed to do "stuff" at periodic 1-hour intervals, like backuppc or my photo posting script.  So far powernap doesn't seem to do anything for me neither, so I removed it completely.

I tested IDE HDDs that were lying around.  Seems like the 500GB and the 200GB are both dead.  I'm left with an old 6GB to play with.  Mounted it on kid2, checked that there was no data left (moved some to kid2 home).  I also moved data from the Windows partition into the home partition so that I can prepare to attempt a Windows reinstall.

On the 6GB hdd I removed the old partitioning, created a single partition, and installed Puppylinux just to play with it, and have an alternate/backup boot method for kid2.  That distro is really damn small!  But quite functional as a intetnet/word processing box.  I might try that on my old eCafé that's sitting in my drawer awaiting for better days.  The installation media could be a single SD card, 512Mb would be enough...  I think the eCafé can boot from USB so that would seem like a piece of cake.

I like the internal hardware on kid2, and the way it allows to add many more 3.5" disks in the future if I wanted to.  The base hardware (packard bell) really has only one free spot left for that.  I'm starting to think about swapping roles for these two boxes.  Both could accept the USB3 PCIe card that I've ordered...  both hardware seem to be reliable still... I wonder how the slower CPU would work in the context of rsync/gzip/network backups; we'll see when I complete the backuppc setup by adding a few more clients on kid2's backup hosts list.