On 11/4/23 04:46, gene heskett wrote:
... my only previous experience with logical volumes 20 years ago
cost me dearly in terms of lost, irreplaceable data, like the only
pictures of my first wife ...
On 11/4/23 05:22, gene heskett wrote:
On 11/4/23 05:39, Andy Smith wrote:
Maybe it is time to just buy a "black box" NAS device and make all
this someone else's problem in return for money. It's not the way I
go, but you have had a lot of trouble getting your own mdraid to work.
Good advice maybe, Andy Smith, thank you, but that puts it all at the
mercy of a $5 cable. Not exactly my cup of tea. Since I'm into
designing stuff in OpenSCAD, 3d printing the output, made into gcode
with Cura, and none of the common tools for making gcode to drive the
printers, or the printers own firmware, has learned how to roll up the
code into repetitive loops, instead generating step by step printer
instructions, so even the simplest part is half a gig of g-code. So
the data is growing like a cancer. Really complex parts might be 50
gigs of g-code and takes the printer a week or more to make.
G-code, properly written is like a .pdf, its the best compression we
have. I write it by hand for linuxcnc and have one 90 LOC file that
takes the machine 3 days to run. Remove the comments and it fits on
one side of one sheet of paper.
On 11/4/23 10:20, gene heskett wrote:
I've found I could temporarily unload the 6 port on the mobo
controller down to 1, the boot disk containing everything but home,
which would give me enough ports to build another raid10 if I can
conjure up enough sata power plugs, which I have some spares of
molex to sata splitters. Or does pvcreate automatically null the
formatting. I have enough of the 2T gigastones to do that, but will
that then fix my lack of instant raid access? That would leave me with
a blank home I could then copy to the new raid10 which would give me a
raid10 twice as big as now.
To complicate that, I also have a wd 2T NVMe that has never been
plugged in but I'm understanding that is not a mod, but a whole new
install, and another 22 installs disaster before it works this well,
unless the installer now has some manners or I unplug all usb stuff
except the keyboard/mouse buttons. that possibly reduces the sata
count because it would become the boot drive. I can do the usb cleanup
long enough to do the install now that I know about it. Probably
should download and burn the latest netinstall image first though.
Perhaps my constant mewling about the broken installer has done some
good? Like asking me yes/no do I want brltty and cura or whatever
the hell it is that yells out every keypress from any speakers it
can find and locking up the machine for the duration of the yell
just because it surveyed the usb stuff and found a usb-serial
adapter connected to a cm11a X10 controller so it ASSUMES I'm blind
and installs that stuff w/o asking me. IDK. I don't want to get into
that situation ever again because if you nuke brltty and cura so you
can work in peace, the sob won't reboot, grub gets stuck looking for
them and won't proceed with the boot, forcing yet another
re-install. Finally, may even have been you, someone told me to
unplug the usb stuff FIRST, rebooting problem solved. Sorry, but
this gets me started on a rant about a broken installer.
I have 5 of those 2T drives. And another narrow PCIe sata card with
all 16 ports populated. That may serve as the foundation storage so
I can restart amanda and have some backups. A 2T raid10 for /home
out of 4 of them would satisfy the storage needs for a while, maybe
even for the rest of my time here. And an expandable linear lvm for
amanda would be a treat. If its dependable. A maintenance PITA if
not.
WDYT?
Trying to do too much with too little equipment is a recipe for
disaster. Been there, done that, lost data.
My computing life became more reliable and less stressful when I bought
additional computers, additional drives, and mobile racks:
https://www.startech.com/en-us/hdd/drw150satbk
https://www.startech.com/en-us/hdd/hsb220sat25b
https://www.startech.com/en-us/hdd/s25slotr
I suggest that you give the Asus a rest, buy or build another computer,
install one small SSD (and mobile rack), install Debian, install one
very large HDD (with mobile rack), install Amanda, and back up
everything over the network. Once that is working, buy another HDD
(with mobile rack), either swap HDD's or duplicate the first HDD to the
second HDD, store one HDD off-site, and repeat monthly.
In any case, burn your most valuable data to optical discs regularly.