Good Cheap Server - HP Proliant Microserver 4 BAY - OWNERS THREAD

Hi guys,

I have two drives in my MicroServer, both formatted as UFS. I've copied a bunch of stuff onto one, but the other drive is empty.

I've decided I should really be mirroring this stuff. I'm pretty sure there's no way for me to set up RAID 1 with the data in place. (I'd have to copy the stuff off, set up RAID, then copy it back, right?) However...

Can I set up ZFS (RAID-Z) with the data in place? (Format drive #2 as ZFS, copy the stuff over, format drive #1 as ZFS, and join the two together.) I know little about ZFS (just started reading), but at least if someone could tell me it's worth pursuing, I'd have the incentive to keep investigating. :)

Thanks!
Simon
 
TurGe said:
Wonder if anyone can give me a hand
I have the following
Server with 2008HS on the 250gig budled hard drive on the optical header (Flashed with Hacked Firmware)
In Bay 1 and 2 I have 2 Samsung F4's Mirror using the Oboard Raid set up.
I have a transfer speed from My PC to the Server of 3.2Meg a Second :-(
My Pc has a Gig NIC
I have the Virgin Media Hub witch has a GIG lan
All connected by Cat6 Cable

Any Ideas why the speed is so slow?

Thanks
Click to expand...

Can you run some iperf / jperf benchmarks with a window size of 56k to test the raw TCP networking performance between the two comps, and some CrystalDiskMark benches on both pc's to test disk performance.

As a thought, does either computer have a wireless card in and connected to the Superhub? Sometimes this network card takes precedence over the Gigabit Ethernet.
 
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Somnambulist said:
Yes as others have said, some eSATA to SATA cables don't work. One person on another forum trimmed the plastic round the head of the eSATA end that wasn't working and it solved the problem, so perhaps it's down to 'not enough head'. I just bought one linked on AVF that the poster had found worked (at the 4th attempt!).

My only cable futz was buying a right angled SATA to straight SATA cable and discovering it was right-angled the wrong way (looking at the mobo from the front, you want it angled off to the right, not the left). I had to laugh. Good thing cables are cheap.

EDIT - ordered a 45cm regular one off OCUK for £1.79. You don't need a right angled one for the mobo connection if the cable is flexible.
Click to expand...

Urgh, got the cable. The header is quite long so I'm not 100% happy with the fit, as it's causing the SATA connector on the board to bend a little. I'm not sure if I'm just being a perfectionist though.
 
Ice_Black said:
How do you use software RAID5 in WHS 2011, I can't find the tutorial :(
Click to expand...

Go to Computer Manager, right click on Disk Management and choose Create new RAID 5 array. WHS 2011 then runs a wizard where you choose which disks to add (min 3 obviously). Then wait a (very) long time until everything synchronises :mad:
This is from memory but it is a simple process which I did again last night.
 
Loving mine so far, WHS2011, auto backup of all machines, great media sharing, With 'lightsout' addin it sleeps after 10mins of inactivity and then wakes itself up in the night to backup clients....

Superb.
 
What is WHS2011 like for backing up Macs? I've read that the support isn't great but it was an old post. Anyone here use it with Time Machine?
I'm on a bit of a dilemma, thinking of turning my old PC into a WHS 2011 and using it to back up my digital photo library and stream/serve media to a PS3,2 MacBooks and an IPad in the house. I'm just concerned about the noise and power consumption of an old A64 X3700 vs a modern small box like one of these.
 
DoubleCheese said:
What is WHS2011 like for backing up Macs? I've read that the support isn't great but it was an old post. Anyone here use it with Time Machine?
I'm on a bit of a dilemma, thinking of turning my old PC into a WHS 2011 and using it to back up my digital photo library and stream/serve media to a PS3,2 MacBooks and an IPad in the house. I'm just concerned about the noise and power consumption of an old A64 X3700 vs a modern small box like one of these.
Click to expand...

Just found this..

http://www.wegotserved.com/2011/07/03/osx-lion-breaks-hp-mediasmart-server-mac-backup/

http://www.wegotserved.com/2011/05/...time-machine-backup-windows-home-server-2011/
 
got my cheque today.. chuffed.

I'm going to get a half height graphics and run the server as a xbmx as well. Just curious as to what the temps are going to be like with the new gfx.
 
What is an ODD port?

Is it hot swappable?

I'm trying to work out if I can add a 1TB drive to my MicroServer without turning it off. All 4 bays are full.

It's a Sata drive that I've just pulled out of the PC I'm ebaying.

Thanks,

G
 
AtomicBanana said:
Ok, formatting is a little screwed up, but meh, it should be pretty readable. Basically I've written exactly what I wished existed when I started this whole thing. Hope it helps someone!

Building initial USB key


Note, you must use the desktop one, you can't use the alternate or server version (you need live cd functionality)
  • open the usb installer
  • select the correct desktop build you have downloaded, and select that iso.
  • select your pen drive.
  • select the persistant option, and select a casper partition (2GB is plenty)
  • allow this to build
  • Once built, stick this into your server (any usb slot)

Booting up

  • The server should boot this usb stick with no changes to bios (assuming nothing else bootable is present of course)
  • select run from this usb
  • You should now be at the ubuntu desktop

Configure enviroment

First off, you need to fix a missing link that will prevent the system from being able to update itself correctly.

open a terminal and enter the following:

Code: 
ln -s /cdrom/casper/vmlinuz /vmlinuz

note I found this didn't work unless I first deleted the existing /vmlinuz directory.

  • Now, we're able to add/remove the packages we need to get this going.
  • We don't need the installed dmraid packages, and they will screw around with the drives at boot time, making it impossible for the program we want to use to function. Either from the package manager or synaptic remove dmraid, and libdmraid.
  • We need mdadm to control our raid array, so install that package in the same manner.

Setting up the drives

Now, here I admit I'm a little hazy, as I tried lots of things and generally faffed around until it worked.

All I think you need to do is make primary partitions on all of your drives, and mdadm can handle the rest. You can do this with gparted, cfdisk fdisk etc, whichever you are happiest with. You can set the 'raid' flag too, but I don't think that actually prevents it from working otherwise.

Assuming you have 4 drives in the bays like I do, what you want to end up with is sda1,sdb1,sdc1,sdd1. You can verify this from console by typing this:

Code: 
sudo fdisk -l

Assuming this is all correct, it's time to assemble the array using mdadm.

Setting up raid with adadm

For a raid5 raid volume spanning all 4 disks, you'd type the following:

Code: 
mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=5 --raid-devices=4 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1

Check you're getting what you want:

Code: 
sudo mdadm --query --detail /dev/md0

Refer to this document if you need other options: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=408461

It should now get to work building the array. You can monitor progress from the console:

Code: 
watch cat /proc/mdstat

If you're building an array like mine, expect it to take *Forever* (13 + hours)

But, we still need to set a few more things up, and you can do that while it's building.

I'm not sure if you need this, but to be on the safe side, you can use a script to put the details of your raid setup into mdadm.conf

Code: 
sudo /usr/share/mdadm/mkconf

After a short delay, this should write the required lines into the file (you will be able to see the lines it adds on the console)

Basic Samba setup

We are going to want samba to share things to the pc, so we need to install these packages:

samba
libpam-smbpass

I will expand this later if anyone wants it, but samba is pretty straight forward and well documented. The easiest way to kick it off is actually through the gui, navigate to your mount point for the device, right click, propeties, and go to sharing and this will generaly set it up for you. Note that I still had issues until went into the console and put in the password again for the samba user (even though there's some stuff that's meant to link them together)

Code: 
smbpasswd
(follow instructions)

it should appear as a share from a windows machine, and accept that login.

Obviously there's lots of stuff you can do here, way beyond the scope of this guide to just getting it going.

Remote SSH

you are also likely to want to be able to remotely access the machine using ssh. By default, it's not included in

the live cd install, so add it:

Code: 
sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude install openssh-server

You can now access the machine across the network.

Formatting the array

I think you need to wait until the array is built (could be wrong!) before you can add a filesystem:
Code: 
mkfs -t ext3 /dev/md0

note ext3 is the filesystem, you may want to read around if you aren't sure which one you want. This will take a fair while, but not as long as it did to build the array.

Mounting the array

now we need this new raid volume to be mounted somewhere. I'm sure linux experts will have suggestions, but I just

stuck it in /mnt/storage like so:
Code: 
sudo mkdir /mnt/storage
sudo mount /dev/md0 /mnt/storage

you will most likely want this folder owned by the ubuntu user rather than root:
Code: 
sudo chown -R ubuntu:users /mnt/storage/

Now we want to make this auto mount each time you boot the machine. This means adding a line to the fstab, but before we can do that we need to make one more change. By default the live cd wipes the fstab on each boot, which isn't very useful. To prevent that, enter the following from console:

Code: 
sudo chmod -x /usr/share/initramfs-tools/scripts/casper-bottom/12fstab

Code: 
sudo update-initramfs -u

(the second one can take a little while, don't panic)

now we need to edit the fstab to include our new mount point

Code: 
gksudo gedit /etc/fstab

for mine I added:

Code: 
/dev/md0 /mnt/storage reiserfs defaults 0 3

Consult here for what you may need : http://www.tuxfiles.org/linuxhelp/fstab.html

Success?

This is as far as I've got, I still need to work on improving smb performance and some other tweaks. However hopefully this saves you lots and lots of time I wasted to get this to work.
Click to expand...

I thought i would bump this post as it helped me out, some of the guides i found were a nightmare for creating a raid.

Cheers mate!
 
Reality Bites said:
What Does the remote access card give you and how much was it?
Click to expand...

Sorry i didnt see your question...

It gives me remote access into the server, even when its in a powered down state.

I can power on/off, use the bios, open up virtual media / KVM sessions for installing an OS or anything else.

Its all done web based / java.
 
Trox said:
Sorry i didnt see your question...

It gives me remote access into the server, even when its in a powered down state.

I can power on/off, use the bios, open up virtual media / KVM sessions for installing an OS or anything else.

Its all done web based / java.
Click to expand...

Is that like iLO?
 
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