Tern
History
- 2016-Oct-22 Auto power off every night, BIOS power on at 7AM every morning (ACPI setting). Also enabled wake on PCI.
- 2016-Oct-18 Replacing the Seagate 2TB drives with new 3TB ones, one of the drives has been throwing errors for a few weeks now.
- 2016-Oct-16 Made it a fogg machine. (Ansiblized with fogg-ansible.)
- 2016-Jan-20 set up as Time Machine and it backs up all 3 of our Macs.
Hardware
Hardware is a MiniITX server that used to be Bellman
The two spinning drives are now striped because I need space more than reliability for Time Machine.
- ASRock E350M1/USB3 AMD E-350 APU (1.6GHz, Dual-Core) 6400.14 BogoMIPS
- AMD A50M Hudson M1 Mini ITX Motherboard $125
- Kingston 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10600) Desktop Memory Model KVR1333D3N9K2/8G $35
- OCZ Vertex 3 120GB S/N OCZ-9UDI676M56Z4IR8P
- Case: brand name?? need to look it up. Cost about $50 250W power supply
- /dev/sdb Seagate Barracuda 2.0TB Model=ST2000DM001-9YN164, FwRev=CC4B, SerialNo=Z240BVP5
- /dev/sdc Seagate Barracuda 2.0TB Model=ST2000DM001-9YN164, FwRev=CC4B, SerialNo=Z240A0H1
Video drivers
The ASRock card has an onboard AMD Radeon HD 6310 graphics chip. Therefore I need to follow these instructions: http://wiki.debian.org
% lspci -v | grep VGA 00:01.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Device 9802 (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
Flags: bus master, VGA palette snoop, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 64
Dang but the aticonfig --initial command fails, unsupported hardware!
Maybe getting the driver from AMD support page will do it but I don't have time right now to deal with this.
See http://www.sensicomm.com/main/linux/acer_5253/index.shtml
Bringing up new 3TB drives as RAID 0 stripe using btrfs
apt-get install btrfs-progs mkfs.btrfs -m raid0 -d raid0 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 blkid /dev/sdb1
Add entry to /etc/fstab using UUID and fs-type btrfs:wq In df -h it shows up as
/dev/sdb1 5.5T 1.2M 5.5T 1% /green
Changing over 2TB drives from mirror to stripe
It ended up on /dev/md126 (he shrugs).
mdadm --detail /dev/md127 mdadm --fail /dev/md127 /dev/sdc --remove /dev/sdc mdadm --stop /dev/md127 mdadm --remove /dev/md127 fdisk /dev/sdb fdisk /dev/sdc mdadm --create /dev/md127 --level=0 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 mkfs.ext4 /dev/md127 blkid /dev/md127 >> /etc/fstab emacs /etc/fstab
Software
I maintain this server using Ansible, so the details are tucked away in the fogg-ansible git project.
Netatalk
Installing Netatalk makes Tern visible as an Apple server.
https://daniel-lange.com/archives/102-Apple-Timemachine-backups-on-Debian-8-Jessie.html
Built deb packages for netatalk from git on bellman and install packages here.
apt-get install mysql-common libcrack2 libmysqlclient18 avahi-daemon dpkg --install libatalk16_3.1.7-1_amd64.deb netatalk_3.1.7-1_amd64.deb emacs /etc/netatalk/afp.conf systemctl enable avahi-daemon systemctl enable netatalk systemctl start avahi-daemon systemctl start netatalk
Contents of afp.conf file
The "valid user" is the name of a user in the local passwd file on Tern.
[Global] ; Global server settings vol preset = default_for_all log file = /var/log/netatalk.log uam list = uams_dhx2.so,uams_clrtxt.so save password = no [default_for_all] file perm = 0664 directory perm = 0774 cnid scheme = dbd [Homes] basedir regex = /home [TimeMachine_Swift] path = /home/timemachine/swift time machine = yes vol size limit = 3000000 valid users = julie [TimeMachine_Stellar] # both plover and stellar get backed up here path = /home/timemachine/stellar time machine = yes vol size limit = 3000000 valid users = bwilson
Time Machine, on the MAC
You have to allow TimeMachine to write to an "unsupported volume" with this command
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1
On Stellar only, for some reason I had to manually create a sparse bundle on the server to make it work. Time Machine would not connect to Tern until I did. Then it would not use the bundle and I deleted it. Read "Note" below. Crazy. Connect to server from Finder. Swift and Plover had no problems creating their own bundles. Then in Terminal,
hdiutil create -size 300G -type SPARSEBUNDLE -verbose -fs HFS+J -volname "Time Machine" /Volumes/Timemachine_Stellar/stellar.sparsebundle
The SPARSEBUNDLE type means the filesystem will grow in 1M pieces, it won't immediately allocate 300GB. 300GB is the limit and you can resize it later if you need to. Stellar has a 256GB drive and right now has 115GB on it. After executing this command, the empty bundle consumed 430M of space. I remember when 430M was a huge amount of space. :-)
Note on filenames First I mimicked what I saw created by Plover: Plover.sparsebundle. I created Stellar.sparsebundle and ran Time Machine. It smiled and happily accepted that as a destination and immediately created 'stellar.sparsebundle' next to it. I think this is a screw up waiting to bite me, so I shut the Time Machine backup down, removed both bundles from the server with "rm -rf", revised the above sample command and created 'stellar.sparsebundle'.
NOW it's busily creating "stellar 1.tmp". Sigh, seems very Mac-ish. I wonder if that's good or bad. I will let it play and go do something else. This Mac is backed up to an external drive right now anyway so I can't think of any unbearable worst-case scenarios.
I am thinking about what a great program 'rsync' is...
After the "preparing" stage it renamed the folder to "stellar 1.sparsebundle", apparently ignoring the one I created. When it's done backing up I will nuke the one I created manually and see if it remains happy.
Timemachine and wake-on-lan
I put this machine on a scehdule to power off every night and BIOS power on at 6AM (1300 UTC). The intent is to reduce run time and power usage. Running the spinning drives only 12 hours a day means they should last twice as long.
To allow waking up the system remotely when it's off, I enabled wake-on-lan. In BIOS, I enabled wake-on-PCI and in a shell I used "ethtool -s eth0 wol g" to enable the magic packet (g) in the ethernet interface.
