Month: April 2020

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Second Stab at my Software Raid

I am convinced I need a 3rd device to act as my boot device so I’m adding one.  Same problem as before, no mounting solution in my home desktop pc, fortunately I have a 2.5” notebook drive so it does not need much room, and I still have some extra sata cables on my old PC.   Zip-Ties again:

This time the manual storage configuration went smoothly.  I set the 0.5TB drive as boot device, then created a 1GB /boot partition.  This left the two 4TB drives available to configure the simple Raid 1 mirror as md0 which I mounted as / ,the root of the file system.  Below is a picture of the final configuration:

The next screen offered up some unexpected dessert.  Two of my primary target technologies were available as “snaps”, the NextCloud application and the docker system.  Not sure what a snap is, but it’s worth attempting an unexpected short-cut so I selected them.

The next page asked if I wanted OpenSSH installed by default, why off-course thank you very much.  The install went extremely fast, and voila, I could ssh in from my PC:

Must wait until tomorrow to play with this OS!

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Installing the new drives

My 2x 4TB drives are in.  I’m just moving forward.  I wanted to have validate what OS to use and what virtualization.  But screw it, going for Ubuntu server, I need to be comfortable with linux on the command line and I don’t want anything getting in the way.

Now I need to figure out how to physically install them (since the chassis does not support more than one).  Zip Ties!!  Had plenty of sata ports, so I stole some cables form my old PC.  And then zip tied the 2nd drive.

I downloaded the latest version of Ubuntu Server, 20.04 LTS and burned it to the disc.  Since I want to utilize a software Raid, I looked on-line (it’s only been 15years since I configured a Raid myself) this link gave a pretty good overview of how to proceed.  I also found this link useful.

Without going through the details of my pain I kept getting stuck on the manual configuration of the storage system.  It is allowing me to create a Raid, but not select a boot device….  I should have foreseen this, the OS needs a “raw” device to boot from, yet I only have the two drives which I intend to be my storage.  I’m guessing I need an additional drive, but more importantly I need to sleep.

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Toying around with Virtualization

First Qemu:

It’s a little old but the unixmen have good quick start.

As usual, start off great, apt-get all worked.  Created a disk image attempted to start a new iso of linuxmint-19.3 with minimal success.  It appeared to lock up during boot after I selected what to run.  For now I’m going to move on, looks like there is a management gui.

Initial start of the gui tool, looked really promising.  But I ran into a similar issue, the VM would begin boot but not succeed in any install.  At least it’s consistent.

VirtualBox:

Let’s try a more “mature” vm.  I started with this page for installation, as straight forward as apt-get can be!  The article did mention Guest Additions to improve the experience, opted out for now.

Performance Digression:

I’ve been noting a slogish response via the NoMachine solution I’m using. It would appear there is a notable CPU load of 40% on the system, and this is after a clean reboot.

And the usage is correlated to me viewing the graphs.  Now that I think of it, the graphs are extremely exacerbated by the NoMachine solution I’m using to run system.  Since I still have local access it will be easy enough to test.

As expected, exiting NoMachine brought the load down to ~10%, then not watching the performance graph brought it down to <1%.  I suppose I should migrate to ssh access to the linuxmint box to monitor and manage.  Quickly going back to old school! Now that I have htop running through ssh I can see that the system is staying idle before boot.  I can now have better visibility as I start the Qemu instances.  However starting it responds with:

Looks like using a VM solution is a can of worms. The minimal hardware platform I am using make this un-realistic. Since my new drives are in soon I will probably skip the VM solution.

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Let’s get started

I don’t want to spend much money yet, so for now I will work with what I have.  And what I have is an older HP desktop computer running Windows 7.  The OS is not functional anymore so I will start by installing a Linux OS to host my software.

Currently I imagine a Linux box that runs an OS configuration setup essentially as a host for VM’s or Dockers and a bunch of Storage.  Due to time limitations (aka; laziness), I have previously opted for full-fledged GUI’s to bypass the learning curve.  However, this has always led me to roadblocks and back to the command line anyway.  For now, I’ll go with what I know and install Linux Mint on my PC as it is just to start playing around.

Assuming I am successful in my endeavors I will need upgrade the server once I start using it for development and real server stuff.  But for now, I am ordering two 4TB drives with the intent of making a raid file server.  It may be slow, but at least it will give me the storage I require.

While I wait for my new drives, I will start by installing Linux Mint and then moving on to looking into my virtualization platform to see where to go…..  The initial installation of Linux Mint was very easy which is allowing me to dig into my prime unknown question, which virtualization solution I should use?

Virtualization review:

Lifewire VM review and some other pages appear to confirm my previously forgotten knowledge, there is really only one VM software available to me, VirtualBox.  It has an GPLv2 license, so even though it’s an Oracle product it can be freely used.  There is, of course, the enterprise level Extension Pack  add-on that is always there lurking to force a purchase.  … hold on… what about Qemu .. 

My initial look at Qemu is that it would appear to be a very functional solution but with NO simple GUI front end.  Essentially fully command line (bringing back to my question of what would I want for my core OS to do?) which means a notable learning curve.  But it’s not like the learning curve of VirtualBox is zero.

Next, I will briefly attempt to sandbox a running Qemu VM running a Linux Mint instances.  Of course, this will be on the temporary Ubuntu instance I am already running.

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Nextcloud

What next?

I want to manage my own data, yet I want all the features of many modern cloud services.  The question is how do I even get started?   Fortunately I have been thinking about this for awhile and already have a primary tool that I want to test; Nextcloud.

Fortunately, Nextcloud appears to have been created to solve my primary dilemma, the ability to control my own data.

I am not going to waste my time re-writing what Nextcloud has already documented.  I suggest perusing their site to understand the potential of the tool.  For now, let us just say it claims to do what I need.  And it appears to allow me to control all of it.  It checks all the correct boxes, fully open source, dropbox like functionality, and it supports all the devices my family use.  To be honest it is more then I hoped for!

Ok so how do I start?  You can look on their website and find cloud base services which provide a Nextcloud instance or out of the box hardware solutions you can purchase.  These solutions all look great, they appear to be secure and reasonably priced and may be the way to go (in the future I might even suggest some of them).  But due to my desire to control and understand this technology I will be utilizing a self-hosted solution.

This means I need a server (yeah, an actual box in my home), and based on my experience, Ubuntu will be the OS and therefor I need a computer/server to run it on.  For a myriad of reasons (I’m cheap) I will use my old Windows 7 desktop and upgrade it with larger hard drives, possibly even raid drives to make sure they are reliable.  Setting up this home server will be the topic of the next few posts.

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Why I’m here

A digital expedition into owning and maintaining my own data!

Technology has flourished over recent history at the pace of Moore’s law.  As humans this has been nearly impossible to keep up with.  Even as an Electrical Engineer who has made my career with computers, I gave in about 15years ago and just rode the consumer wave of hardware/cloud/phone.  I allowed 15 DVD’s worth of pictures, videos, and files to be created and distributed across device and space.

Any attempt made at taming the digital beast was met with new operating systems, new cloud services, and a wife and daughter who just see this sea of digital features no differently than the air we breathe.  It is just there and works, why would it be otherwise.  “What do you mean you don’t know where that picture from Spain is that we took, you know the one on the 3MegPixel easy shoot Kodak camera we use to have?!?!”

Losing what data I have corralled is obviously not an option.  And being a technologist, I have no reasonable excuse for allowing such an event to occur.  So being diligent I purchased a 2TB NAS and diligently backed up my files every holiday and stored the device in a safe place.  Kudos to me!  Yet still, technology bytes again.  The home computer with everything on it dies, cool no problem, I planned for this.  But wait all the PC’s I have access to are now windows 10, and guess what the BlackArmor backup software which was purchased by Seagate hasn’t been maintained since 2010, and oh what a surprise, their new all-encompassing solution does not appear to be compatible with the archives I’ve created.  ……  Even once solved, this story never ends.

This tirade does not even start to consider the security and privacy questions of my family’s data existing all over the cloud and across more devices then I can remember.  Then there is the desire for other devices, security cameras, games and devices with cameras. 

I conceptually know how to support, secure, isolate and solve any of the problems I’ve complained about above.  But they all take a notable effort.  And how helpless the non-nerd types of this world must feel!

Of course, there are many cloud solutions that solve much of this for us.  And, for many, this is a perfectly acceptable solution.  Without getting into a long review of the pros & cons in this discussion, for me this is a version of the dependency I’m attempting to avoid. 

This project will document my process for slaying the digital beast to create a reliable maintainable digital solution for my home.  The intent of this effort is to own and protect me and my family’s digital life.