Small meeting today. Just me, Michael and Chris.
I went ahead with my plan to do an md-raid on a little sbc.
NanoPi M4. It has a Rock64 Arm chip, like the board that Rick
mentioned.
I downloaded armbian for the M4. There are editions using Debian or
Ubuntu and I went with the Ubuntu Focal flavor.
I have two 1TB drives to play with. One from an old desktop which I emptied.
Other one is a laptop size 1TB from a smashed PS4 that I found on the sidewalk.
(I tried to see if the data could be read but seems nobody has figured out
the PS4 filesystem)
So write armbian to a sdcard and boot up.
By Default it is root:1234 and it requires you to change the password. And it
forces you to set a "good" password. I put something in to make it happy then
run passwd and set it to the "bad" password I want.
lsblk gives me /dev/sda /dev/sdb and /dev/mmcblk
sda and sdb are the 1TB drives and mmcblk is the sdcard.
Michael helps me out and I run this command:
mdadm --create --level=raid1 --raid-devices=2 md0 /dev/sda /dev/sdb
Creates a device called md0 which is raid1 from 2 devices: sda and sdb
As Michael explained you can use partitions, but I chose to use the
whole drive as I don't have anything else happening on those drives.
So this created a new device /dev/md/md0.
And also the same device as /dev/md127. (Micheal tried to explain to
me how to force it to use /dev/md0 instead of /dev/md127 but I just
couldn't follow. It is working now, so I'll try to figure it out later)
I now do gdisk /dev/md127 and create a partition table. Then a partition.
lsblk shows a new device /dev/md127p1
Create a filesystem: mkfs -t ext4 /dev/md127p1
Now to mount it at boot. I want to id the drive by UUID so that it is
findable even if the name changes.
ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid
Create mountpoint. mkdir /mnt/NanoPi
chown tom /mnt/NanoPi
And edit /etc/fstab with the UUID and mountpoint.
Last step: create samba share. At this point hunger slowing my
brain (and also how confusing samba is) I called it a day.
I'll have to figure out smb.conf another day.
So It was a very good meeting for me.
The little board seems to be working well. Right now it has passive
cooling only. The M4 is mounted to a heatsink as big as the board
itself and the SATA addon has a little heatsink on the controller
bridge chip. The little heatsink was hot to the touch and measure
~ 100F from my infrared thermometer. The large cpu heatsink about
the same 100F but didn't feel as hot to the touch. May need active
cooling.
See you in a couple weeks for the next LUG or next week at sf-lug
Thomas