Re: [PLUG] I think my Pi NAS has issues

[Rich Freeman via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>]

On Thu, Jan 26, 2023 at 4:27 PM Adam Zion via plug
<plug@lists.phillylinux.org> wrote:
>
> I'm not 100% sure if my trusty Raspbian NAS has bitten the bullet, but it's not responding on its reserved IP, nor does it identify itself under its given name in the connected devices list of my Comcast box (I know- ptooey).
>
> So, what can I do short of throwing up my hands and rebuilding it? I'd REALLY rather not do that, since the attached drives are configured as a RAID, and I'm honestly not sure how I'd be able to read that on a spanking new Raspbian NAS or PiNAS.
>

It might take jumping through hoops, but if you're just using mdadm
for RAID that will work on basically any linux distro that has the
appropriate drivers.  Just be careful not to do anything to format it.
If you're using some UI-frontend for the NAS you might have to look up
how to import an existing mdadm volume.

Since it is a Pi you can of course easily back up the sdcard before
messing with it.  Hopefully you already have a backup of it (if not
I'd suggest making a backup of all your Pi sdcards soon - dd is a
reasonable way to go about it but does require you to match/exceed
sizes when restoring the backup).  I've lost Pis just due to the
sdcard wearing out - restoring a backup onto a new sdcard got it
working.  sdcards generally aren't the highest-quality flash media
around, so if you're running an OS on one you can wear them out.
Really any kind of flash drive should be considered a consumable -
even an expensive NVMe.

Short of rebuilding it you can just stick the sdcard into another
linux box, make a backup with dd, and then just take a look at it and
run fsck/etc.  The problem is detecting what is wrong with it if it
isn't something catastrophic.  If you have one corrupted library that
could prevent it from booting normally, and it might not show up
unless you can run a package manager integrity check/etc (I'm guessing
most offer such a feature, and you might be able to run it from
chroot/nspawn).

I'm not sure what your Linux knowledge level is though, so if you want
any of that explained please do feel free to ask.  Unfortunately
something like this might be a little hard to do via email...

-- 
Rich
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