YaboOm (Yet another bunch of OMV machines)

By now I am very new to OMV but not to NAS systems at all. After years of using Freenas since early V7 time has come to try something else. Until now I was using a self-build NAS only on the job, mainly as a playground and just for data transfers. For serving VM data I use two big QNAPs and an ancient EMC AX150i for storing Win PC system backups with scheduled cmd files.
Well, this playground runs on an Intel S975XBX2 board with a Dual Core @2,66, 6gb RAM and four WD RE3 1tb drives. Not that bad and the switching hardware is upper class. But with Freenas data read and write does not break the 60mb/s barrier. As far as I remember it was going better with the V7, but that's long ago. Network power is all I need and I put a dual NIC Intel PCIe in this box, teamed the links with LACP over a VLAN and it runs. But after replacing the switching hardware from 3COM 5500EI to HP 3800 Freenas does not bundle the links again, no matter what I try.
That was the point where I decided to give OMV a shot, some three days ago. Now the box is up and running and I get read and write transfer speed about 90-100mb/s only using the onboard NIC. Without any fine tuning.

The story is very different at home. For years I have been using an old Promise NS4300 just for storing videos and music. It simply works, not fast, but reliable. Now my wife discovered all the music and videos on our network and watching video with two devices brings the Promise to it's limit. Read speed at 20mb/s is not that fast and cabling and switching hardware can deliver much more. I have a HP 1810G-8 switch, this is an 8-port Gigabit switch with the internal switching engine of the 24-port version, this thing is really fast.
So I decided to buy a faster machine (What I believed to be faster), an used Thecus N4100PRO. Put some brand new and compatible Seagates 2tb drives in, let it build a Raid5 and go. But the read and write speeds were ridicolous, not faster than the old Promise. No matter which firmware I tried, no matter which Raid version, it was slow.
So I put it back to the bay, received the same money I spend for it and bought some hardware to make my own build. A Bitfenix Prodigy case, an ASUS E45M1-I DELUXE ITX board with 8gb ram and the four Seagates. Installed OMV on an USB stick and right now it is resycning the new raid with a speed of 120840k/sec while the CPU is nearly idle at about 20% load. That gives me hope for much better speed, the CPU of the Thecus box was at 100% while resyncing.

Finally I want to say thanks to all the people for making this great piece of software. By now I am just beginning to discover all the corners and I like what I see.

Yezz I am. Starting with DOS 3.3. 8-)

Some news from the hands-on trenches....

Some weeks ago I decided to redesign the home NAS. Running OMV on an USB stick wasn't a good idea as reported numerous times. The Asus ITX board has five internal SATA ports and one external, so I bought a eSATA to SATA cable, took a leftover 2,5" notebook disk and mounted it into the Fenix case (Still a good decision, this case is top), connected it to the external port, mount another 2TB HDD (Now I have five of them in the box) and made a fresh install onto the 2,5" disk.
Now it works like a charm, fast and reliable.

The company NAS was up for 219 days without any hassles until last week. Due to some replacement of other systems I had to shut it down and move the case. This is a NAS OS one can count on.

Thanks for the hint, I did not know that it it that easy to add some more SATA drives.

This evening I was tinkering with my way to backup the data of my home NAS, there was an error in a script. Now I thought I write something about the way I do that.

When I raised the OMV NAS I put the old Promise NS4300 in a locker and forgot it. While I was searching for a SATA power adapter I stumbled upon it and thought that this thing can be useful to backup the NAS data. It was still equipped with four 2TB drives which are not so brandnew but a SMART test showed that they are still in a good shape so why not. Before that I sometimes hooked up some big USB drives to copy the data, but this is a manual job and lasts very long. Even with a tool like Freefile Sync.
So I brought it back to life in the network, cleaned all the partitions and established a NFS share. Then I mounted this NFS share on the OMV box and wrote some scripts which are called by cron.

Before I decided to use scripts called by cron I tried to use the RSYNC function of OMV itself, but it is not possible to mount the NFS share on the NS4300 by this way. Looks like an old and/or weird implementation of RSYNC on the NS4300, it always denied to accept the rsync connection.

This is the first script:

#!/bin/sh
if grep -qa '/mnt/ns4300' /proc/mounts; then
echo "NS4300 mounted" > /media/8360743b-7008-4b66-99b8-be93f346f91a/temp/downloadsynclog.txt
else
echo "NS4300 not mounted" > /media/8360743b-7008-4b66-99b8-be93f346f91a/temp/downloadsynclog.txt
mount -t nfs 192.168.2.1:/VOLUME1/NFS1 /mnt/ns430 > /media/8360743b-7008-4b66-99b8-be93f346f91a/temp/downloadsynclog.txt
fi
cd /media/8360743b-7008-4b66-99b8-be93f346f91a
rsync -azv download/ /mnt/ns4300/download >> /media/8360743b-7008-4b66-99b8-be93f346f91a/temp/downloadsynclog.txt
chown -R 1003:501 /mnt/ns4300/download/*
chown scheff:users /media/8360743b-7008-4b66-99b8-be93f346f91a/temp/downloadsynclog.txt

This script is the first one which is called by cron and it checks if the NFS share on the NS4300 is mounted and writes the result in the downloadsynclog.
Then it changes the directory to the mounted Raid partition and rsync with the parameters -azv is called. Then it chowns all the files in the directory to the correspondig user on the target NAS and at last it chowns the user of the log file.
Using rsync it copies only the data which are different on both machines and this is not that much per day.
Every result of the sync action is written in the log, using a single > it writes a new log file, with two >> it appends. At the end rsync writes a summary like this:

sent 1947686 bytes  received 281840 bytes  4316.60 bytes/sec
total size is 366144924530  speedup is 164225.46

The other scripts follow, there are five more and cron calls them in alphabetical order. Each script rsync's a different share. These scripts are located in the directory /etc/cron.daily, they need to be chowned to root:root and chmod 0755 to be read- and executable by cron.
Doing it this way I always have a consistent data status on both NAS. Of course any other Linux system can be used as the rsync target.

But take care: If a file will be deleted on one NAS rsync automatically deletes it on the other one.