Rebuilding greyhole pool after reinstalling OMV

Normally when you click on Source it will keep formatting. I tried to fix.

No worries, and best of luck, GTE. Third time's a charm, as they say.

Regarding patience, I am always reminded of the old joke about the old bull and the young bull standing at the top of the hill, overlooking a pasture full of cows:

Young bull: "Hey, let's run down there and **** a cow!

Old bull: "No. Let's walk down, and **** them all."

Zitat von tekkb

Normally when you click on Source it will keep formatting. I tried to fix.

I noticed. No worries, the linked page gets it right.

Zitat von cogitech

OK. Shared folders vs. SMB/CIFS. The way I understand it, "Shared Folders" are just folders in the local file system that have appropriate permissions to allow plugins the needed access to read and write data. They are "shared" with local processes, not the network. SMB/CIFS is exactly what we think it is. Folders that are shared on the network. So, Plex's database needs to be in a "shared folder" (local) but not necessarily an SMB/CIFS share.

Thats 100% correct.

Zitat von cogitech

What I do know is that re-creating SMB/CIFS shares with the same name can be difficult if there is a local "shared folder" already named that.

The naming scheme for Shared Folders and SMB/CIFS Shares is independet, however you can't name two SMB/CIFS shares the same.

Zitat von cogitech

Also, it is impossible to delete "shared folders" if OMV thinks a service is using them.

If it thinks it is used, it is used somewhere. Sweetspot that most people overlook is the home folder settings, which keep the reference even if you disable the home folders.

Greetings
David

Zitat von gtelliott

Morning Gentlemen. Yes . . Yes I know I said I would be out of your hair but a couple things came up during the redo that I wanted to ask about before I went further. I have reinstalled OS, OMV Extras, etc. then mounted the 3 media drives, and the parity drive. I then installed the mhddfs and created a volume labeled "AllMedia". "AllMedia" includes the 3 HDD's with directories: Media1/MoviesOne; Media2/Movies2; Media3/TV Shows - all directories were already populated with those directories and enclosed data. Then - following along through Cogitech's original instructions to restore my server, I created a new directory in "AllMedia", called "Collection" (I have already used "media" as a label too many times) with the intention of almagamating the 3 HDD media directories into it - and then making that amalgamated directory the only shared folder I would need to add to my services (SMB, DLNA and PMS). Now to the point: (1) Thinking through that though, it occurs to me that I would probably have to make the 3 individual directories shared folders anyway, or I can't move them with rsync - and once they are shared folders what is the point of amalgamating them, and (2); If I amalgamate them, won't that make it hard to create the separate libraries in Plex, i.e., "Movies", "TV Shows", etc.

You don't have to amalgamate the directories. That's totally up to you. All those directories are now contained on the "Allmedia" volume. You can go ahead and create SMB/CIFS shares of those directories just like you used to, but this time make sure to select the "AllMedia" volume and then the appropriate path to the directory you want to share.

I just find it much simpler to have one share, with multiple folders inside it. Plex doesn't care whether your Movies are in a different share than your TV shows, as long as they are in a different folder.

If you agree that a single share with all the media folders in it does make things simpler, then it is very easy to move them:

1) ssh into OMV as root

ssh root@192.168.x.x (where x.x is the appropriate IP of you OMV server

2) Figure out the UUID of your AllMedia volume:

df -h

When you look at the output of this command, you will see several paths like /media/67081dda-f67f-4081-ad65-4e1702aaa82c/ and it'll show the size, space used, etc.

It should be obvious which one is the path to your mhddfs volume (AllMedia) because it will be the largest. Now, look and the UUID in that path a write down or remember the first two letters/numbers. In my example, I would simply remember "67".

3) Now, change to that directory:

cd /media/67 (use the two letters you remembered)

and now hit the tab key on the keyboard and the entire UUID will be filled in

so it will now look like

cd /media/67081dda-f67f-4081-ad65-4e1702aaa82c/

Now hit enter - You are now in the "AllMedia" volume, at the root of the directory.

4) You can verify that by doing:

ls

and then hit enter. You should see all the folders from all 3 media drives, plus the new "Collection" folder.

5) Now you can move the media folders into the Collection folder easily. For example:

mv MoviesOne/ Collection/

and hit enter.

Instantly (without actually moving any data) the "MoviesOne" folder is in the "Collection" folder.

You can repeat the same with the Movies2 and TV Shows folders. Then you can

cd Collection

and do an

ls

to verify that the folders are there.

Now, just go into SMB-CIFS (in OMV-WebGUI) and create a new shared folder - Select the "AllMedia" volume and the "Collection" folder.

Then in Plex, simply specify that your TV shows are in "/Collection/TV Shows" and your movies are in "/Collection/MoviesOne" and "/Collection/Movies2".

To simplify things even more, you can move (mv) everything from "Movies2" to "MoviesOne" and then rename "MoviesOne" to "Movies". If you want to do this, I can write out the commands to do so.

Zitat

Second issue, I have installed the snapraid plugin and looked at the set up guide. What I am unclear on (before I do it this time) is, since I have already created the single mhdffs volume, do I just set up the parity drive and add that single mhdffs volume as the data drive, or for purposes of snapraid, ignore mhdffs altogether and add the 3 separate hdd's as if they were not pooled?

Yes. For SnapRAID purposes, you ignore the mhddfs pool. They are completely separate entities.

Zitat

Thanks

GTE

UPDATE: Thinking about it further, on the snapraid it would seem to me that it would have to be the 3 separate drives. Cogitech earlier told me that the parity drive must be as big as the biggest media drive (i.e., 4TB) - the mhdffs volume is 11TB so, if it was "the media drive" the parity drive would have to be at least 11TB. It may just be a matter of me not distinguishing between "drives" and "volumes" -as I often do.

Best of luck, you are almost there.

By the way, it appears complicated doing all of this stuff at the command-line, but it really does all become very simple and very handy once you get used to it.

It definitely works best to have one samba share for media and then different folders for categories (Movies, TV, Music, etc...) within that share.

Zitat von gtelliott

Well Cogitech - looks like I went and did it. I decided to move the three media directories (MoviesOne, MoviesTwo and TV Shows) into a directory on the AllMedia volume called "Collection". I navigated to the root no prob, Typed ls, all directories were listed - so I then typed "mv MoviesOne/ Collection" and hit Enter. Noticing now that I left the forward slash off the end of "Collection", but it did not complain. I went ahead and retyped "mv MoviesOne/ Collection/" And it responded "No such directory MoviesOne" , so I figured it must have moved it even with the syntax error. Checked the folder with ls - and it does not show - navigated to the actual drive the directory MoviesOne is on - and hit ls - and it does not show, however, running df -hs it still shows that the HDD with MediaONe on it has 2.5 of 3.6 TB's used, and the AllMedia Volume still shows it has 4.0 TB used - so the directory full of movies is somewhere on that drive still, but where - and how do I get to them?

MoviesTwo moved fine, and even though ls of AllMedia Volume lists the directory "TV Shows" - when I try to use the mv command it says "No directory TV Shows"? Leave out the space?

GTE

As you are learning, syntax is important, but fickle.

I just re-created that scenario on my own drive and even with the missing / after Collection, it moved the Directory without error:

root@openmediavault:/media/67081dda-f67f-4081-ad65-4e1702aaa82c# mkdir MoviesOne
root@openmediavault:/media/67081dda-f67f-4081-ad65-4e1702aaa82c# mkdir Collection
root@openmediavault:/media/67081dda-f67f-4081-ad65-4e1702aaa82c# ls
backup Collection  CPbackup  lost+found  Media MoviesOne  Music  RAWbackup  snapraid.conf  snapraid.conf.bak  snapraid.content  snapraid.content.lock  Software  tftp
root@openmediavault:/media/67081dda-f67f-4081-ad65-4e1702aaa82c# mv MoviesOne/ Collection
root@openmediavault:/media/67081dda-f67f-4081-ad65-4e1702aaa82c# ls
backup Collection  CPbackup  lost+found  Media  Music  RAWbackup  snapraid.conf  snapraid.conf.bak  snapraid.content  snapraid.content.lock  Software  tftp
root@openmediavault:/media/67081dda-f67f-4081-ad65-4e1702aaa82c# cd Collection/
root@openmediavault:/media/67081dda-f67f-4081-ad65-4e1702aaa82c/Collection# ls
MoviesOne

So I don't know where your MoviesOne folder went. It should be in "Collection". Are you sure you didn't forget to "cd" to Collection before "ls"?

But, it should be easy enough to find the folder:

apt-get update
apt-get install mlocate
updatedb
locate MoviesOne

The first three steps are just installing mlocate and then running the locate.updatedb it'll take a while. The fourth command let's you locate anything in the file system. You can use that now when you are looking for things.

The reason you are having trouble with "TV Shows" is the space in the name. In order to avoid these issues, I always use _ instead of spaces.

The way around it is to use a \ (not /) in front of the space, so the syntax to move that directory to Collection would look like this:

mv TV\ Shows/ Collection/

I just tested this as well. Here is the full output:

root@openmediavault:/media/67081dda-f67f-4081-ad65-4e1702aaa82c# mkdir TV\ Shows
root@openmediavault:/media/67081dda-f67f-4081-ad65-4e1702aaa82c# ls
backup  Collection  CPbackup  lost+found  Media  Music  RAWbackup  snapraid.conf  snapraid.conf.bak  snapraid.content  snapraid.content.lock  Software  tftp  TV Shows
root@openmediavault:/media/67081dda-f67f-4081-ad65-4e1702aaa82c# mv TV\ Shows/ Collection/
root@openmediavault:/media/67081dda-f67f-4081-ad65-4e1702aaa82c# cd Collection/
root@openmediavault:/media/67081dda-f67f-4081-ad65-4e1702aaa82c/Collection# ls
MoviesOne  TV Shows
root@openmediavault:/media/67081dda-f67f-4081-ad65-4e1702aaa82c/Collection#

Another tip:

If you want to know exactly what the command syntax was that messed up the MoviesOne move, just keep hitting the "up arrow" on your keyboard and the command prompt will cycle back through every single command you have issued. Once you get to that first, erroneous mv command, right it down and post it here so I can see what went wrong. It should have worked even without the trailing / .

I know what happened. You renamed the "MoviesOne" folder to something else.

The mv command will rename directories if the destination directory doesn't exist.

As I said, use the up arrow key to flip all the way back to that very first move command and post it here.

Zitat von gtelliott

My first command when I set down was "mkdir Collections", with an "s" at the end noticeably. My next command was "mv MoviesOne/ Collection", no "s" . So I tried to move MoviesOne to a non-existent directly apparently, but it did not complain. I then unknowingly typed "mv MoviesOne/ Collection/" and it said there was no MoviesOne directory. Nonetheless, when I typed "mv MoviesTwo/ Collection/" it did not complain, and looking at the AllMedia volume with ls, both "Collection" and "Collections" Directories are there, and MoviesTwo is in the "Collection" directory??

GTE

Yes. It all makes perfect sense, actually.

mkdir Collections --> so now a directory called "Collections" exists.

mv MoviesOne/ Collection --> since the directory "Collection" did not exist, the mv command renamed the "MoviesOne" directory to "Collection".

mv MoviesOne/ Collection/ --> this failed because "MoviesOne" has been renamed "Collection".

mv MoviesTwo/ Collection/ --> this succeeded because now the "Collection" directory exists (and contains everything that was originally in "MoviesOne")

So, now you have a "Collection" directory that contains all the stuff you had in "MoviesOne" (since you literally just renamed "MoviesOne" to "Collection") and it also has a sub-folder in it named "MoviesTwo".

First I'll wait for you to confirm that you understand before I try to help you fix it. It is easy, but let's go slow.

Zitat von gtelliott

I wonder if MoviesOne is now Collection and MoviesTwo is now a subdirectory among all those individual movie files?

Exactly! You figured it out as I was explaining it.

So now, the question is; do you want to just have all your movies in one big folder ("Collection"), or do you want them split up as "MoviesOne" and MoviesTwo".

The beauty of mhddfs is that you can do whatever you want now. I suspect you had "MoviesOne" and "MoviesTwo" because they were on different drives (still are actually) but mhddfs allows you to ignore that fact and just have a "Movies" folder with everything in it.