falc410

Still running good with these settings: http://atsoftware.de/2014/07/snapraid-and-drivepool-on-windows-server-2012-r2-essentials/

Haven't had a drive failure so far but to be honest I only use drivepool for the pooling and nothing else. I've disabled all mover scripts and locked certain directories to certain disks. Still if I copy a file across I don't care to which harddrive it is saved and I only see the pooled drive in my explorer which is neat. I've set up a script that calculates parity with snapraid during the night. If you write to the disk during that period it doesn't matter I think, but the new files will not be protected. You only have to be careful when deleting data (or moving to a different drive). I've tested the restore before I put any live on it and it worked fine. So far I'm quite pleased with my setup. Unless I have to replace a broken drive however, I won't know for sure if everything is working as expected. Many tests in a VM showed good results though. I like my current setup much more than unraid. You can look at some posts at atsoftware.de as well, which explain a bit more. edit: found the correct link: http://atsoftware.de/2014/07/snapraid-and-drivepool-on-windows-server-2012-r2-essentials/ http://atsoftware.de/2014/07/homeserver-from-windows-to-linux-and-back-again/

Thanks, keep me posted please and let me know if you need additional logs. I haven't been able to completely reproduce it because it seems to be happening randomly on one of the shares, and only one at a time.

Ok I did upload the logs and gave a date / time when it happened. I don't see any errors in the logs though Maybe you are able to see something.

I am using NFS Server Role in 2012 Essentials. I tried setting up the Shares using the Server Manager and with just right clicking a folder, going to Properties - NFS Share. You can't have spaces in the Name, Windows does not allow it. But I only have Single words. Enconding is set to ANSI, all 3 Kerberos options are enabled, No Server authentication enabled, enable unmapped user access, allow unmapped user UNIX (by UID / GID) and if you click on Permissions I enabled root access, ALL MACHINES read only. I exported 7 Serverfolders with NFS since I couldn't get SMB to work at all when connecting from anything other than a Windows 8 Machine (OSX works but is slow as hell). XBMC (Openelec) works fine with NFS but like I said, sometimes one of the shares can just not be accessed. If you browse the list of shares it turns up but you can access it. The last time it happened to my 3DMovies share, after un-sharing and re-sharing it I did a server reboot and it worked again. Now it happened to my Anime Share and what ever I tried, I was unable to access it. Luckily the Serverfolder resides on a Single HDD so I was able to share it directly and then it worked again. Currently the other shares from the Pool work too. I'd very much like to Debug it though because what's the point in using Drivepool when not using the Pool...

I have set up a few NFS shares on my Drivepool running Server 2012 Essentials. Sometimes one of the shares is not accessible and I can't figure out why. Sometimes it helps to reboot the server but most of the time it doesn't. I then tried to un-share and re-share the same folder again, even with a different name, still it stays unaccessible from the outside while all other folders work fine. After several reboots of the server and client and changing the sharing name / settings I gave up and shared the folder directly from the normal disk and voila it worked, so I'm 99% sure that the problem is with Drivepool. Are there any known problems with NFS? Anything I can do to debug this?

Linux of course (Openelec). If it would be Windows, there probably would be no problem. Except that SMB even under Windows 8.1 and a PC that joined the Domain doesn't work as expected. Transfers start with around 110 MB/s then drop to 40 MB/s and stay there constantly. Same PC with WHS2011 was able to get a constant 80 MB/s and this was probably limited due to the HDDs. Server 2012 is really crappy, guess it really is the Windows 8 of the Server Family. OSX connection via SMB is even worse and Linux is impossible. Tested only for 5 Minutes NFS yesterday and that seemed to work fast enough.

No dumps found I will try the burst test. The scanner did run at the same as I was copying - maybe that messed things up.

I did some research and since 2013 Drivepool should support NFS shares, I also checked that the necessary setting in the config File is set to true (by default). Still I can't share folder via NFS, it gives me an error that brings me to the following link after googling it: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsserver/en-US/687aa6fe-0886-4f82-bc47-270b4692630b/i-cant-create-a-nfs-share-on-a-windows-2012-storage-serve-2012?forum=winserverfiles So basically it says you can't create NFS shares on a non physical disk. How come I read that Drivepool supports NFS then if Microsoft doesn't allow it? EDIT: Partially solved! The Share name must NOT include whitespaces ! Since it automatically takes the Folder name you have to replace any whitespace with something else. Going to test now and see if it is finally possible to access my server throug xbmc, because smb sure is not working.

I really like the scanner and the option to be notified via email but I'd like to it to monitor the temperature of the Mainboard and CPU as well. I know there are other tools available, freeware as well, but I don't want to install too much stuff on my server. Less is more (stable) in this case. So I don't like the idea of having Speedfan or some Desktop Tools from the Mainboard Manufacturer run on a Server 2012. Also those tools don't integrate into the Dashboard.

I did start with a seeded Pool but some of the data was still on unpooled Parts of the HDDs (because I wanted the data to go to a different HDD). So I copy from Disk2\Folder to Pool\someOtherFolder And after some time the server just restarts. It's probably a blue screen, I don't know. It's a headless box that has just been installed with 2012 R2 Essentials and I did copy manually from one HDD to another the past week (migrating from unraid ReiserFS to NTFS) before installing Diskpool. I did look into the Event log, but I can only see two Critical Events from my crashes: "The system has rebooted without cleanly shutting down first. This error could be caused if the system stopped responding, crashed, or lost power unexpectedly." That's about it. I'm not familiar with Windows Events Debugging since I come from Linux so I don't know where else to look. It might be that it's not Diskpools fault, but then again, the machine was running fine for over a week and I did copy 10TB of Data from one HDD to another, without any crash. Any idea how to debug this further?

Thanks, moving the files worked. After I re-started the service I selected re-measure and everything is looking good. I disabled nearly all of the plugins and only used the file placement rules and tried to manually copy some files and it went to the correct HDD. Looking good so far. I'm not sure if the permissions are correct now. Since when I create a server folder, the dashboard applies permissions on that folder. Now I moved everything (and the data was copied with a tool which ran under Administrator account too). Anyway, Drivepool tells me that the Pool is unbalanced now and I should re-balance it. Is there any way to preview what it would do? I don't really want to re-balance it right now. Can I do it manually later too? If a disk gets too full can I stop the service again, move some stuff to another pooled drive and start it again?

So I finally configured and installed my basic Server 2012 Essentials R2 and just activated Drive Pool and the Scanner. I have 3 Pre-Filled Disks and two empty ones. Created my pool and added all disks but now I am unsure what is the best approach to proceed. I created a lot of Server Folders using the Dashboard and placed them all on the pool. Since I want to use snapraid for additional backup, I disabled auto balancing. My main folders are something like Pictures, Movies, TV Shows, Anime, Documents, Music and so on. When accessing one of those folders I want to keep the active hard disks to a minimum. Also when copying a new TV Show to the pool I would like for all episodes to stay on the same HDD (if possible). Duplication is not enabled (I might enable it for super important documents only). My idea was now to only use the file placement rules and only allow like one HDD for each Server Folder. For example Movies may only go to drive D: and nowhere else (except when D: is full). Is this a sound approach? I looked at the additional plugins but those don't seem too helpful in my case. I also read on the wiki on how to move data into the hidden PoolPart Folder - is this generally save to do? Moving folders on the same HDD would probably save me a lot of time instead of copying the data from one disk to another.

Ah that's perfect. Thanks you sold me! I'm going to order the license right after our guys won the world cup.

Ah, I'm using Lights-Out too. Haven't thought about that yet. It might be a problem if the Server decides to go to sleep while the balancer is running. It might be safer for me to just disable auto balancing and just do it manually then.