Adding two drives in a software RAID for file sharing

Hi, Thanks for the help I’ve received here so far, I’m now pretty confident I can set up nethserver as I need but need a bit of hand-holding with this bit please.

I have Nethserver 6.7 up and running as a firewall/gateway & email server on a single 80Gb hard drive. I’ve added and set up a single shared folder just to get file sharing up and running. Now I want to add a couple of 320Gb drives, set them up as a software RAID, create half a dozen folders on the RAID drive and link the folders into half a dozen shared folders in Nethserver. The idea is that I can see the half a dozen shared folders on my network and mount them on power up in my desktops, running Linux Mint, by adding them to /etc/fstab. This is what my existing system is set up to do with my old Turnkey file server. The intention is the nethserver system resides on the 80Gb drive while my data lives on the RAID array, not mixed up with the nethserver system.

Without the two additional drives, nethserver dashboard showed ‘No software RAID’. Now I’ve added the two additional drives it shows :

Software RAID status
md127 OK
Level RAID1
Devices 2/2 (sdc2,sdb2)

I’m not sure if this is because nethserver has seen the new drives and auto magically set up a RAID array, or because the drives were previously used in this way in a D-Link DNS-323 NAS device. Whatever, I’d like to format and set up a new RAID array if this is not what nethserver has already done ?

I’m familiar with Debian/Ubuntu, but not CentOS, so the command line is a little challenging at present :slight_smile:

Regards
Paul

I’m having problems in other areas at present, and need to spend some time familiarising myself with the CentOS way of doing things before proceeding much further. I think perhaps filippo_carletti may be right suggesting waiting for NS7 to be released.

Paul

Hi,

Did you use LVM?
take a look here: https://www.centos.org/docs/5/html/Cluster_Logical_Volume_Manager/

And here:
http://wiki.nethserver.org/doku.php?id=howto:how_to_add_a_disk_in_nethserver_with_lvm

Thanks for your reply JIm, I think the base install of nethserver uses LVM, so yes, The CentOS docs look like heavy going :frowning:

Until NS7 is released I’ve decided to side-step the couple of issues I have at present, i.e. sharing the RAID array and the printer problem I have. I’m going to retain the Xubuntu base system I’m currently running, which handles 2 x 2Tb disks in a BTRFS array and my Samsung printer, and run Nethserver 6.8 in a virtual machine to handle my firewall, email and file sharing, replacing the three VMs I’m currently running. That way I can safely gain some experience with Nethserver in a real use situation, use the VM snapshots to protect against the inevitable cock-ups that will occur while learning, and end up with NS7 in the longer term. I’m assuming I can load the Virtualbox Guest Additions into nethserver to share the Xubuntu BTRFS array ?

Paul