User Share Storage Issues

[Houseplant]

Hello everyone, I have been running unRAID 4.6 for a little over a year now with the following configuration:

 

Samsung F3 2TB - Parity

WD EARS 2TB - Data1

WD EARS 2TB - Data2

WD EADS 1TB - Data3

 

I have seven shares setup on the array and, up until recently, have not had any issues with space. Over the last week, we've made a final push to backup some of our media and we've run into a problem that I cannot seem to find an answer to. The share continually attempts to copy to a disk with only 3GB free. No matter what Allocation Method I use, I run into "this drive is full" issues when I copy to the share (and therefore, the drive). I have tried setting a minimum free space and I have tried forcing the disk that is full onto the excluded list.

 

I'm wondering if there is anything I may be missing or if there is a way around this problem.

[dgaschk]

Enter "du -m /mnt/*" and post the results.

 

[Houseplant]

Well, that revealed some goodies...

 

disk1 was the disk that was getting full. du -m /mnt/* spat this out:

 

du: cannot access '/mnt/disk2': No such file or directory

du: cannot access '/mnt/disk3': No such file or directory

root@jeeves # /etc/rc.d/rc.samba: line 15: /boot/config/ident.cfg: No such file or directory

/etc/rc.d/rc.samba: line 18: /boot/config/share.cfg: No such file or directory

[Houseplant]

Ugh, okay so I am not entirely sure where to go from here. I tried restoring an older backup I had of the flash drive, but it didn't recognize my Plus key and, therefore, did not recognize my third disk. So I shut it down again and reloaded the backup I'd just made before I started this process. Now, after booting back up and into the web interface, none of the drives or shares are mounting so it's worse off than before I started the process -- More confused now than ever.

 

Edit: I reverted back to my older backup and the shares and drives are being loaded properly. The only issue I have is that the key isn't being recognized so I am left with Basic (and only two out of my three drives).

 

Final Edit: Okay, so I cleared the Plus.key and hidden _Plus.key file out of the config folder and replace them with the one that was originally mailed to us. I rebooted the server and, low and behold, I have a Plus license again. New problem: I go to add the third disk to the array and it gives me this message:

 

Start will record the new disk information and bring the expanded array on-line. All new disks which have not been factory-erased will be cleared first; and, the array will be available after the clear completes. This process takes time, but the array remains protected at all times. Caution: any data on the new disk(s) will be erased! If you want to preserve the data on the new disk(s), reset the array configuration and rebuild parity instead.

 

My first instinct would be to reset the array and rebuild the parity so I could maintain the data that was on disk3, but I am done with assuming anything tonight. If anyone has some advice on what to do here I would appreciate it

[dgaschk]

Enter "initconfig" on the command line. This will invalidate parity and allow it to be recreated using all assigned disks. Do this only if your sure that disk 3 has data.

[Houseplant]

Worked like a charm. All three disks are showing properly and with data on all three. I am currently rebuilding parity to make sure everything is going okay.

 

Update: Parity has been rebuilt but I am having the same storage issues as the first time around so I am going to run '/du -m /mnt/*' and see what kind of information I can pull from it.

 

After the scan was done of /mnt/, everything is showing up properly so now I am going to try and exclude the disks again and see if there is a way I can get unRAID to force write to one of the non-full disks in the partition. If not, I am really not sure how I am going to go forward with this.

[Houseplant]

So any thoughts on possibly killing the parity, moving the data from disk1 to disk2/3 and then re-building parity to create a "High-water" environment and then hope unRAID maintains it?

 

My only concern is that this will happen all over again. Maybe something in the settings is just plain wrong? Everything is set to high-water. Two of my shares have an excluded/included disk for backups my wife and I have. Other than that, split level 1 and no other settings across all five other shares. Thoughts?

[dgaschk]

The share settings are independent of parity. The min free space setting should be larger than the file that your copying. It should be larger than the largest file that you'll ever copy. Mine is set to 50GB and I top off the disks manually.

[Houseplant]

Yeah, see that is the problem I ran into before. I have set a minimum and it just seems to ignore it and copy right through it. I know the split level is okay because some of the files are indeed spread over the other two physical disks, but now that it's gotten so that doesn't make much of a difference.