tucansam Posted January 23, 2019 Share Posted January 23, 2019 First question: a year or so ago, BTRFS was still experimental, or newly implemented (can't remember exactly) and XFS was generally accepted as being the filesystem to use for "mission critical" servers. Is this still the case, or is BTRFS now considered 100% GTG? Re: encryption. I have a 15 disk array that is very full. There is enough room on the drives to manually copy data over in such as way that one member disk could be completely emptied, changed FS if needed (currently XFS), encrypted, and then data copied back over. This could be done one disk at a time until all disks were encrypted, without me having to move data over to tapes or a second server. Is this an appropriate way to accomplish this task? Thanks. Quote Link to comment
JorgeB Posted January 27, 2019 Share Posted January 27, 2019 On 1/23/2019 at 10:18 PM, tucansam said: or is BTRFS now considered 100% GTG? I believe the btrfs faq phrases it the best: Quote Is btrfs stable? Short answer: Maybe. Long answer: Nobody is going to magically stick a label on the btrfs code and say "yes, this is now stable and bug-free". Different people have different concepts of stability: a home user who wants to keep their ripped CDs on it will have a different requirement for stability than a large financial institution running their trading system on it. If you are concerned about stability in commercial production use, you should test btrfs on a testbed system under production workloads to see if it will do what you want of it. In any case, you should join the mailing list (and hang out in IRC) and read through problem reports and follow them to their conclusion to give yourself a good idea of the types of issues that come up, and the degree to which they can be dealt with. Whatever you do, we recommend keeping good, tested, off-system (and off-site) backups. Pragmatic answer: Many of the developers and testers run btrfs as their primary filesystem for day-to-day usage, or with various forms of real data. With reliable hardware and up-to-date kernels, we see very few unrecoverable problems showing up. As always, keep backups, test them, and be prepared to use them. When deciding if Btrfs is the right file system for your use case, don't forget to look at the Status page, which contains an overview of the general status of distinct features of the file system. I've been using btrfs only on all my Unraid servers for the last 2 or 3 years, and I love it, but of course I have backups. On 1/23/2019 at 10:18 PM, tucansam said: Re: encryption. I have a 15 disk array that is very full. There is enough room on the drives to manually copy data over in such as way that one member disk could be completely emptied, changed FS if needed (currently XFS), encrypted, and then data copied back over. This could be done one disk at a time until all disks were encrypted, without me having to move data over to tapes or a second server. Is this an appropriate way to accomplish this task? Yes. Quote Link to comment
tucansam Posted January 31, 2019 Author Share Posted January 31, 2019 I see that xfs -- encrypted and reiserfs -- encrypted are both options for a disk format, in addition to btrfs. Any reason to choose one over the other? Quote Link to comment
JorgeB Posted January 31, 2019 Share Posted January 31, 2019 XFS is more mature and stable than btrfs, it's a good choice if you don't care for snapshots and/or checksums, reiser is dead. Quote Link to comment
tucansam Posted January 31, 2019 Author Share Posted January 31, 2019 I'm not sure what snapshots are, nor do I really know how to use checksums. Quote Link to comment
tucansam Posted February 6, 2019 Author Share Posted February 6, 2019 First server conversion is going swimmingly. Second sever, I cannot get Unbalance two function, and I may need to move files off one disk at a time by hand. Question: during the upgrade process, say I'm installing a larger disk in an array with no encrypted disks at the moment, can I make the new disk encrypted, and have parity rebuild the data on the new (encrypted) disk? Quote Link to comment
itimpi Posted February 6, 2019 Share Posted February 6, 2019 1 hour ago, tucansam said: First server conversion is going swimmingly. Second sever, I cannot get Unbalance two function, and I may need to move files off one disk at a time by hand. Question: during the upgrade process, say I'm installing a larger disk in an array with no encrypted disks at the moment, can I make the new disk encrypted, and have parity rebuild the data on the new (encrypted) disk? No. Parity can only rebuild a disk with exactly the same format. Parity has no concept of file system as it works at the physical sector level with no understanding of what the contents of the sectors mean. Quote Link to comment
tucansam Posted February 20, 2019 Author Share Posted February 20, 2019 Is there a way to change the filesystem to an encrypted one on disks outside the array, ie, those mounted with Unassigned Devices? I have an SSD for docker use, and a spinner for scratch/downloads, and would like to encrypt both. Quote Link to comment
dlandon Posted February 20, 2019 Share Posted February 20, 2019 8 hours ago, tucansam said: Is there a way to change the filesystem to an encrypted one on disks outside the array, ie, those mounted with Unassigned Devices? I have an SSD for docker use, and a spinner for scratch/downloads, and would like to encrypt both. You cannot format an encrypted drive with UD, but you can read an encrypted drive taken out of the array. Why don't you add the drives to the array and encrypt them? You can then set up disk shares to read/write to those disks. Exclude those drives from all other shares. The advantage is that they will be parity protected. Quote Link to comment
tucansam Posted March 5, 2019 Author Share Posted March 5, 2019 Here's a dumb question, for which I think I already know the answer, but I'm going to ask anyway. Once all other disks in the array have been converted to encrypted volumes, is there any necessary action to take on the parity drive(s)? IE, can they remain their default partition format of GPT, or do they need to be encrypted also? Quote Link to comment
tucansam Posted March 5, 2019 Author Share Posted March 5, 2019 On 2/20/2019 at 7:10 AM, dlandon said: You cannot format an encrypted drive with UD, but you can read an encrypted drive taken out of the array. Why don't you add the drives to the array and encrypt them? You can then set up disk shares to read/write to those disks. Exclude those drives from all other shares. The advantage is that they will be parity protected. I have never even thought of this. I will have to look into this more. I have often feared what would happen if one of my primary application disks failed, never even thought of putting it in the array so it is protected. Quote Link to comment
JonathanM Posted March 5, 2019 Share Posted March 5, 2019 1 hour ago, tucansam said: Once all other disks in the array have been converted to encrypted volumes, is there any necessary action to take on the parity drive(s)? IE, can they remain their default partition format of GPT, or do they need to be encrypted also? Parity has no file system or files to encrypt. Quote Link to comment
Gee1 Posted November 30, 2020 Share Posted November 30, 2020 How save is encrypted XFS in UNRAID? How to decrypt outside unraid? When somebody has the unraid login data is this one able to read the discs? Quote Link to comment
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