Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Removing And/Or Replacing a Greyhole Drive

I see this question a lot, how do you replace or remove a Greyhole pool drive? First off, yes, there is an easy and correct way to do this. Second it is not to simply remove the drive from greyhole.conf and restart Greyhole, this will not do what you want, but the correct process is easy enough.

So let's say that something terrible happens and one of your drives begins to give the click of death. It still works, but there's no saying for how long. (You should have backup's, shame on you if you don't!) Or perhaps it's something far more mundane, you're running low on space and you want to replace a smaller drive with a larger one. In either case, the below will work.

  • Add your new drive to the greyhole.conf file
    • You don't have to hook up a new drive, if your remaining volumes have enough space to absorb the file copies stored on the drive that's going away, feel free to skip this section
  • Make sure you follow all the steps to get your new drive Greyhole ready (mount it, create the gh folder, create the .greyhole_uses_this file)
  • Restart Greyhole to make sure your updated config has been picked up
Now come's the fun part! We're going to use a handy little command called --going (-n). Basically this option lets you tell Greyhole 'Hey, this drive has valid file copies, but it's going to go away soon, so don't count these file copies towards the total.' Okay, maybe that's a mouthful, how about 'Hey, Greyhole! Copy all the files on this volume to other volumes!' While overly simplified, that gives a clearer impression of what's going on.
  • Run `greyhole --going=/path/to/drive/that/is/being/removed`
    • Where /path/to/drive/that/is/being/removed matches the path for the volume that is listed in your greyhole.conf
    • Once you run this command Greyhole will automatically remove this drive from your greyhole.conf
  • Once this is run Greyhole will schedule an fsck which should proceed shortly if not immediately
  • This can take a while, if you watch the Greyhole log you should see it running through all your files and creating new file copies for any files that are on the drive which has been marked as going
  • After this is done you can unmount the drive and remove it as you wish
    • For sanity I'd unmount the drive and then verify I can still access files that were on the removed drive. If yes, then you can be fairly certain that Greyhole correctly migrated all the data
    • Once you've sanity tested, physical removal of the drive shouldn't be a problem

1 comment:

  1. Worked perfectly. Thanks for the clear instructions

    ReplyDelete

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