Friday 28 November 2014

Registering Xen VM with UnRaid

Each time I create a new VM in Xen on UnRaid, I can never recall the command to register it so that it shows up in the Xen management interface.

Thanks to a discussion on the UnRaid forums, I've now found it again and am posting here for posterity;

xenman register /mnt/cache/domains/vmfolder/vmname.cfg

Sunday 16 November 2014

System Transplant

For a few reasons, I wanted to move away from my tower-based media server;

First, I wanted to move the server from my attic to a rack as I'm soon going to be adding a new wider screen to my home theatre and this will make attic access a little more difficult than at present.

Second, with hard drive capacity increasing rapidly, I really don't see a use for oodles of drives in a system - all I need to do is gradually replace my 1TB drives with 4TBs and I'll have move from 12TB TO 27TB, 37TB if I go with 6TB drives. So I really don't need any more space.

Given the above and my recent addition of an expansion chassis, I settled on 2x SilverStone cases; an SST-GD07B for MediaServer8 itself and a Grandia GD09 for the expansion chassis.

Before transplant - the recipient is a good deal smaller than the donor

Saturday 1 November 2014

Rsync + Screen

More on copying, this time on the linux common line.I'm in the process of removing some smaller drives from my unRAID array and converting the remaining drives to XFS. To do this requires a good deal of data shuffling.

It's best to do this directly on the unRAID OS so as to remove any network operations. I'd never liked using Midnight Commander so decided a cp operation was required. However, two problems; cp doesn't show progress and doing this over ssh is risky as if the connection or client system dies, the copy operation dies.