Victor Churchill wrote:
> Hi,
>
> trying to build a backup box for work with removable SATA disk
> caddies. The idea is that it mirrors a Buffalo TeraStation repository
> on the works LAN and The Boz can take a disk home with him at the end
> of the day, replace it with another, and thus have Peace of Mind(tm).
>
> Since He has Winboxes and all the 'office' LAN is Winboxes I thought
> that making the removable disks NTFS rather than ext3 would make them
> more accessible.
> (Although he would need to fit a caddy drawer on a winbox to access it).
>
> I've put Ubuntu LTS 6.06 on a bare new HP Proliant with a drawer
> fitted for a removable disk caddy.
>
> Tried putting a bare new disk in the caddy, used parted to put a
> single partition and fat32 filesystem on it:
> parted) mkfs 1 fat32
> (parted) p
> Disk geometry for /dev/sdb: 0kB - 320GB
> Disk label type: msdos
> Number Start End Size Type File system Flags
> 1 32kB 320GB 320GB primary
>
> But on trying to mount it I get this:
>
> root@backup:~ # mount -t ntfs /dev/sdb1 /mnt/backup/
> mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb1,
> missing codepage or other error
> In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
> dmesg | tail or so
>
> and dmesg says:
>
> [17200424.788000] NTFS-fs warning (device sdb1):
> is_boot_sector_ntfs(): Invalid boot sector checksum.
> [17200424.788000] NTFS-fs error (device sdb1):
> read_ntfs_boot_sector(): Primary boot sector is invalid.
> [17200424.788000] NTFS-fs error (device sdb1):
> read_ntfs_boot_sector(): Mount option errors=recover not used.
> Aborting without trying to recover.
> [17200424.788000] NTFS-fs error (device sdb1): ntfs_fill_super(): Not
> an NTFS volume.
>
> I've added to /etc/fstab:
>
> /dev/sdb1 /mnt/backup vfat umask=0,quiet 0 0
>
> Googling for the dmesg messages yeilds threads where people are trying
> to do dual booting which is not my agenda.
>
> I dunno much about WIndows disk/file systems (*). Do I need to set up
> a boot sector for each disk even if I don't have any need to boot from
> them?
>
> and then ...
>
> I'm assuming I would be able to do a cron/rsync setup to mirror the
> repository onto the removable disk drive. Will the choice of file
> system affect that?
>
> And has anyone heard of any nice idiot-proof hot-swap utilities (will
> be used by The Boz while I'm not there) for Linux for the day to day
> use of this?
>
> thanks as ever
>
> victor
>
> (*) rather less than much, actually.
>
It sounds like you're trying to do something similar to what we do for backups. We have a Linux
Server that runs RSync and every night each of the servers backup to this, then in the morning once
all that backups have finished we Rsync everything to a external USB 2.0 HDD. These are all
formatted as ext3, we tried Fat32 & NTFS and found that NTFS was doable but sooooo sllllooooww,
(this was a year ago) and Fat32 was really limiting on the partition size (were using 200Gb Drives).
The boss wanted to be able to read the drives on a Doze box if necessary so he uses something like
Diskinternals "Linux-reader" (
http://www.diskinternals.com/linux-reader/) to access them.
The joy of the USB 2.0 enclosures is that when you need to upgrade your storage you just swap in new
drives and sync the data back again and this is what we're doing at the moment as we've swapped to
500GB drives as 200's were getting filled.
Just another option
Brian
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The views expressed here are my own and not necessarily
the views of Portsmouth College
