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I won't claim this is in any way exhaustive. It was exhausting.
The problem begins like this:
I want to have a "cloud file service" that I can use, and others can use, and I can offer better pricing.
So overall it looks like NextCloud is the right tool. It really has a lot of features I want. Maybe the only thing missing is an S3 interface to the users.
But I'm telling you, this isn't nearly as easy to set up as I was expecting it to be. This little chronicle will describe most of what I went through, and where I ended up. Which is to say, seriously incomplete.
You can get nextcloud installed as part of the ubuntu installer. That is the best way to go. Trying to figure it out after the OS installs was too complicated. Do the easy thing.
First info: I was installing on an HP DL380 G9, with 80GB RAM, and a chunk of RAID space. I'm even remember where I started with that. but here this week it was approx 18TB, and a small RAID volume of 150GB for OS install on 10K SAS drives. Sounds easy enough, right? Two RAID volumes, one for OS, one for cloud data.
So I did the simple install, fixed up the IP addresses, fired up NextCloud, created the admin account, and began to push some files over. I tried to copy all the music library from my desktop machine, to this new "cloud" filespace, 130 GB of data. And it ran out of space pretty quick. So I wondered what was going on, and the answer was that the big RAID volume wasn't in use.
So I tried to figure out how to make it be in use, and the NextCloud answer is that that is not possible after the initial setup. I think that is where I dropped the ball a year ago. Had other things to worry.
This week I needed to come back, but I'd forgotten about it being in that awkward unfinished state.
Had reinstalled Ubuntu/NC some months back, it was sitting as-yet-unconfigured, so I did the initial stuff, and noticed that I could specify a data folder; don't remember seeing that previously. This is important. Tried to copy the music files up again, rand out of room at about 50GB. WTF? This machine has a huge RAID, what's the deal?
Well, there's that *little* RAID volume, and that's where NC was putting data: because I didn't tell it not to. And that RAID volume was 150GB total, and it has the OS on it, and whatever the hell else the installed does. AAARRRGGGHHH! OF course it bombed out at 50GB.
Well, I have more drives now, so I pulled those two out, and put a pair of 2T drives in (these two are in the back). Rebooted, reconfigured the RAID to a single group, and--whoops! two of the drives are not the matching size, gotta swap them too. A quick moment on that and now there are 14 2T drives in a RAID 60 group, and I can do a reinstall with a more consistent size. The HP RAID controller really wants all the drives in a group to be the same, and I had had a pair of 146GB drives in the back as their own group. (One thing you could do here is use a pair of SSDs for the OS, 250GB probably being the right size.)
Full OS reinstall with NC, fixed the static IPs again, retry with the copy the music files attempt.
Fails at 80GB. WTF! Well, it turns out, somewhat the same deal. The Ubu installer has made some assumptions I didn't know about regarding how it created file partitions. I do not know what it was thinking here, but linux is an annoyingly complex thing at this level. My unix understanding began 30 years ago but then there's a huge time-gap where I didn't touch it. So now I can go look at what happened, but i don't understand some things. But again Ubuntu has done some partitioning of this one huge RAID volume into pieces it likes that I don't really know the entire purpose of.
So I hunted around to try to understand a bunch of things. Various linux commands would tell me various things.
mount would tell me that sda1 and sda2 are mounted, but sda3 is not. sda3 is the big remainder space. I don't understand how this is possible, as there's just the one RAID volume, but ok, I know how to format and mount partitions. But no, it's already mounted, and I can't see how or where.
Eventually I see enough indicators to tell me it has gotten some flavor of "lvm" partition that isn't very big (100GB), and approx 15GB is inaccessible. This is just not what I want.
So I went online for some more info, read a little about LVM, watched a couple videos, ok, yeah, this is interesting, I should learn about this, sounds like LVM will do interesting things I want to do, but this feels like not the time. I really do want to do some of the expand/add/replace routine, but I need to think about how and what.
So back to the RAID drawing board. I am doing a new pair of RAID partitions, where the two drives in the back are going to be a RAID 1 group for the OS, and the other 12 are a RAID 60 again, that will be an entirely separate mount that I will use for NC from the very beginning.
So that is where I am. OS being installed now. Infernally slow, it took 2 hours earlier. I think the RAID controller is redoing the RAID parity initialization, which takes a day or two at this size.
What I'm hoping to end up with is that the 2T RAID 1 group has all the OS goings on and that the other 16T RAID group isn't even mounted, so that I can do that and tell NC to use that mount as data space. Will be finding out tomorrow how well that works.
Next after that is trying out an S3 server tool or two; pretty sure I need to be able to understand and do this. It doesn't *LOOK* all that complicated, but that has to be a whole nother machine so it doesn't interfere with the NC instance(s). For the moment, I need the behavior, without needing the more serious content management like replication.
And of course LVM is a whole bigger topic. I'd LIKE for there to be a gui tool for this somehow, where I only need to "draw a picture" of what I want to do. Of course I'd like that for network config too.
And now I've just realized that the other LAN-only machines I set up NC on are also improperly configured. Argh. Yep, here's a picture of some of it on one machine:
I found this web-page helpful here:
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