Topic: Second HHD

[Chris]

Just a quick note to tell every one about the troubles i had installing a second HDD into my e-smith box.
After much help from the ppl here i took a packed lunch, several bottles of coke and kissed the wife good buy and disappeared into the study.

As i toiled away getting the second HHD located, formatted and then mounted, with the help of a friend, realised that I needed to create a new ibay to mount the new HDD to. Fine i can do that, into e-smith manager, create ibay.........

Everything just stoped. Still had putty session open as root and still could 'walk around' inside the box, but nothing in the manager. What the?????

'walked around' a bit more and checked the ETC dir to see if i had formatted it by  mistake, nope everything was still there...... What the ??????

So in the true sprit of windows ' If all else fails restart ' so i did.

What do you know..... up it comes.... manager works... every thing. What the hell was going on....
So with the help of the same friend we figured out ( if you have read the prevous questions i have posted) that it had grabed the second HHD that i had in their at the time of install and turned it into a 3 GIG SWAP FILE.
So when i formatted what i thought was a empty second HDD ( by all accounts E-smith gets the first HDD and ignores the rest) i was actualy formatting the swap file.

And i wondered why it didnt work! Doh.

So here is a question how big does the swapfile partion need to be? Is there a white paper on the recommened partion sizes for linux/e-smith. I understand that  E-Smith will use what ever size is availabe. But come on 3gig is a bit exessive.

And has anyone run across this before?????

[Kelvin]

Hi Chris,

I have managed to install secondary HDDs into my e-smith boxes with little drama (barring my first attempts at it of course !  ). I personally have not come across the problem of e-smith taking over the 2nd HDD as a massive swap file.

My usual sequence of steps :-

1. fdisk to partition the 2nd hdd
2. mkfs to format it
3. create a temp directory (or permanent directory whichever suits your needs) on the primary hdd as a mount point for the new hdd
4. mount and copy and existing files / directories (ie. home, files or ibays, etc).
5. Fix up permissions
6. edit fstab , blah ....
7. reboot
8. check that the hdd is mounted correctly
9. remove temp directory

Just my 2 bits

Kelvin

[Johan Wijngaard]

To build a second HD in your E-smith server.

Login as root

Your second harddisk is the "hdd"

You must partion your new HD

    >  fdisk /dev/hdd

Then you must format this drive

    > mkfs /dev/hdd

then you must make a config to share the new drive voor a Ibay

    > mc  (staring Midnight Commader)

goto the file

  in \etc\ftab  (starting with edit F4)

look for the row

   "LABEL=/boot "

Change here the row for a Ibay

example (in the orginal is it /dev/hdc1 /.....etc)

/dev/hdd1 /home/e-smith/files/ibays/mp3/html ext2 defaults 1 2

save the file with F10

And make a reboot of the server (are give the command "mount -a"

And your Ibay is placed on the second Harddisk and in y example you can place all your MP3 on the I-bay.

Goodluck

[Sander]

i have a scsi drive and i dont want just 1 ibay i want to mount the whole drive to /home directory (if the server runs out of disk space on sda1(or 6 i dont remember) it takes the additional space it needs from that other drive.

to tell you the truth i have 3 scsi drives(all identical) and i want to use all of them in the server)

how do i do that?

Sander