Mark Knecht wrote:

On Sat, Dec 17, 2022 at 12:10 PM Wol <antlists@youngman.org.uk> wrote:
<SNIP>
> Do you want the system layered, with each layer doing one job? Use
> dm-integrity to protect against corruption, raid to join the disks, lvm
> to partition them, and ext to manage the directories and files.
>
> I do the latter ...

No argument there, at least on a group of drives where you

want to have flexibility in the future. Desktop computers or

system drives certainly. You didn't tell me what replaces

the compression aspect of the problem but I'm sure there's

something. It's a great strategy if you have the expertise and

time to set it up and then manage it when a problem arises,

if it ever arises.

I'm just asking what's the purpose of doing LVM, or your

suggested layering, specifically on a storage pool for a

home user like Dale? That's the part I don't understand,

especially for a new NAS user like Dale?

Mark

My reasoning is simple, I'm already familiar with LVM and how to manage it. While I swap drives on my Gentoo rig pretty regular lately, I don't want to be limited from doing that on a NAS either. If for example I want to replace a 10TB drive with a 16TB drive, LVM makes that easy and I know how to do it already. With ZFS tho, is that even doable and if it is, do I want to learn to do it with a new tool? From what I've seen, I'm not even sure you can do that. It seems you can expand by adding a drive but not replace or shrink.

As a example. I went back to a basic pool of two drives. I then recreated a dataset, or whatever it is called, and added for it to be encrypted. Since I did that, I get write errors. I can mount it just fine but that's it. I have no idea what the cause is, google isn't helping and to be honest, I'm thinking about target practice for the thing. It took me a good long while to set up the most basic thing. Adding encryption shouldn't be hard but apparently, it is more difficult than I thought. That or its so secure even I can't use it even with the password. lol

This is what I like about LVM and cryptsetup. I create a partition, or use a whole drive, as needed. I use cryptsetup to start the process with one drive. I then put ext4 on top of that. Then I add a second drive to that pv, add that to the volume group, extend the file system, all done. And it is encrypted as well. If I need to move from one drive to say a larger drive, no problem. Add drive, move data, remove old drive, extend file system if needed, all done. I have notes but I've done it a lot recently and have the general idea still glued to the back of my head. ;-) Thing is, ZFS isn't making sense to me so I'm clueless where to start when something goes wrong or even getting it to work period. I may try watching a video on ZFS and see if that helps. Maybe it will, maybe I'll still prefer LVM. After all, I'm a old dog. New tricks ain't easy. ROFL

If I bought a pre-made NAS, I'd just have to deal with it. I'd keep hammering until I got it to where I could backup my data. If I build a Raspberry thing, NAS software may not be my first choice. Maybe, just maybe, my light bulb will pop on and I can make sense of TrueNAS and ZFS. If so, fine. Right now, it's a lot of work with really no gain. I'm not able to backup my data yet. It's a brick, time consuming and confusing brick at that.

After supper, I'm rebooting and see if I can beat some sense into again. Seriously considering using dd and starting over from scratch. I can't figure out how to do that with the GUI thing. No delete button, that I can find anyway.

Dale

:-) :-)