RogerBW's Blog

Building a File Server 4: maintenance 18 October 2017

In this (probably final) part of the series on building a file server, I'll talk about keeping the thing running once you've got it. This is specific to the ZFS approach.

Scrub once a week or so (this reads every piece of data to make sure they're still legible). I think Debian zfs packages now come with a once-a-month crontab; that could work too.

zpool scrub storage

Take snapshots at least every day, quite possibly more often. This is your backup in case you accidentally delete or overwrite a file. I keep seven days of snapshots, deleting the oldest one just after the latest one's been added. You can do this on the entire pool, recursing down the individual filesystems on it (which is what these commands do), or to individual filesystems. Snapshot data are accessible within the filesystem under .zfs/snapshots/NAME.

zfs snapshot -r storage@NEWNAME
zfs destroy -r storage@OLDNAME

If you have a second server also running ZFS, you can do incremental backups (e.g. from the previous day's snapshot to the one you've just taken). Look into zfs send and zfs receive for that; the syntax will vary based on your needs. I end up doing

zfs send -R -I LASTSNAP FILESYSTEM@THISSNAP |ssh BACKUPSERVER "/sbin/zfs receive -F FILESYSTEM"

Check the health of the pool every so often (use a Nagios plugin, or look at the output of zpool status). When you need to replace a disc, in theory hot-swap bays let you do this without downtime, but in practice it's always easier to shut the machine down for the hardware swap.

Use your list of disc serial numbers (see, that's why I told you to make it) to confirm that you're pulling the right disc. Drop in the new one, reboot, and:

zpool replace -o ashift=12 storage pci-0000…

where the last parameter is the disc ID shown by zpool status as having failed. ZFS will start resilvering at once (copying data back onto that disc).

When it's time to expand your array, put in another slab of discs, get the new path IDs, and:

zpool add -o ashift=12 storage raidz2 /dev/disk/by-path/pci-0000…

When doing a replace or add with new discs, you may get a warning that a disc "does not contain an EFI label but it may contain partition information in the MBR". The easiest way round this is to use the -f flag, though the usual provisos apply; make sure you're not overwriting a disc with data on it.

Tags: computing

See also:
Building a File Server 1: planning
Building a File Server 2: hardware
Building a File Server 3: software

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