Darkavich's Daily Ramblings Ramblings of a Mad Sys-Admin

The data sync finally finished. A total of 6 days to transfer 845 gigs of data. Not really speedy, but at least it’s all back online. Most of what I was copying was Time Machine vaults, so I was not too concerned. I was able to point the mac clients at the new vaults and all the history was there. Hurray for small wonders.

Now I will work on creating my secondary data syncs so that it will be easier the next time. I will perform some speed tests to try and find out why the Drobo’s can’t get full speed.

The sync’s are almost done. I am only getting 5-8MB/s. The max is supposed to be 25MB/s. Clearly there is something wrong with one end or the other. At this point, I don’t really care until the sync is finished, then I will run some I/O tests to see if I can figure out where the bottleneck is. During the 1st sync, I ran out of disk space and had to add a third drive to the ReadyNAS. This drive was larger than the 1st two. I expected it to add it like the Drobo, but what Netgear calls X-Raid vs what Drobo calls X-Raid are two completely different animals.

On the Drobo, when you add a new drive, larger or smaller it will level the drives so that you get the max-possible space available. On the Netgear, it will level the drives so that they equal the same size as the smallest drive in the array. What this means is you have to have all the drives be the same size in the array if you want to use the max space. The good thing though is that once all the drives are the same, it will level them up to the max size again.

I am looking forward to putting this behind me and getting some real work done.

My first Drobo has completed it’s syncing. I have moved all the data off to another host. I broke my rule and went to fry’s for a new array. I picked up a ReadyNAS NV+. Nobody else had one in town. Man, sales tax has gone way up from the last time I have bought electronics.

I setup the system and started my rsyncs. This morning, I reviewed their status and ran into some permissions problems. Apparently, the group ID’s didn’t match so it could not “chgrp” the files. Not a big deal, just changed them on the local drive and re-sync’d. I ran into an interesting issue. I normally do a “du” to confirm that the right number of bytes copied over. I was getting larger values on the destination than the source and was scratching my head. It turns out that every directory was a larger size than the source. The source is an HPFS+ volume and the destination is an AFP volume. Apparently the AFP volumes have more attributes than HPFS+ so the inode needs to store more data and hence the file is bigger.

I only have two more volumes to copy but I now need to figure out how to move the Time Machine sparse bundles over to the ReadyNas as the volume for TimeMachine doesn’t appear to be a normal share.

After repairing the volume, I was still unable to mount the volume. Turns out the journal was corrupt. Again, I don’t get how this can happen. I was able to issue the following command:

% /System/Library/Filesystems/hfs.fs/hfs.util -N /dev/disk1s2
Turned off the journaling bit for /dev/disk1s2

I then re-ran the fsck option and then remount the volume. It complained again that the volume was corrupt, but this time let me mount the volume. I am now syncing the data over to a new set of drives so that I can re-purpose these drives.