Issues with multiple disks and R63/Unslung6

[pedxing]

I was experiencing really odd behavior when trying to set up a Firefly server using an NSLU2 running Unslung6. I was trying to boot from a flash disk and save my music on a hard disk, but following the recommendations would cause Unslung (and specifically rc.bootbin) to mount over the conf partition on the hard disk every time I rebooted, effectively killing my shares.

I documented this behavior and a working solution on the NSLU2 wiki in the R63DiskBehaviour page.

Hope this helps!
Ped Xing

[fizze]

erm, youo are talking about unslung v6 straight? or 6.8?

weird. Almsot erveryone here has unslung to a flash stick, and has an ext3 HD attached to port 1 to store it’s data.

I have the same setup, works like a charm.
🙄

[davesanti]

I am unslung to flash on port 1 and have HDD on port 2 seems to work fine so far..

Dave

[pedxing]

I’m using 2.3R63-uNSLUng-6.8-beta on a brand new NSLU2. I experienced this same behavior after three different tries from a completely fresh install (I wiped sysconf with fis erase even). It is totally repeatable for me, every time. Do a df and let me know if it looks different for you from the one I posted in R63DiskBehaviour, ok?

Ped Xing

[sansp00]

Does your method so the drive properly formatted on your Linksys web page ? This was the biggest drawback AFAIK with method similar to this one in the past …

I had similar issues with this and decided to move my HDD to NTFS because
1) Avoid 2 natively formatted drive issues
2) Was able to take the drive and plug it in any Windows box anytime
3) FAT was too restrictive

My only issue now is that scp and rsync do not work in the new setup, I always get a connection lost ?!? Arghh This is another issue I have to tackle now.
Patrick S.

[pedxing]

The hard drive shows up as “Not Formatted” on the web page.

…BUT…

By mounting it under the flash drive, you can add and administer shares through the web page to your heart’s content. You just specify the mount point as a “prefix”…

ie, mine is mounted at /share/flash/data/sdb, so I just add “/sdb/” before whatever share I want to create. Want a new music share? Just create it on the web and specify “/sdb/music” and it’s running.

The only real issue is user shares – they’re always created under /share/xxx/data, so they “live” on the flash drive not the hard drive unless you move them with a symlink…

Ped Xing

[sansp00]

Thats what I thought …
I did the same thing with the shares 🙂 Found it was the easiest workaround.
Won’t need to do it anymore since Im NTFS now

FYI
I finally solved my issue with SCP. SSH worked fine but SCP and RSYNC where failing. Found out it was because I forced the bash shell in /etc/password. Found the info at the openssh page and they provided a test to try out. The test worked properly, so I decided to try it out anyway. Looks like SCP gets messed up if the user is in another shell than sh.

Thanks for hint on the natively formatted drive, you should indicate (if not done) that the drive will still appear as not formatted on the slug wiki, just in case you confuse somebody.

Patrick S.

[fizze]

@pedxing wrote:

The hard drive shows up as “Not Formatted” on the web page.

…BUT…

By mounting it under the flash drive, you can add and administer shares through the web page to your heart’s content. You just specify the mount point as a “prefix”…

ie, mine is mounted at /share/flash/data/sdb, so I just add “/sdb/” before whatever share I want to create. Want a new music share? Just create it on the web and specify “/sdb/music” and it’s running.

The only real issue is user shares – they’re always created under /share/xxx/data, so they “live” on the flash drive not the hard drive unless you move them with a symlink…

Ped Xing

WTF? You did format it with the slugs original web interface though?
NTFS is highly disrecommended, by the way.
My HD shows up like it should be, and everything worked like a charm.

@ sansp00: for SSH repectively SCP to work the user also needs to have a proper shell, which R63 doesn’t create by default (/dev/sh), so login isnt allowed.

[sansp00]

WTF? You did format it with the slugs original web interface though?
Nope, the wiki indicates that the drive is formatted with the linux commands, thus the partitions created by the interface are missing.

NTFS is highly disrecommended, by the way.
I know that, but it’s been the most stable setup I had yet. My OS still runs on a natevely formatted stick, which does help a lot.

My HD shows up like it should be, and everything worked like a charm.
Do you use a flash disk on port 1 ?

My problem was that the HDD got mounted b4 the flash disk with the OS. I got told that I did not unslunged properly as a diagnostic. Which is total crap since I followed the exact instructions which I reposted afterwards and nobody was able to tell what went wrong. It ain’t like it was the first time either, I’ve tried like 4 or 5 different setups with mixed results.

Patrick S.

[fizze]

Aah, ok now I got your problem. This is a known issue.

You should have formatted your hard disk through the slugs webinterface to avoid this. Now you have to create some diversion scripts to avoid the automount-failure. :-/

So, just to clarify, you have one ext3 partition on your HD, but 2 ext3 parts on your usb stick? Workaround is to copy all the /opt directory and whatnot gets linked to the usb stick to the HD.
Anyhow, if you can find the right script to divert from, it should be easy to unmount the HD and remount the flash’s /conf partition to the correct location.

The nslu2-linux wiki should provide all the needed info iirc.

[Author]

Posts