Creating a Software Raid 1 Filesystem

Having accumulated a fair amount of media I wanted to accomplish two goals: i) create a mirror of my data so that I would not lose all my data in the case of a drive failure, and ii) allow my media to be accessed from anywhere on my network. After some research I decided against a hardware RAID due to potential compatibility issues between different devices, which I felt limited my options. Instead I went with a software RAID, in this particular case using LVM.

Setting up a Virtual Group and Physical Volume

Use pvdisplay to determine the size of the drive as you will need to keep 1 extent free for the Raid1 infrastructure. Here we are working with 2 physical drives with only one partition each: /dev/sda1 and /dev/sdb1.

This is definitely not the most efficient way to setup the filesystem. In this case I copied files from a Windows drive to one of the LVs and then converted to a mirror as I was unfamiliar with how this would all work initially. The order that I selected the drives was arbitrary.

Also in this particular case I wanted to change my original naming for the vg so I have shown that below as well for more breadth on the command usage possibilities:

sudo pvdisplay

sudo pvcreate /dev/sdb1

sudo vgcreate share /dev/sdb1

sudo pvdisplay

sudo fdisk -l

sudo vgrename share vg_share

sudo lvcreate --extents 1430790 -n share1 vg_share

Now the new volume share1 and be formatted and mounted like any physical drive/partition.

The Raid1 Mirror

Now to create the mirror of the existing drive:

sudo pvcreate /dev/sda1

sudo vgextend /dev/vg_share /dev/sda1

sudo pvdisplay

sudo lvdisplay

sudo lvconvert -m 1 --type raid1 /dev/vg_share/share1 /dev/sda1

You can track the progress of the mirror using sudo lvs -a vg_share

Monitoring the Health of the Drives

SmartMon setup for drive error detection:

Expanding the Capacity of the File Server

Setting up a Samba File Server

After getting the filesystem up and running, the next step was to get a file server and media server up and running. I'll focus this blog on the former, Samba in this case, and have a separate blog on the media server.

Installation and SELinux

The first step is ensuring that Samba is installed and running which is done easily via:

sudo dnf install samba

sudo systemctl enable smb

sudo systemctl enable nmb

sudo systemctl start smb

sudo systemctl start nmb

sudo setsebool samba_domain_controller on

sudo setsebool samba_share_nfs on

sudo setsebool samba_export_all_ro on

sudo setsebool samba_export_all_rw on

sudo firewall-cmd --add-service=samba

sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --add-service=samba

The Configuration File

Edit /etc/samba/smb.conf and ensure the settings shown as below if you want public access to some or all of your shared folders. Importantly, ensure that the interfaces row is commented out for it to be set automatically. If not, you may have issues with network discovery. Any entries here are shown for example purposes and would have to be changed for your system.

;interfaces = lo eth0 wlp2s0

hosts allow = 127. 192.168.0.

max protocol = SMB2

name resolve order = lmhosts host bcast

guest account = nobody

map to guest = Bad user

The name resolve order line ensures that the Samba server doesn't send multiple responses to share name resolution requests via different interfaces if you have both WiFi and Ethernet setup, for example.

In the shares section, use the following template for a public share:

comment = Name

path = /path/to/share

public = yes

guest ok = yes

read only = no

Finally we need to appease SELinux:

chcon -t samba_share_t /path/to/dir

Rygel Media Server

I also wanted to have DLNA/UPnP capability on my server which in this case I decided to use the Rygel Media Server in Gnome as this is already installed with Fedora.

Install GStreamer Add-Ons

Rygel is built on the GStreamer framework so the first step is to ensure all the GStreamer addons are installed. This step involves adding the appropriate RPM URL as the Fedora repositories don't support all media types, and then installing via DNF:

sudo dnf install http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-25.noarch.rpm

sudo dnf install gstreamer*

Configuring Rygel

Next edit /etc/rygel.conf to:

• Add the appropriate interface (use ip addr to confirm)
• Change the media server titles (optional in 3 locations)
• Edit file URIs to point to your media directories

Setup Systemd Service

Create the following as /usr/lib/systemd/system/rygel.service. As this will be run in the global session it needs to be in the system folder even though there may already be a similar file in the user folder for systemd:

[Unit]

Description=Rygel DLNA/UPnP server

After=syslog.target

[Service]

User=youruser

Group=yourgroup

ExecStart=/usr/bin/rygel

Restart=on-failure

[Install]

WantedBy=multi-user.target

Use the User and Group attributes to run Rygel as a user with limited privelages as it's not recommended to run the service as root. Finally start the server with:

sudo systemctl start rygel

sudo systemctl enable rygel

Note, that if for any reason your media export get corrupted, try deleting ~/.cache/rygel/mediaexport.db in the home directory of the user specified in your rygel.service file.