Yup! I'm doing it - reinstalling Gentoo *gasp*

Zucca

Stop!
Before you comment - the story so far:

I was on my PC just about to start working on some exercises (set up some virtual machines on a headless server)...
... when power outage strikes!
"Oh no! But wait! Lights are still on and so is everything else BUT my desktop PC."
*a cat peeps behind the PC* (yes, this literally happened like this)
So the culprit was a loose IEC C13/C14 power connector, which this cat pushed until it disconnected.
I dug my cables out and replace the power cord with one that felt more tight to push into the PSU.
I booted the PC but the boot hung up at initramfs stage unable to mount btrfs.
None of the usual operations helped, so the filesystem is trash. I must have a bad luck, since it's a six disk btrfs-raid10 (internally every file has two copies, each spread/striped on 1 to 3 disks).
As a last resort I attached my backup drive to my PC and used btrfs restore. After going trough several btrfs tree roots I managed to backup ~everything. At least most important things from /etc and /home
Yay me! (?)

Now that there is significant chance of corrupted data, I need to rebuild everything. This Is why I thought to just boot from latest Gentoo Live and reinstall my setup. I have config files backed up so there's not much to do but to glance the configs for errors from corruption and then run long emerge sessions. BUT, while I'm at this, I thought to

switch to stable (may need to adjust configs)
simplify my disk layout --> /boot on memstick maybe and all SSDs go full btrfs
maybe UEFI boot?

The most complicated part is to switch to stable. Lately I've noticed that I really don't need to run software that's so close to the edge. Despite If I need to have something from unstable I can adjust package.accept_keywords (for those packages that don't need dependencies from unstable), or if I change my mind switching back to unstable isn't much of a hassle.

So for the most part I (think I) know what I'm doing here but if you, fellow forum members, have any tips to point out about potential pitfalls, please say it here. :)
The first tip would be the obvious: backup more often. Yeah. I got lazy and trusted too much on btrfs-raid10 + snapshots (for user errors). :\
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..: Zucca :..
Gentoo IRC channels reside on Libera.Chat.
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P.Kosunen · Guru Joined: 21 Nov 2005 Posts: 309 Location: Finland

It was with internal RAID of Btrfs? Guess it's not ready yet for production use, might be better use kernels MD RAID 10 and Btrfs on top of it.

Zucca · Posted: Mon Sep 03, 2018 1:09 pm Post subject:

Only btrfs-raid5/6 are considered unstable.
That said, the whole btrfs isn't yet considered production ready. :|
That said (2), the, now broken, btrfs had survived other power outages just fine. Bad luck? Maybe.

The other option for my setup would be to use lvm2 and its internal raid. Then lay maybe ext4 over it. Since lvm2 uses mdraid it should be pretty stable. But I'm not sure how it can manage different sized disks and swapping them with bigger ones. I know btrfs can handle different combinations of disks seamlessly (automatic fs shrink, data balancing in case one drive is removed etc...). The keyword is "seamless". Btrfs is the "drobo" software equivalent in Linux world in terms of ease of usage (imo).
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..: Zucca :..
Gentoo IRC channels reside on Libera.Chat.
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Spargeltarzan · Guru Joined: 23 Jul 2017 Posts: 317

I would have a look for ZFS. For my datapool I use a 6 disk Raid-Z2. Don't take Z1 if you really care about your data, the statistical chance of data loss is reduced very significantly with 2 disks parity. (consider during resilvering one disk, all other disks become more stressed, what might be a reason for a second disk to fail)

You can use ZFS also for your rootpool, but it will take some time to install, custom initramfs, etc. Have a look at the work of fearedbliss, it creates also an initramfs for you.

I am also on stable and upgrade to ~amd64 for some packages only. If those packages pull in many ~amd64 dependencies you might want consider to virtualise or chroot your ~amd64, because otherwise you would have a too mixed stable/unstable system what is a receipt for blockers.
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Regards

Spargeltarzan

Notebook: Lenovo YOGA 900-13ISK: Gentoo stable amd64, GNOME systemd, KVM/QEMU
Desktop-PC: Intel Core i7-4770K, 8GB Ram, AMD Radeon R9 280X, ZFS Storage, GNOME openrc, Dantrell, Xen

Tony0945 · Posted: Tue Sep 04, 2018 1:53 pm Post subject:

I hear cat tastes just like chicken. :!:

Ant P. · Watchman Joined: 18 Apr 2009 Posts: 6920

Oof, sorry to hear that. I use Btrfs everywhere myself but it's only in single-disk configurations. I wouldn't trust it with a RAID (or ZFS for that matter), I'd always go with the old-fashioned solution.

P.Kosunen · Guru Joined: 21 Nov 2005 Posts: 309 Location: Finland

Ant P. · Watchman Joined: 18 Apr 2009 Posts: 6920

I've heard two major, recurring complaints about ZFS: the memory consumption, and having important parts of the system reliant on an out-of-tree driver. If I had enough storage to warrant using ZFS I'd probably go with BSD.

Spargeltarzan · Guru Joined: 23 Jul 2017 Posts: 317

When using ZFS for a rootpool the memory consumption shouldn't be the same as for a big datapool; don't forget you can configure ZFS also to use less ram, or more if you have plenty of it. I use it for a 12TB datapool (6x3TB Raid-Z2) and with default settings I am fine with the memory consumption, I even want to allow it to use more RAM because ZFS will benefit from it and the developers made quite a small memory limit to avoid users' afraids for RAM usage . As long as you don't want de-duplication you should be good to use normal consumer hardware. I used it with 8GB RAM, now I have 24GB because I virtualise more, but even with 8GB I was happy and my 24 GB are the reason why I want to allow more for ZFS.

Agree that with ZFS one relies on a package which is not included in the mainstream kernel, but this package itself is incredibly reliable with all of its end-to-end data checksumming, transactions, compression, caching, etc.
One needs to invest to setup the rootpool and finally be aware to create the initramfs when upgrading kernel - fearedbliss' work does the job, which users can automate in skripts. Skripts for upgrading Gentoo are a good idea anyway, so for using ZFS this are some little additionaly only.

And when we see what happened to a BTRFS user, ...... I would decide between ext4 or ZFS. Ext4 will boot without a doubt, in ZFS the user wins much, the prize is to monitor the skripts for the initramfs.
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Regards

Spargeltarzan

Notebook: Lenovo YOGA 900-13ISK: Gentoo stable amd64, GNOME systemd, KVM/QEMU
Desktop-PC: Intel Core i7-4770K, 8GB Ram, AMD Radeon R9 280X, ZFS Storage, GNOME openrc, Dantrell, Xen

Zucca · Posted: Thu Sep 06, 2018 1:55 pm Post subject:

How well zfs manages different sized disks on same pool nowdays?
My disks are between 120GB to 512GB. On my server I have from 640GB to 4TB.
I could consider zfs for my server, but last time I compared it to btrfs, it was a little too complicated to the use case. Also can you specify redundancy level in zfs (ie. how many disks can you lose before you may start losing data)?
The reason why I originally chose btrfs over zfs was the ease of use.
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..: Zucca :..
Gentoo IRC channels reside on Libera.Chat.
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HenryW · n00b Joined: 07 Sep 2018 Posts: 2

Power outages, is that normal in Finland?
How do you prevail, ups are only good for a few minutes.

Spargeltarzan · Guru Joined: 23 Jul 2017 Posts: 317

Zucca · Posted: Fri Sep 07, 2018 2:03 pm Post subject:

Zucca · Posted: Fri Sep 07, 2018 5:28 pm Post subject:

Now I have a problem with grub-mkconfig. Instead of using rEFInd I'd like to use grub for customisability reasons. And also I'd like to finally "learn" grub2.
However... grub-mkconfig creates a faulty grub.cfg.
I think the problem is that I don't have any partitions on the disks that are a part of the main btrfs pool. Only /boot (and ./efi/ inside it) is a seperate to avoid needlessly complicated setup.

I inspect grub-mkconfig by piping its output to less for example, and whatever I do this syntax error appears: