Cockpit¶

Cockpit summary

Install cockpit

sudo apt update

sudo apt install cockpit cockpit-storaged -y

Enable it

sudo systemctl enable --now cockpit.socket

Cockpit will now be running on port 9090.

For SMB file sharing first install samba

sudo apt install samba

Enable it on startup

sudo systemctl enable smbd

And start it

sudo systemctl start smbd

You'll need curl if you don't already have it

sudo apt install curl

Then add the file sharing plugin

curl -sSL https://repo.45drives.com/setup | sudo bash
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install cockpit-file-sharing

You'll need to set a samba password for your user

sudo smbpasswd -a thomas

Restart samba

sudo systemctl restart smbd nmbd

Creating a RAID 1 array with two disks¶

Go to the storage tab. You should see all the drives on the right and nothing under devices. Click the menu button to create a RAID device.

To view raid devices in the cmd line

cat /proc/mdstat

You can also see the array with

sudo mdadm --detail --scan

The lsblk command will show you all your devices and you should see the raid1 array here as well

lsblk

You can mount the drive manually with

sudo mount /dev/md## /mnt/raid

to unmount

sudo umount /mnt/raid

Simulating failing a drive¶

Note that I reference the array first, then a disk from the array.

sudo mdadm --fail /dev/md127 /dev/sdb

After a drive fails, you can remove it from cockpit or from the command line

sudo mdadm --remove /dev/md127 /dev/sdb

After removing the drive. You can turn off your machine, add another drive, then add it to the RAID array in Cockpit. It will then mirror the drive.

ZFS Instructions¶

For ZFS storage pool, install the utils

sudo apt update
sudo apt install zfsutils-linux

You'll need to install git

sudo apt install git

then follow instructions here: https://github.com/45Drives/cockpit-zfs-manager

Make sure to follow the instructions to enable Windows to see the snapshots.

I had to explicitly set the the snapdir to true

zfs set snapdir=visible tank/immich

Copy zfs folder to cockpit

git clone https://github.com/45drives/cockpit-zfs-manager.git
sudo cp -r cockpit-zfs-manager/zfs /usr/share/cockpit

So that you can view the snapshots in windows in the mapped drive you need to add the to the samba config

sudo nano /etc/samba/smb.conf

shadow: snapdir = .zfs/snapshot
shadow: sort = desc
shadow: format = %Y.%m.%d-%H.%M.%S
shadow: localtime = yes 
vfs objects = acl_xattr shadow_copy2

You can take snapshots in Cockpit manually, but unfortunately it does not provide a cron to this.

Fortunately, Sanoid can maintain snapshots for us quite easily.

Follow the installation instructions here: https://github.com/jimsalterjrs/sanoid/blob/master/INSTALL.md

I went ahead and created the following config at /etc/sanoid/sanoid.conf

[tank/immich]
use_template = production

[template_production]
    frequently = 0
    hourly = 36
    daily = 30
    monthly = 3
    yearly = 0
    autosnap = yes
    autoprune = yes

You can see other templates in the repo: https://github.com/jimsalterjrs/sanoid/blob/master/sanoid.conf

If you want to view the timer, you can use

sudo systemctl list-timers sanoid.timer

Now you're up and running and have snapshots!

Simulating disk failure¶

For zfs, this is called "offline". We can do this in Cockpit but simply using the menu option and clicking offline. This will change the state to FAULTED for this disk, and make our storage Pool Degraded. If we had another disk at the ready, we could go ahead and replace the disk, but alas we do not. So let's go ahead and detach it. We actually get a healthy status now that we've detached the failed drive.

Let's shut down the machine and try to replace the disk. I'm going to add yet another disk for simulating replication.

You can easily add the new disk to the pool which will default it to a Mirror.

For replication¶

By default, we already have syncoid install from our Ubuntu installation.

I'm going to create a new pool called backup and use "disk" mode for a single disk, then format the 4^th drive. To replicate, I can simply run

sudo syncoid -r tank backup

Nginx Proxy¶

Make sure you configure the allowed domains and needed nginx configuration here: https://garrett.github.io/cockpit-project.github.io/external/wiki/Proxying-Cockpit-over-NGINX