Tag Archives: linux

Raspberry Pi for Christmas

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I finally got a chance to open up my Christmas present to myself a few months late. I was excited all the same because it was a Raspberry Pi 400.

This is an incredible form factor for the raspberry Pi. It’s an all in one unit that fits into a keyboard. The keyboard is the computer. Just incredible.

Once you plug in power, the mouse and an HDMI monitor you have a working Linux computer running Raspbian. What to do next? Install Tailscale of course !!

Tailscale is a mesh VPN and allows you to link up all your devices in a private network no matter where they are. I’ve blogged about it here. So far I’ve linked up macOS, iOS, windows, Linux centos as well as Synology and QNAP NAS so now let’s add a raspberry Pi.

First things first let’s update the raspberry Pi because it’s been sitting in its box for a while. I didn’t have much luck with the add / remove software gui app (maybe because it was still getting on wifi) but after getting on the network I fired up apt to update all the things. 

sudo apt list --upgradeable

Using apt you can get a list of what is upgradeable. This was my first step the gui app didn’t list any software that had updates. A few months in a box and there should be a lot of updates. This is Linux we are talking about. 

 sudo apt update

Then it is just a matter of upgrading everything.

The next step is to install Tailscale. Read the instructions for Raspberry Pi on the Tailscale website. Before installing Tailscale we have to install other needed components and we have to tell Linux where to find the software. Similar to my adventures with CentOS Linux and yum you have to tell Raspbian Linux what to do with apt.

First we fetch the signing key and tell it where the repo is. Note: Always be mindful when using curl to download and install items or scripts. 

   curl -fsSL https://pkgs.tailscale.com/stable/raspbian/buster.gpg | sudo apt-key add -
   
curl -fsSL https://pkgs.tailscale.com/stable/raspbian/buster.list | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/tailscale.list

Just a few more steps now. Install the needed https components. Check with apt for updates then we can finally install Tailscale. 

sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install tailscale

The next step is to authorize Tailscale which is usually done with a login to our account we created the Tailscale network with. But this time I wanted to try a pregenerated keys from the Tailscale admin panel. 

sudo tailscale up --authkey tskey-gh37374737292a4847382

Now to test the new secure Tailscale mesh VPN set up I wanted to login to my MunkiReport web server.

Using the Tailscale cli to list all devices on my private network I found the IP. 

tailscale status

Find the ip of the server or device from the status list and connect.

Next I outputted the raspberry Pi cli history to a file and sent it to my iPhone where I edited this blog post with the WordPress app. 

history > raspberry-history.txt

tailscale file cp raspberry-history.txt iPhone:

I am looking forward to working on many fun projects with my raspberry Pi. After Tailscale is on there then it is easy to connect from my iPhone or from anywhere Tailscale is installed.

In the example below I used ssh shellfish app on my iPhone to connect.

Tailscale has great documentation and despite this I had a small misstep when I went to look at the install instructions. It defaulted to Ubuntu or misdetected my raspbian linux so I wondered for a second why it wasn’t working. I soon realized I’d copy pasted the wrong thing. Checked the drop down install menu for the raspberry Pi instructions and voila happy times.

Updating the P5 client on the Jellyfish

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You’ve successfully installed Archiware’s P5 backup and archiving software on your backup server following my previous blog posts and after it has run smoothly for a while you decided to upgrade the version of P5 on your server, but how do you do this on the Lumaforge Jellyfish storage? I’m glad you asked.

There are a couple of ways to update your P5 agent, and I will show you the built in way in Archiware’s P5 software. Surprisingly after many years of using P5 I have never used this method before. I’ve been using Munki for years to upgrade all software on my Mac clients including P5 and on Linux and Solaris servers I’ve just done it by hand. Install over top of the previous version and voila upgrade! But what if you didn’t want to ssh in as root and just install over top, what if there was a better way? I present to you the official “Update client” dialog box. It’s nice.

Update-p5-jellyish-1

Updating client software assumes you’ve set up clients in the P5 server clients section, This is needed when you want to use these server agents to designate their attached storage as a backup, archive or sync source. And also, this assumes you’ve updated your server.

P5 client update Jellyfish 2 Screen Shot 2018-08-06 at 4.40.03 PM

During the update process there are some nice dialog boxes to let you know what is happening.

P5 client update Jellyfish 4 Screen Shot 2018-08-06 at 4.44.34 PM

And afterwards you can test your client with a Ping test.

P5 client update Jellyfish 3 Screen Shot 2018-08-06 at 4.44.27 PM

Success! Looks like we’ve updated our client successfully. How wonderful. And no need to mess about in Terminal with a root shell. No telling what kind of trouble we could get into with those elevated privileges…. much safer this way.

Thanks Archiware for making this great software. I depend on it every day.

 

 

P5 on the Jellyfish: Archiving Gotchas

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TL;DR

Using Archiware P5 to Archive files to tapes is awesome, but watch out for little things you might miss, such as the path to the files and backing up your Archive Db.

P5 Archive on the Jellyfish

Using P5 Archive with the Lumaforge Jellyfish is a great way to preserve your digital archives. See this post for how to set up P5 on the Jellyfish

Using Archiware P5 for archiving makes sense. You want your completed projects and original camera footage on LTO tape. But how do you do archives? There are several different ways, and there be gotchas.

P5 Archive vs P5 Archive app

Using P5 Archive to manually archive completed projects to LTO tape is a process of logging into the server via a web browser and selecting the the project folder you want to archive to tape.

The completed project folder could be on the storage visible to the server or it could be storage the client sees. And that can make a difference. Where the storage is mounted is different on a Mac vs Linux. Its’ the difference between “/Volumes” and “/mnt”.

The same Jellyfish storage, either SMB or NFS, when seen on a Mac is mounted by default at “/Volumes” (this can be changed but for most people leave it at the default). But when archiving the storage via a Jellyfish client you will get “/mnt” path.

p5-smb-test2.png

Using the P5 Archive app, which is a Mac only companion application to P5 Archive, to run the archives you will see the storage archived as “/Volumes”.

This first Archiving gotcha is if you’re archiving the Jellyfish storage with the web application of P5 Archive you will have to find your footage and restore from the “/mnt” path vs if you’re archiving from the P5 Archive app which is running from a Mac and will see and store the footage using the “/Volumes” path.

All this to say that using both ways to archive may double up your footage in your archive which may be unintended. And from a restore in the web browser finding your footage may be confusing if you’re used to seeing it mounted in “/Volumes” and you actually find it under “/mnt”.

Note: the reason to use the P5 Archive app is because of the simplicity of right-clicking files in the finder which are on your storage and telling them to archive right then and there. Files are copied to tape then the original files on the storage are replaced with stub files. Right-click again to restore. Simple.

p5-archive-app-job-monitor.png

Backup your Archive!

Don’t forget to backup your archives. Or rather, your archive Db. A more recent addition is the ability to automate the backups on the Archive index, so don’t forget to enable it.

In the managed index section, choose your Archive index.

Set the target client where the backups are going and the backup directory. Choose a time and don’t forget to enable it (check the checkbox and hit apply before closing the windows).

Note: Repeat this setup for each Archive index you want to backup.

Archive Backup db setup3.png

Monitoring your Archive!

Don’t forget to enable email notifications for your P5 server to get your inbox full of status notifications and errors and other important stuff. But if you want to cut down on email notifications or you have multiple P5 servers (many different clients, perhaps), then you might want to check out Watchman Monitoring and the P5 plugin that is built-in). Find out easily when your tape pools are getting low, the tape drives needs to be cleaned, the support maintenance needs renewing etc. All in one dashboard. How convenient!

Maybe everything is going well…

Watchman-P5-info.png

Or maybe not!

Archiware-P5-Jobs-Watchman-tapes-required.png

 

Install P5 on the Jellyfish

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TL;DR

You can easily install Archiware P5 backup and archive software on a Lumaforge Jellyfish storage server. Once you’ve done that you can backup to tape or disk or the cloud directly or through another P5 server. Backups are good. Archive are good. Restores are better.

P5 install on the Jellyfish (Linux) How-To:

Note: Thank you to Lumaforge’s CTO Eric Altman who gave me some basic instructions to get me going.

Step One: Download the latest Linux P5 rpm file 

http://p5.archiware.com/download

p5-Linux-rpm.png

Copy the downloaded rpm file to the root folder of your SMB or NFS file share.

 

Step Two: Install the rpm file

Open Terminal and ssh into your Jellyfish. Login as root or as another appropriate user.

yum localinstall /mnt/Primary/ShareSMB/awpst554.rpm

 

Step Three: Browse to server on port 8000 to test that the server is up

e.g. https://jellyfish:8000

Or in Terminal and ssh into your Jellyfish and ping your P5 server

cd /usr/local/aw 

./ping-server

Pinging PresStore application servers...

  lexxsrv pid: 4840 (server is running)

  lexxsrv url: http://127.0.1.1:8000/login 

Pinged 1 from 1 application servers.

 

Step Four: Decide if the Jellyfish storage will be a P5 client or a server.

Note: If configuring the Jellyfish storage as the main P5 server you may wish to set up a user that only has access to the shared volumes.

For my set up the Jellyfish storage is going to act as a P5 client to a main P5 server on a Mac mini (yes, they are useful for something). The Mac mini is this case is the P5 server and is attached to theOverland tape library via a Promise SANlink2 Thunderbolt Fibre Channel adapter.

NEOs-T24-large-new.jpg

macmini-ports.png

 

Step Five: Set up the Jellyfish storage as a P5 client

Log into your P5 server and add the Jellyfish by the IP known to the P5 server. In this case the P5 server is connected via 1GB to the Jellyfish in Port 1.

P5 clients jellyfish setup1.png

Note: You could also choose to plug into the Jellyfish via a 10GB port, but in my setup these 10GB ports are reserved for the edit stations. You should choose what’s appropriate for your setup.

P5 clients jellyfish setup2.png

Resource utilization of P5 on the server is low, topping off generally at 1GB of RAM at peak usage. While this does technically take resources from ZFS caching, the impact should be super minimal.

In my observations the CPU never spiked too high while both serving NFS and SMB mount points to multiple Final Cut Pro X workstations even with backups or archive jobs going to tape at the same time.

jellyfish-cpu-resources-graph.png

More Jellyfish P5

See the follow up post on Archiving gotchas with the Jellyfish here