Home Made SAN
It has been a while between posts but I felt I needed to post this information because it took me so long to figure it out.
A couple weeks ago my WD 2TB NAS died. It was out of warranty so I could not get a replacement. I decided I was going to try and salavage the hard drive and make my own SAN/NAS out of an old HP DC 7700 I had laying about.
After some exhausting work I was able to crack open the WD case (it’s never going to house another HD unfortunately LOL) and retrieve my 2TB hard drive.
While this was happening I built a VM using the newely download Open Filer 2.99.1. The install the VM world went well. It took me about 20 mins to install and another 20 mins for me to presetn an ISCSI target to my windows 2008 server.
So I then decided to put the Hard drive into my HP desktop and installed Open Filer 2.99.1
Everything went well until I went to create some physical volumes. It just plain refused. After doing some reading I figured it might be the drive itself. So I installed Ubuntu on the 80GB hard drive and formatted the 2TB hard drive. Logged in when it finished installing and saw the entire volume. Nope not the hard drive.
So I reinstalled OF. Still the same thing. This time I read some forums where someone created a smaller PV. I tried making a 560GB PV and hey presto it worked.
Cool I’m making head way. Wrong. Next I could not create any more PV’s.
Ok so now I am getting frustrated because I have 1.5TB of disk sitting being wasted. So I go and speak to my good friend “Uncle Google”. After reading many posts and learning a lot about disk manipulation in Linux I found an answer that worked for me.
- Log in as root at the CLI (I SSH’d in but it would work from the console obviously)
- I used fdisk /dev/sdb -l to show me the partitions. It showed me
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 63 1072451204 536225571 8e Linux LVM
- I then ran cfdisk to create a small partition. I made it about 96GB in size.
- I selected the [Type] and chose option 8E for the disk Id type.
- I selected [Write] to commit the change.
- Once the change was done I quit out of cfdisk.
- I then used partprobe -s to re-read the partition table.
- When this was done I was able to use the pvcreate /dev/sdb2 -v (-v so I got the maximum information)
- This created the volume.
- When I then used the web browser to open the GUI and go to Volumes, low and behold there was the disk.
- I then repeated the process to get my the other 1.3TB of disk.
It has taken several days work but I know have a cool SAN that I have been able to carve disk out and present to my servers and PC’s using iscsi.
My next project is to get a better case and load it up with some disks in a RAID to give me redundancy and really have a cool SAN for home.
