2024-11-20

Argon EON NAS

So after much dithering I bought a Raspberry Pi 4B and an Argon EON NAS enclosure. I also bought a couple of Seagate IronWolf 4TB hard disks. Yes, quite an expense, it’ll take many years to pay off, but that’s OK.

Time to document what I’m trying to do.

Internet Connection

This was a nasty one, it just didn’t work. It would connect once to Wi-Fi and that’s it. Sunk a few hours on that before I realised:

wpa_supplicant is irrelevant to Raspberry Pi Bookworm (at least without modifications)
I still don’t know what the problem is.

Eventually set my router to “legacy mode” (Wi-Fi 5) and it seems to be working, at least for now. I’m not very happy with it, maybe I’ll get a network dongle.

Speed Checks

Installed iperf3 on the Raspberry Pi and on my computer, and checked the speed (internal network). Got:

[ ID] Interval           Transfer     Bitrate         Retr
[  5]   0.00-10.00  sec  48.3 MBytes  40.5 Mbits/sec   85             sender
[  5]   0.00-10.02  sec  46.5 MBytes  38.9 Mbits/sec                  receiver

It is what it is, but hopefully it should be fine for a network drive.

Argon Software

Installed:

$ curl https://download.argon40.com/argoneon.sh | bash

It says:

Use 'argon-config' to configure device

Let’s try that

`argon-config`

I just realised that I did not install a battery for the RTC. I should really do that before setting it…

There are some options for fan, IR, OLED, etc. But all of that can wait.

Storage

The drives are available:

$ lsblk
NAME        MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sda           8:0    0  3.6T  0 disk
sdb           8:16   0  3.6T  0 disk
mmcblk0     179:0    0 29.7G  0 disk
├─mmcblk0p1 179:1    0  512M  0 part /boot/firmware
└─mmcblk0p2 179:2    0 29.2G  0 part /

I can also see them with fdisk:

$ sudo fdisk -l
...
Disk /dev/sda: 3.64 TiB, 4000787030016 bytes, 7814037168 sectors
Disk model: SATA
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes


Disk /dev/sdb: 3.64 TiB, 4000787030016 bytes, 7814037168 sectors
Disk model: sata
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes

The plan is to keep the OS on the SD card and the NAS data on the drives, using RAID 1.

But first… let’s try using etckeeper.

### etckeeper

https://ubuntu.com/server/docs/etckeeper

$ sudo apt install etckeeper

This should also create a git repository for /etc, but I don’t think it did. So I’ll do it myself:

$ cd /etc
$ sudo etckeeper init

That’s about it for now.

### mdadm

To create the RAID device,

$ sudo apt install mdadm

Then:

$ sudo mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md0 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sda /dev/sdb

mdadm: Note: this array has metadata at the start and
    may not be suitable as a boot device.  If you plan to
    store '/boot' on this device please ensure that
    your boot-loader understands md/v1.x metadata, or use
    --metadata=0.90
mdadm: size set to 3906886464K
mdadm: automatically enabling write-intent bitmap on large array
Continue creating array?

I’m not planning to boot from the RAID device, so just continue.

mdadm: Defaulting to version 1.2 metadata
mdadm: array /dev/md0 started.

Apparently version 1.x of the metadata sits at the start and could interfere with booting from the disk. Version 0.9 sits at the end and allows booting from the disk (if booting from RAID was possible - I think it isn’t).

### RAID 1

RAID 1 keeps the two disks in sync. It takes some time for them to get in sync:

$ cat /proc/mdstat

Personalities : [raid1]
md0 : active raid1 sdb[1] sda[0]
      3906886464 blocks super 1.2 [2/2] [UU]
      [>....................]  resync =  0.2% (10624256/3906886464) finish=556.7min speed=116625K/sec
      bitmap: 30/30 pages [120KB], 65536KB chunk

unused devices: <none>

I think that this means that it’ll take several hours for the disks to be in sync. That’s OK though - it’ll happen in the background and I don’t have any data on them yet (not even a file system).

Save the configuration:

$ sudo mdadm --detail --scan | sudo tee -a /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf
ARRAY /dev/md0 metadata=1.2 name=argon:0 UUID=fada8382:82aae7d0:bd4b0af6:6847b4e5

This should re-assemble the RAID on startup.

For now I just need to wait for the disks to sync. Once that’s done, I’ll start adding the file system and expose it using samba.

OpenMediaVault

Instead of adding a file system, I noticed that the instructions for the NAS tell me to install OpenMediaVault. Fine, let’s install it:

$ wget -O - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/OpenMediaVault-Plugin-Developers/installScript/master/install | sudo bash

That installs a lot of stuff. It’s nice to just download a shell script from the internet and run it with sudo.

Two Months Later

A lot of missing detail here, but it’s been running nicely for 2 months. I’m now backing up to S3 daily, and it’s all good so far.