Greyhole UI App Transition Guide

This guide will provide a step by step transition from the manual Greyhole installation to using the Greyhole UI application for Amahi 7 or greater. Going forward, this is the preferred method of installing Greyhole.

Disclaimer

While following this guide should not result in any data loss, we cannot guarantee that it won't cause any problems with your HDA. Please proceed with caution!

The Greyhole UI application does not support previous manual Greyhole installations, meaning all your current Greyhole settings will be overwritten. You will have to reconfigure it using the dashboard.

NOTE: If you would still like to setup your Greyhole pool manually, please see Manual Greyhole Setup.

Backup Settings

We need to back up or note our current settings prior to installing the application. There are many ways to do this. Lets keep it simple and copy the /etc/greyhole.conf file to a share.

As root user:

cp /etc/greyhole.conf /var/hda/files/docs

Housekeeping

For those who did the manual install, there were two lines manually added to the Extra Parameters field for each share that was Greyhole enabled.

dfree command = /usr/bin/greyhole-dfree
vfs objects = greyhole

Please ensure these are removed before proceeding with the next section. They will be automatically added by the application to each share. but not reflected in the Extra Parameters field.

NOTE: If you are using the Mount Shares Locally service, as a precaution recommend you stop it as well.

service mount_shares_locally stop

Adding drives

If you need to add additional drives to your HDA for Greyhole, please follow the adding a second hard drive guidance for Amahi 7. The Amahi Disk Wizard application provides a Dashboard UI for this process in Amahi 8 or greater ONLY.

If you have completed the addition of the drive via disk wizard you then need to add the drive to the storage pool. Once that has been completed run fsck. To balance the data among old and new drives you should first run the following command to clean up trash

 greyhole -a  

Then run this command to balance the drives data.

 greyhole -l

Install Application

The Greyhole UI application has a convenience fee, therefore you will need to log in to your Amahi control panel and purchase the application.

Once you have done so, it will appear in your Available Applications list. If it does not, try refreshing the page. Select it and install as you would any Amahi application.

Configure Greyhole

NOTE: Ensure you have enabled Advanced Settings before proceeding.

Now that you have the application installed, select the Drive Pooling tab.

• Storage Pool

The first thing you will want to do is select the appropriate drives for the storage pool.

If you are unsure which drives were used, you can open the greyhole.conf file we saved in our Docs share in any editor and consult your previous configuration.

• Shares

Select the share that will use the Storage pool. Don't forget to choose number of file copies. Leave as - (dash) if none are desired.

Consult the greyhole.conf file if needed to see what shares and number of copies were previously used.

• Status

You will see the status of the Greyhole Daemon.

If it says 'idle', select Run FSCK

Verify Results

You can monitor activity as always in the Greyhole log.

tail -f /var/log/greyhole.log

Recommend you verify that everything is working properly. If not, refer to the Greyhole Troubleshooting area for assistance.

NOTE: If you stopped Mount Shares Locally script earlier, you can now safely start it.

service mount_shares_locally start

Additional Settings

There are limited settings configured using the Greyhole UI application. If you have additional settings you configured manually in the past, see Greyhole Advanced Options for guidance on adding those to Greyhole.

Tips and Best Practices

Refer to Greyhole Tips for additional guidance.

Troubleshooting

If you have any problems, please submit a bug report or stop by the Amahi IRC channel #amahi for real-time assistance.