USB Drives
Last updated
Last updated
Blue usb ports: usb 3.0. Black usb ports: usb 2.0.
NOTE: You must change the boot options in the system BIOS after adding a USB device. Upon the next restart, the Antsle will try to boot from the USB and fail. If you did not configure IPMI you can connect a keyboard and monitor to the Antsle. Power up and hit <Del> at the SuperMicro splash screen to enter the bios settings. Arrow over to the 'Boot' menu and select 'USB Device BBS Priorities' and set the boot option to 'disable' for the usb device. Save settings and exit.
There are three main ways to utilize external USB drives with the Antsle.
Add Zpool storage
Give an antlet exclusive access to a USB drive
Mount USB storage in the edgeLinux file system
You can use additional external USB storage for antlets and virtual drives.
First ssh to the Antsle
To see the existing drives run
The drives are named: sda, sdb...
Plug in your usb drive and run 'lsblk' again to see the name of the new drive - it should be the last drive in the list. Now we want to prepare the drive for zfs by removing the partitions on the drive. This will destroy all data on the USB drive!
where 'sdX' is the name of your usb drive
this will warn, any data on the drive will be destroyed. If this is ok with you, answer Yes. then quit 'parted'
Now lets create a zpool on the drive
Replace POOL_NAME with a name to identify the new zpool. Replace 'sdX' with the actual drive name POOL_NAME must be the same in each part of the commands. ex:
Now you can refresh antman and create a new antlet or virtual drive on this zpool. You will see the new zpool in the 'zpool' dropdown.
If you want mirrored usb disks repeat the 'parted' steps for the second drive but run the following zpool commands.
sdX and sdY need to be replaced by the actual drive names displayed in 'lsblk' Replace POOL_NAME with the desired zpool name
You do not need to update /etc/fstab. zfs will take care of mounting the zpool if the Antsle is rebooted. Refresh antMan and you should see the new zpool.
At the Antsle's command line list the zpools
Then destroy the zpool
Remove the directory the zpool was mounted to
Now if you refresh antman and try to create a new antlet, the zpool dropdown will no longer list the usb zpool.
Note: Currently USB Pass through only works with KVM antlets
USB Passthrough allows you to assign an external USB drive to a specific antlet. Enter the antlet details page by clicking the name of the antlet
Then choose the 'USBs' tab and select your device.
Be sure to 'Stop' then 'Start' the antlet.
This can be useful to store installation .iso files or store backups of other files without filling up the root '/' partition. List the existing drives with the command:
The drives are named: sda, sdb... Find your device and partition number in the list. Create a directory to mount the USB in
Mount the USB
replace 'sdXN' with the device(X) and partition number(N) with those of your USB as seen in the 'lsblk' command.
Note: For edgeLinux 0.13 or prior, if you get an NTFS unknown file system error, you can install NTFS support with the command: emerge sys-fs/ntfs3g
Check that you can see the files on the USB with
To make this mount persist after a reboot, we need to add the mount info to the 'fstab' file.
First lets get the UUID and file system type from the USB drive using the blkid command. In this example the drive name is sdc as found in the lsblk command
The output will include both the UUID and file system TYPE. The output may have other info like a LABEL.
We can now update the /etc/fstab file to mount the USB when booted.
Make a backup of /etc/fstaband open it for editing
Add the following line to the end of the file using your UUID, mount point and file system type.
To un-mount the USB (the command is 'u'mount not 'un'mount)
