Hi. I have gotten the drobo-utils to work, but I can not find a way to make a partition table under Linux. Parted says that there is a bad label on the disk. Can anyone help?
I know I’m likely too late for you, but I just spent all week on this. So I’ll post it for others to reuse.
Use a Windows laptop, connect via USB. Update the Drobo firmware BEFORE you stick you disks in (I got caught with slow disks – new WD 2TB drives uses 4k blocks and you need updated firmware for faster IO). Configure IP address of NIC cards, etc. Disconnect USB. Reboot DROBO.
Once the disks are in, partition the drobo LUNs (still using Windows laptop – may not need USB, as ethernet port may be used at this point to configure). Drobo software works wells on Windows. Create LUNs, just don’t format them. I stuck to 2TB for ext3 – I don’t trust 8TB the way it seems unsupported.
Once this is done, download the latest version of drobom (0.6.2.2). Ubuntu 10.04 Server doesn’t have recent builds in it’s repository, and the -s option is missing (needed – see below).
Have a good read here:
http://drobo-utils.sourceforge.net/
You have to see the drobo first.
drobom -v 16 status
If you don’t have drobos discovered (mine didn’t work), run the following command:
drobom -s Drobo status
Now it should work:
drobom status
Find out what the properties you need for iSCSI:
iscsiadm --mode discovery --type sendtargets --portal <DROBO_iSCSI_IP_HERE>
Connect iSCSI (check the target – it’s partially based on your DROBO serial number):
iscsiadm --mode node --targetname iqn.2005-06.com.datarobotics:elite.tdb1234567890.id1 --portal <DROBO_iSCSI_IP_HERE> --login
Just so you know, to disconnect is almost the same command:
iscsiadm --mode node --targetname iqn.2005-06.com.datarobotics:elite.tdb1234567890.id1 --portal <DROBO_iSCSI_IP_HERE> --logout
To make sure it doesn’t come up on a reboot:
iscsiadm -m node --targetname iqn.2005-06.com.datarobotics:elite.tdb1234567890.id1 -o update -n node.startup -v manual
Check “/var/log/messages” to see where the drive is located (sd[a-z]). Mine showed up as “sdc”.
Aug 9 15:21:22 thor kernel: [ 4193.853117] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdc] Attached SCSI disk
Good to go. Run the format command drobom provides. Place your drive letter in there:
drobom -d /dev/sdc format ext3
When you assign the mount point in fstab, do it by UUID not device. Look for the drive that references your device…
ls -la /dev/disk/by-uuid
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2010-08-11 16:03 16A6BA93A6BA72BB -> …/…/sdd1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2010-08-11 14:31 d686328d-9d9c-4844-ae25-0f0e7b00845e -> …/…/sdc1
( note: sdd is an NTFS-3g file system, sdc is ext3)
Stick it in /etc/fstab (drobo_backup is NTFS, drobo_linux is ext3):
UUID=16A6BA93A6BA72BB /mnt/drobo_backup ntfs-3g noauto,rw,dmask=007,fmask=117,locale=en_US.utf8
UUID=d686328d-9d9c-4844-ae25-0f0e7b00845e /mnt/drobo_linux ext3 noauto,rw,suid,dev,exec,nouser,async 0 0