I'm working with an up-to-date CENTOS-5 x86_64 machine connected via
ATA-over-Ethernet to a Coraid array. I have one drive in the array
that I want to use for manually transported offsite backups and I want
the drives to be encrypted. I've done a fair bit of reading but am
having trouble. Since I can't really find a single source of the
trouble, I thought it was time to ask for some input.
As I mentioned earlier, the drive is in an AoE array. It's setup as a
single drive (JBOD, no raid) and it properly appears as
/dev/etherd/e1.12; 12th drive in shelf 1. The drive capacity is 2TB.
I started like so:
# cryptsetup -y luksFormat /dev/etherd/e1.12
confirm and set password
# cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/etherd/e1.12 offsitefs
give it the password
# cryptsetup status offsitefs
just checking
No trouble up to here. Then, based on guidance found online, I ran dd like so.
# dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/mapper/offsitefs
come back tomorrow for the dd to be finished...
The first time I tried this, the machine almost immediately went to
its knees. Console and terminal sessions staggered to a crawl.
Messages on the console indicated the machine was out of memory. I
eventually gave up on it and cycled power.
I tried it again but was prepared with some terminals running top and
other monitors before I started the dd. I saw the dd process
consuming some CPU but not terribly much. This time, the dd evenually
completed. It took a couple days but it did eventually complete.
Next, I setup the filesystem like so:
# mke2fs -j -O dir_index /dev/mapper/offsitefs
create ext2+journal filesystem
This also brought the machine to its knees but after a couple
power-cycle iterations and a couple more days, it completed and I was
able to mount the drive and use it to a point. I was able copy most
of our backup files (tar.gz files) to the drive but the largest one
(over 300GB) failed. I didn't catch why as I'd let it chug along
without me again.
My first question is whether or not I've made some fundamental error
in the approach I'm taking. Should this work?
My second question is if I just need to add more RAM to the machine
(currently on 2GB).
Third, what additional information can I collect to narrow down the
issues I'm having?
Thanks in advance,
Paul
--
Paul Dugas â Dugas Enterprises, LLC â Computer Engineer â
Paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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