DanielM Posted August 30, 2020 Share Posted August 30, 2020 Hi. I've just bought a Rock Pi 4a board, I plan to use it as home server, running stuff like Owncloud, Postfix/Dovecot, Apache, pihole, OpenHab, Emby server etc. I'm thinking of running Armbian on it, but I have absolutely no experience of this dist (I've been managing Debian/Ubuntu servers for many years though). It's going to run headless. I'm wondering what would be the best way to set up disks from an Armbian point of view. My main reason for buying Rock Pi is for the M.2 port, I'm going to put my data on a M.2 disk. Booting from M.2 seems to be tricky though so I'm thinking about booting from micro SD card. I don't want to put any important data or any data that is written a lot on the card though, so my question is what the best way to do this would be? 1: I just keep / on the sd card and mount /var and maybe /home from the M.2 disk. 2: I just boot from the sd card and keep /boot there and keep the entire / on the M.2 disk. (not sure how to set this up though, any good guides?) 3: Any better suggestion? /Daniel 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Igor Posted August 30, 2020 Share Posted August 30, 2020 4 hours ago, DanielM said: but I have absolutely no experience of this dist https://docs.armbian.com/#what-is-armbian 4 hours ago, DanielM said: that is written a lot on the card If you only plan to boot from SD card, that's not a problem. Even running system from it is not that critical unless you are doing some hardcore IO. We used to run this forum from SD card (in the early days of the project, when the load was low) 4 hours ago, DanielM said: 3: Any better suggestion? Use the tool we are providing since the day one and don't touch mount. It will leave boot on SD card and root on wherever you want. https://docs.armbian.com/User-Guide_Getting-Started/#how-to-install-to-emmc-nand-sata-usb 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Werner Posted August 30, 2020 Share Posted August 30, 2020 If you have already experience with Debian/Ubuntu you should not notice much of a difference. Armbian trying to provide as much as "vanilla" experience as possible while adding some tweaks for the individual hardware under the hood. For moving the operating system you can use the sata-nand-install script which is included in any Armbian image. Take note that the sd card might still need to be present since the bootloader will be store there that points to the ssd. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DanielM Posted August 31, 2020 Author Share Posted August 31, 2020 Thanks a lot both of you! I kinda suspected there would be a handy tool for it, just didn't find it in the documentation :-) Guess that means I'll just buy the smallest A1 SD card I can find and have it boot from that. Another newbie question: I see that some of the software I'm planning to use is available via the software menu in armbian-config. Is it better to use this install option than an ordinary apt-get install? Can't see much about what the differences are... /Daniel 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Werner Posted August 31, 2020 Share Posted August 31, 2020 9 minutes ago, DanielM said: Can't see much about what the differences are... Easy answer: There is none It's just a tool for lazy people and newbies to make things a bit easier. But if you are familiar with apt and installing 3rd party software via scripts and stuff go ahead and skil the config tool. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
meesha Posted August 31, 2020 Share Posted August 31, 2020 23 hours ago, Werner said: For moving the operating system you can use the sata-nand-install script which is included in any Armbian image. Take note that the sd card might still need to be present since the bootloader will be store there that points to the ssd. Guys, on the topic, but with my own variation of the problem. Got me a rockpi 4b which I run headless. Since I have a history with many SBCs of other well-known manufacturer and a lot of microsd cards that died on me, I immediately moved my armbian install into usb attached ssd, but was not aware of that fine tool that already comes with the system. I just rsync'ed the root filesystem and changed the rootdev in armbianenv.txt. It works, but had issue with some of last major updates - the system couldn't boot. I had to change the rootdev to point the microsd card back, update the system on the card, and then change the rootdev again to ssd. Then it booted (but still had to manually install kernel modules for some devices to work). Now, the question - is there any way to tell the updater that it should change firmware (i.e. kernel image) on the microsd despite having rootfs on other device? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Werner Posted August 31, 2020 Share Posted August 31, 2020 Due to lack of ressources we don't have much of a chance to test many possible scenarios when updating (but you could help doing that https://forum.armbian.com/subscriptions/ ) As for myself I never had an sd card failing on me but maybe you had some application that for example did lot of log writing or similar bypassing ramlog? That would shorten their lifetime significantly. Quote - is there any way to tell the updater that it should change firmware (i.e. kernel image) on the microsd despite having rootfs on other device? Not sure about that but I do not think that this is easily possible.... 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
meesha Posted October 30, 2020 Share Posted October 30, 2020 On 8/31/2020 at 6:36 PM, Werner said: (...) Not sure about that but I do not think that this is easily possible.... It actually is. After rsync'ing files to another device, remove the directory /boot from there. Then, after restart, mount the filesystem on the sdcard to somewhere on the new filesystem. Mine is at /mnt/sdcard. To achieve this, add a line to /etc/fstab like: /dev/mmcblk1p1 /mnt/sdcard ext4 defaults, noatime,nodiratime 0 2 after creating the actual directory in /mnt. Then, issue just once a command:ln -s /mnt/sdcard/boot /boot And it will be there each time you restart, also allowing the updater to put firmware files where they should be. And it runs now perfectly. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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