Knowledge share for using Synology RAID set on FVDW-SL fw

[wvwaard]

Hi all. Its been a very very long time since i have posted anything here.

Today i wanted to share a little project i have been working on. Hope its of interest to y'all.

I have a Synology 411J which is pretty old and wasnt doing its job for me anymore in terms of speed etc.
And i had a Lacie 5big2 laying in pieces around which i assembled back to its original form without drives in it.

So i took up the task of placing one disk in the 5big2 and flashing the FW on it from here. Which went quiet smooth if you
dont forget to let your "guards" down in Windows uhmmm....

Everything installed flawlessly and now i had it in my mind to get the Synology raid array into the 5big2 which ofcourse
had the space for the 4 disks i had in the array. Its not a big array around 4TB which is not so much these days. Anyways thats beside the point.

What i noticed on the 411j, which is also a kirkwood based system, that they had lvm2 running on it and several other need stuff which isnt
present in fvdw-sl after you install the FW. For people that do not know what lvm is ... its the Linux Volume Manager for Raid partitions.

Anyway mdadm is present and i was able to find out the disk partitions that the Synology drives where now named in the Lacie.
/dev/sdb5 to /dev/sde5. I assembled the drives to one device with the mdadm --assemmble --scan function with succes.

Now the tricky part was getting a lvm version. Which you think you would normally just do a IPKG install lvm .....Nope package not available.
After searching i was able to find an install script for OPKG which i was able to download with a WGET command. i ran the install script for OPKG
and it installed flawless. No i was able to install LVM2 with the OPKG install lvm command.

so to sum up the commands after placing the disks in the right order in the 5big2

mdadm --assemble --scan
vgchange -ay --partial (i had a missing UUID which i am still investigating)
create a mount point in a share (i have created one in the public folder)
mount -t ext4 /dev/mapper/vg1000-lv /share/1000/public/Diskstation_Raid

Every thing worked out fine !!

For getting everything back at boot i created a boot script containing the above statements and now can enjoy my data from the Synology Raid array again :applause

[fvdw]

Thx for sharing this info. :thumbup
If you want we can lvm binary available. I need to check why we did not include it.

[Jocko]

Hi

If you want we can lvm binary available. I need to check why we did not include it.

Yes you had compiled lvm tools but we did not include them because currently the firmware does not use them. There is no issue to do it (and now we have a biggest system partitions)

[wvwaard]

Well someone uses them ;-).....

Thanks for replying

[wvwaard]

And if you have the bin available or ipkg package i would be happy to test is for you

EDIT: I found a TAR file you build of LVM with all neccesary files inside and this works !!

[wvwaard]

Btw. when you install the Opkg package with the SH script and makes the OPT environment the Web interface becomes unstable and buggy.
For example there is no disk info display anymore and the setup tab is not working.....
rm -rf the OPT dir and everything is back to normal..... except ofcourse my lvm environment has disappeared

[Jocko]

Hi

Yes that is why we do not recommend using these packages. By installing them, you can easily create conflicts with libraries used by the firmware.
Regarding your problems with the interface and disk menus I think this is the case because they use several binaries and therefore there must get errors of the type "segmentation fault"

[wvwaard]

Yes i figured that would be the case having multiple bins.
Anyway i downloaded the TAR file from fvdw in some of the posts and this works flawless now.

Thanks for all your efforts and programming in making this possible. Giving , in this case, my lacie a new life