15.1 and External USB disk docking station

[Jocko]

Hi mdi,

So seems that you still have some issues with your usb disks :scratch

No, the firmware after a while should not unmount your disks.

I think that you must wait to see if your disks are again unmounted.

Otherwise, is there a standby feature on your external docking station? if yes, this could explain why the disks are unmounted (=> as if they are unplugged)

[mdi]

Hi Jocko,
yes, unfortunately the story didn't end for me :) :)

The docking station should not have any such mechanism to disable itself or the disks... it's automatically seen by Win and Linux, even if there are some drivers for Win but I think for older versions of the SO (<Win7).

I will try to look for its detailed manual, but that's a really uncommon behavior, I think....

Is there anything I can check in the firmware to know when this happens?
Thanks,
MDI

[Jocko]

You should enable the debug mode (use the previous sent url: /.status/nas-status.php to do it)

When the usb disks seems unmounted (How do you check that ?), before unplugging/plugging again the station,
- look if no warning is present in the dmesg output
- check the mount table : now you know that you must have two lines for each disk (mountpoint in /mnt and /share/1000)
- read the messages file (in /var/log) to see if you find some nasapi calling "mrvlUdevdDetached" and at what time

[Jocko]

Hi mdi,

After one day, my usb disks are still mounted on my 2 nwsp2: one has been plugged after booting and the other was plugged at booting

So maybe an issue with your external docking station or a power failure ???

[mdi]

Hi Jocko,
sorry, I didn't have time to check further, but I already made a small check. dmesg reported several I/O errors, so I need to check the disks (they are new, even if I formatted them multiple times).

I will comment back as soon as I have some info/doubts :)

Thanks for your patience!

Cheers,
MDI

[mdi]

Hi Jocko,
last week I read that when formatting to ext4 you get the disk formatted immediately, but then, when you mount it the first time, a "lazy init" process is started, which clears the inodes list and it takes a long time, writing to the disk, to complete.

Probably in the past, while trying to format my disks, I thought that this was a bug of the gnome formatting program (in fact I wasn't convinced even of it being a bug), and I turned of the disks after some hours (sometimes after a few minutes) because I couldn't understand about this long formatting.

So, before investigating the dmesg errors and I saw, I decided to re-format them.

- I re-connected them to the NAS;
- I connected via ssh;
- umount /dev/sdb1; umount /dev/sdc1;
- mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdb1; mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdc1;
- reboot

Then I reconnected via ssh and you can see this:

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root@nas:/ # file -sL /dev/sdb1
/dev/sdb1: Linux rev 1.0 ext4 filesystem data, UUID=51efcda1-2759-4399-aae6-9193       e50bff9d (needs journal recovery) (extents) (large files) (huge files)
root@nas:/ # file -sL /dev/sdc1
/dev/sdc1: Linux rev 1.0 ext4 filesystem data, UUID=f3c1ba1e-e983-45ac-a869-3de2       8e926da9 (needs journal recovery) (extents) (large files) (huge files)


I'm not sure about that "needs journal recovery", but I imagine it's that "lazy init" of the disk's inode tables.

In fact, doing a TOP, I can see that there's a process running, called 'ext4lazyinit' :-)

I think that now, if I leave the disks connected and let the ext4lazyinit working, I will finally get nice disks :)

I will check if tomorrow morning they are still connected and will feedback you in any case.

Cross fingers and have a nice weekend!

[mdi]

Hi Jocko,
it seems that everything now is fine :punk

The disks today are still mounted and this is the last lines (no cut) of dmesg:

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[   32.061209] udev: starting version 130
[   37.126914] EXT4-fs (sdc1): recovery complete
[   37.132007] EXT4-fs (sdc1): mounted filesystem with ordered data mode. Opts: (null)
[   38.787490] IPv6: ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): eth0: link is not ready
[   40.564025] mv643xx_eth_port mv643xx_eth_port.0 eth0: link up, 100 Mb/s, full duplex, flow control disabled
[   40.573861] IPv6: ADDRCONF(NETDEV_CHANGE): eth0: link becomes ready
[   42.548842] EXT4-fs (sdb1): recovery complete
[   42.554033] EXT4-fs (sdb1): mounted filesystem with ordered data mode. Opts: (null)
[ 4849.996830] nf_conntrack: automatic helper assignment is deprecated and it will be removed soon. Use the iptables CT target to attach helpers instead.


So, most probably it was my fault after formatting the disks, brutally cutting their power.

Thank you for all your support, I'm very happy! :hail

[Jocko]

Hi mdi,

I'm glad to hear that finally everything is in order :thumbup

[mdi]

Hi Jocko,
bad news, I think I need again a suggestion. Today the disks are gone again.

Here are the last lines of dmesg, and I god a lot of I/O errors before:

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[96132.058184] EXT4-fs warning (device sdb1): ext4_end_bio:294: I/O error writing to inode 84018691 (offset 5611520 size 20480 starting block 397667)
[96132.071475] Aborting journal on device sdb1-8.
[96132.076142] JBD2: Error -5 detected when updating journal superblock for sdb1-8.
[96132.105414] EXT4-fs error (device sdb1): __ext4_journal_start_sb:60: Detected aborted journal
[96132.123907] EXT4-fs (sdb1): Remounting filesystem read-only
[96132.131524] EXT4-fs (sdb1): previous I/O error to superblock detected
[96132.143971] EXT4-fs error (device sdb1) in ext4_da_write_end:2870: IO failure
[96132.151159] EXT4-fs (sdb1): previous I/O error to superblock detected
[96132.279673] EXT4-fs error (device sdb1): ext4_find_entry:1300: inode #83886082: comm rsync: reading directory lblock 0
[96132.330943] usb 1-1: new high-speed USB device number 3 using orion-ehci
[96136.032423] EXT4-fs error (device sdb1): ext4_put_super:762: Couldn't clean up the journal
[96139.467075] Buffer I/O error on device sdc1, logical block 243826688
[96139.473414] lost page write due to I/O error on sdc1
[96139.478654] JBD2: Error -5 detected when updating journal superblock for sdc1-8.
[96147.450099] usb 1-1: device descriptor read/64, error -110
[96162.679321] usb 1-1: device descriptor read/64, error -110
[96162.909322] usb 1-1: new high-speed USB device number 4 using orion-ehci
[96178.028552] usb 1-1: device descriptor read/64, error -110
[96193.257787] usb 1-1: device descriptor read/64, error -110
[96193.487754] usb 1-1: new high-speed USB device number 5 using orion-ehci
[96203.907225] usb 1-1: device not accepting address 5, error -110
[96204.027233] usb 1-1: new high-speed USB device number 6 using orion-ehci
[96214.446690] usb 1-1: device not accepting address 6, error -110
[96214.452729] hub 1-0:1.0: unable to enumerate USB device on port 1
[126627.026963] UDP: short packet: From 151.32.76.29:28632 55/28 to 192.168.0.149:51413
[139335.081842] UDP: short packet: From 119.5.182.56:9981 49320/109 to 192.168.0.149:51413
[140662.127761] UDP: short packet: From 151.33.186.9:28632 933/28 to 192.168.0.149:51413


I saw this: http://paulphilippov.com/articles/how-t ... ress-error

Actually my docking station is USB 3, with its own power supply, even if it's backwards compatible to USB2, of course. But I read that USB3 draws more power from the USB port, so I'm wondering if that link can be something useful.
Do you have any chance to test something similar?.....

I will try to follow the suggestion and shut the nas down for a while before rebooting.

Thank you,
MDI

[Jocko]

Hi mdi,

You don't use the same command than me to format the disk.

So try

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mkfs.ext4 -j -m 1 /dev/sdc1
or
mke2fs -t ext4 -j -m 1 /dev/sdc1

see the man to understand these two options http://www.man-online.org/page/8-mkfs.ext4/