Dedicated archives storage

This optional step, for advanced users, allows you to use a dedicated storage for the user files, i.e.:

  • One fast but smaller and more expensive storage device, for instance for the daily emails, in /home/users.
  • A slower but bigger and cheaper storage for the email archives, and other files not requiring fast access, in /home/archives.

This page explains the installation of a dedicated live storage, i.e. the current emails received.

This is specially useful for some cloud providers, offering SSD and HD block storage, but can be also relevant for a home server.

Because when installing homebox, files and directories are created in these folders, it is an absolute requirements to run these playbooks before running the installation itself.

Pre-requisites

Clone the homebox-extra-modules

The extra modules repository is hosted on GitHub.

You can clone at any place, but the repository roles should be accessible by the main Ansible project, for instance, if you store everything in a folder called homebox-all:

cd ~/Projects/homebox-all
git clone git@github.com:progmaticltd/homebox-extra-modules.git

ls -l
drwx------ 1 frodo frodo 320 May 25 12:56 homebox
drwx------ 1 frodo frodo  36 Sep 17  2023 homebox-extra-modules

Let Ansible find the new roles

And your Ansible configuration should contains the path relative to the playbooks:

[defaults]
retry_files_enabled = False
display_skipped_hosts = False
stdout_callback = yaml
callback_enabled = profile_roles
roles_path = {{ playbook_dir }}/../../roles/:{{ playbook_dir }}/../../../homebox-extra-modules/roles/
connection_plugins = {{ playbook_dir }}/../../common/connection-plugins/
filter_plugins = {{ playbook_dir }}/../../common/filter-plugins/
remote_tmp = /tmp/
inventory=../config/hosts.yml

Identify the storage devices

You can identify the attached storage using the lsblk command:

root@debian:~# lsblk
NAME   MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sr0     11:0    1 1024M  0 rom
vda    254:0    0    8G  0 disk
├─vda1 254:1    0    7G  0 part /
├─vda2 254:2    0    1K  0 part
└─vda5 254:5    0  975M  0 part [SWAP]
vdb    254:16   0    4G  0 disk
vdc    254:32   0   20G  0 disk

Configure the “live” storage

Customise the storage settings

You can customise the settings from the default ones, by copying this block to your configuration file system.yml:

storage_live:
  device: /dev/vdb
  fstype: btrfs
  mkfs_opts:
    - -R quota
    - --checksum xxhash
  mount_opts:
    - noatime
    - compress=lzo

The important value to check, if the storage you decide to dedicate to “live” emails, in this case, /var/vdb.

Run the playbook to create the live storage

The syntax is fairly simple:

cd homebox/playooks
ROLE=home-live-storage ansible-playbook install.yml

The playbook is doing the following:

  • Create the partitions, and format them, using btrfs by default
  • Create the systemd services to automatically mount these partitions.

Once run, you can see the storage using the same lsblk command:

root@debian:~# lsblk
NAME   MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sr0     11:0    1 1024M  0 rom
vda    254:0    0    8G  0 disk
├─vda1 254:1    0    7G  0 part /
├─vda2 254:2    0    1K  0 part
└─vda5 254:5    0  975M  0 part [SWAP]
vdb    254:16   0    4G  0 disk
└─vdb1 254:17   0    4G  0 part /home/users
vdc    254:32   0   20G  0 disk

And check the systemd service:

root@debian:~# systemctl cat home-users.mount
# /etc/systemd/system/home-users.mount
[Unit]
Description=Users’ live storage

[Mount]
What=LABEL=arda-world-home-users
Where=/home/users
Type=btrfs
Options=noatime,compress=lzo

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Using a label for the source allows you to re-attach the live storage without changing a system settings in case of disaster recovery.