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Improving the NAS

Configure disk spin down

Although spinning the disks up and down repeatedly causes more wear and tear than keeping them spinning, if the drives are not used for a long time it can still be beneficial as it will reduce power consumption and noise.

Set the auto spin down timer to 10 minutes:

$ sudo hdparm -S 120 /dev/sda
$ sudo hdparm -S 120 /dev/sdb
$ sudo hdparm -S 120 /dev/sdc

Nothing spinned down after 10 minutes, and the culprit is Advanced Power Management. APM levels above 128 do not allow drives to spin down.

$ sudo hdparm -B /dev/sda
 
/dev/sda:
 APM_level	= 254
$ sudo hdparm -B 127 /dev/sda
 
/dev/sda:
 setting Advanced Power Management level to 0x7f (127)
 APM_level	= 127

It looks like hdparm settings are not persistent after reboot. To fix it, add this to /etc/hdparm.conf:

/dev/disk/by-id/ata-HGST_[----------------] {
        apm = 127
        spindown_time = 96
}

However, this doesn’t work on the Seagate drives:

$ sudo hdparm -B 127 /dev/sdb
/dev/sdb:
 setting Advanced Power Management level to 0x7f (127)
SG_IO: bad/missing sense data, sb[]: ...
 APM_level	= not supported

Seagate drives require openSeaChest:

sudo apt install make
sudo apt install gcc
git clone --recursive https://github.com/Seagate/openSeaChest.git
cd openSeaChest/Make/gcc
make release
cd openseachest_exes

Now we can configure the power modes:

$ sudo ./openSeaChest_PowerControl --device /dev/sdb  --EPCfeature enable
$ sudo ./openSeaChest_PowerControl --device /dev/sdb  --idle_a 1000 --idle_b 120000 --idle_c 300000 --standby_z 900000

To check the current setting:

$ sudo ./openSeaChest_PowerControl -d /dev/sdb --showEPCSettings
==========================================================================================
 openSeaChest_PowerControl - openSeaChest drive utilities - NVMe Enabled
 Copyright (c) 2014-2022 Seagate Technology LLC and/or its Affiliates, All Rights Reserved
 openSeaChest_PowerControl Version: 3.2.0-3_2_1 X86_64
 Build Date: [---------]
 Today: [----------------------]	User: root
==========================================================================================
 
/dev/sg1 - ST4000[-----------]2[----] - ATA
 
 
===EPC Settings===
	* = timer is enabled
	C column = Changeable
	S column = Savable
	All times are in 100 milliseconds
 
Name       Current Timer Default Timer Saved Timer   Recovery Time C S
Idle A     *10           *10           *10           1             Y Y
Idle B     *1200         *6000         *1200         4             Y Y
Idle C     *3000          18000        *3000         25            Y Y
Standby Z  *9000          0            *9000         55            Y Y

The drive’s electronics will enter power saving mode in 1 second, heads will unload in 2 minutes, RPM will reduce at 5 minutes, and stop at 15 minutes.

To check the current power mode:

$ sudo ./openSeaChest_PowerControl -d /dev/sdb --checkPowerMode

To check the number of start/stop and load/unload cycles:

$ sudo ./openSeaChest_SMART -d /dev/sdb --smartAttributes raw | grep  -E "Start/Stop|Load-Unload"

there’s also a low current spin up feature, but that’s mostly used to prevent current spike when you spin up too many drives at the same time.

Setting up Prometheus

Prometheus

Install prometheus:

sudo apt install prometheus

Give the folders to the prometheus user:

sudo chown -R prometheus:prometheus /etc/prometheus/ /var/lib/prometheus/
sudo chmod -R 775 /etc/prometheus/ /var/lib/prometheus/

Configure it with /etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml

# Sample config for Prometheus.
 
global:
  scrape_interval:     15s # Set the scrape interval to every 15 seconds. Default is every 1 minute.
  evaluation_interval: 15s # Evaluate rules every 15 seconds. The default is every 1 minute.
  # scrape_timeout is set to the global default (10s).
 
  # Attach these labels to any time series or alerts when communicating with
  # external systems (federation, remote storage, Alertmanager).
  external_labels:
      monitor: 'example'
 
# Alertmanager configuration
alerting:
  alertmanagers:
  - static_configs:
    - targets: ['localhost:<alert-port>']
 
# Load rules once and periodically evaluate them according to the global 'evaluation_interval'.
rule_files:
  # - "first_rules.yml"
  # - "second_rules.yml"
 
# A scrape configuration containing exactly one endpoint to scrape:
# Here it's Prometheus itself.
scrape_configs:
  # The job name is added as a label `job=<job_name>` to any timeseries scraped from this config.
  - job_name: 'prometheus'
 
    # Override the global default and scrape targets from this job every 5 seconds.
    scrape_interval: 5s
    scrape_timeout: 5s
 
    # metrics_path defaults to '/metrics'
    # scheme defaults to 'http'.
 
    static_configs:
      - targets: ['localhost:<prometheus-port>']
 
  - job_name: node
    # If prometheus-node-exporter is installed, grab stats about the local
    # machine by default.
    static_configs:
      - targets: ['localhost:<node-port>']

Make it into a service by creating /etc/systemd/system/prometheus.service:

[Unit]
Description=Prometheus
Wants=network-online.target
After=network-online.target

[Service]
User=prometheus
Group=prometheus
# Restart=always
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/bin/prometheus \
    --config.file=/etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml \
    --storage.tsdb.path=/var/lib/prometheus/ \
    --web.console.templates=/etc/prometheus/consoles \
    --web.console.libraries=/etc/prometheus/console_libraries \
    --web.listen-address=0.0.0.0:<prometheus-port>

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Enable and run the service:

sudo systemctl enable prometheus
sudo systemctl start prometheus
sudo systemctl status prometheus

Open the port in firewall:

sudo ufw allow <prometheus-port>

Now we should be able to access it from 192.168.0.<nas-ip>:<prometheus-port>.

Prometheus-node-exporter

To obtain system data, we create a service running node-exporter by editing /etc/systemd/system/prometheus-node-exporter.service.

[Unit]
Description=Node Exporter
After=network.target

[Service]
User=prometheus
Group=prometheus
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/bin/prometheus-node-exporter \
    --collector.filesystem.mount-points-exclude=^/(dev|proc|run|sys|media|var/lib/docker/.+)($|/)

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

To change the port used, add --web.listen-address=:<node-port>

To restart a service:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl restart prometheus

Now we start prometheus-node-exporter, and new data points should become available.

Setting up Grafana

Prometheus provides some basic visualisation but it’s nothing compared to what Grafana can do.

wget https://dl.grafana.com/oss/release/grafana_9.2.3_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i grafana_9.2.3_amd64.deb

To configure, edit /etc/grafana/grafana.ini

# The http port to use
http_port = <grafana-port>

After allowing the port with ufw, we can now access it at 192.168.0.<nas-ip>:<grafana-port>.

Monitor Drive Power Mode

First we need to modify the node-exporter service to enable reading from textfiles.

ExecStart=/usr/bin/prometheus-node-exporter \
    --collector.textfile \
    --collector.textfile.directory=/var/lib/prometheus/textfiles \
    --collector.filesystem.mount-points-exclude=^/(dev|proc|run|sys|media|var/lib/docker/.+)($|/)

Move the openSeaChest executables to local/bin:

$ sudo cp git/openSeaChest/Make/gcc/openseachest_exes/* /usr/local/bin/

Write a script to extract the power mode data and feed it to Prometheus:

$ sudo vim /usr/local/bin/drive_powermode.sh

This script is tweaked from: https://andrejacobs.org/linux/installing-prometheus-on-ubuntu-20-04/ 

#!/bin/bash
# Check drive states and report it as metrics for the node exporter textfile collector
 
echo '# HELP andre_drive_powermode Report the power mode of the /dev/sd? drives' /var/lib/prometheus/textfiles/drive_powermode.prom
echo '# TYPE andre_drive_powermode gauge' >/var/lib/prometheus/textfiles/drive_powermode.prom
 
function checkPowerMode() {
    local guage=10
    local powerMode=$(/usr/local/bin/openSeaChest_PowerControl -q -d $1 --checkPowerMode)
 
    if echo $powerMode | grep -q -w 'Active'; then
        guage=4
    elif echo $powerMode | grep -q -w 'Standby'; then
        guage=0
    elif echo $powerMode | grep -q -w 'Idle_c'; then
        guage=1
    elif echo $powerMode | grep -q -w 'Idle_b'; then
        guage=2
    elif echo $powerMode | grep -q -w 'Idle_a'; then
        guage=3
    fi
 
    echo "andre_drive_powermode{dev=\"$1\"} $guage" >/var/lib/prometheus/textfiles/drive_powermode.prom
}
 
for drive in /dev/sd? ; do
    checkPowerMode $drive
done

Now we just need to hook the script to a timer:

$ sudo chown prometheus:prometheus drive_powermode.prom
$ sudo vim /etc/systemd/system/prometheus-drive-power.service
$ sudo vim /etc/systemd/system/prometheus-drive-power.timer
$ sudo systemctl enable --now prometheus-drive-power.timer

service:

[Unit]
Description=Run drive_powermode script for prometheus

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/drive_powermode.sh

timer:

[Unit]
Description=Run drive-powermode service every 15 seconds

[Timer]
OnBootSec=15
OnUnitActiveSec=15
AccuracySec=1

[Install]
WantedBy=timers.target

To enable HDD temperatures in hwmon:

sudo modprobe drivetemp
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