Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Upgrading ffp 0.5 and moving it to USB... again

Recently I have been getting some comments on my post on moving ffp to a USB stick asking for help as the instructions seemed to have become invalid. It was only then I found out that fonz has been updating ffp without changing the version number. Alot of changed since I last upgraded to ffp 0.5 and while there are instructions on how to upgrade to the latest version, I decided to play it safe and just do a fresh reinstall. Here is a log of what I did:
  1. Backup the file /mnt/HD_a2/fun_plug and the directory /ffp. (use the sym link to make sure you are backing up your active configurations)
  2. Download the latest packages (i.e. fun_plug and fun_plug.tgz) and put them in /mnt/HD_a2/.
  3. Delete the folder /mnt/HD_a2/ffp if you have it and reboot.
  4. Telnet into the box (default has no username/pswd), disable telnet and enable ssh. (i.e. do a chmod a-x telnetd.sh and chmod a+x sshd.sh)
  5. Download and install all the core packages found here. After the download, install using the command funpkg -i *.tgz. Also run the command funpkg -u *.tgz to update existing packages. (i.e. those that came in the fun_plug.tgz package)
  6. <-- At this point, we have a working stock ffp working off the hard disk partition /mnt/HD_a2. Now to update the box with extra packages we need -->
  7. Restore the svn startup script from backup (it contains the path to my local SVN repository)
  8. unrar
  9. Transmission
  10. Create a local fun_plug script (/ffp/etc/fun_plug.local) to set up some convenience shortcuts. (/hd1 for /mnt/HD_a2, /hd2 for /mnt/HD_b2 and /usb for /mnt/usb)
  11. <-- Now that we have all the features working, lets move it to the USB stick using the method found here -->
  12. First create the directory /mnt/HD_a2/.bootstrap and download the necessary files into it. (namely setup.sh and usb-storage.ko)
  13. Edit setup.sh to make sure that the variable USBFFPPART refers to the right USB partition. If you have only 1 USB drive attached and it has only 1 partition, then this should be /dev/sdc1.
  14. Reboot to get the USB partition up and running. (Check by running df and look for /mnt/usb)
  15. Copy the entire /ffp folder into the USB partition /mnt/usb. (cp -a /mnt/HD_a2/ffp /mnt/usb/)
  16. Create a dummy file .usb-ffp in the root of the USB partition. (touch /mnt/usb/.usb-ffp)
  17. Reboot again to get ffp working off the USB partition. (If you need to troubleshoot, check the ffp log at /mnt/HD_a2/.bootstrap/ffp.log)
A couple of things to note:
  • To have ffp running off the hard disk again, simply remove the file /mnt/usb/.usb-ffp and reboot. You may want to do this when you need to run e2fsck (i.e. file system check) on the partition.
  • To be able to unmount the first hard drive partition (i.e. /mnt/HD_a2) say for disk maintainance, you will need to copy the USB module (i.e. usb-storage.ko) to VRAM (/lib/modules is a good place to put it) before loading it. You can do so by editing the script setup.sh.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

thank you for the write. I am able to follow the instructions and have fun plug running off a USB drive. By the way, how do you feed torrent files to transmission, I am using the script from http://forum.dsmg600.info/viewtopic.php?id=2664&p=1 and it works fine. The only issue if any is that I have not move it to the USB drive and the disk does spin up maybe once a hour.

Anonymous said...

any good way to keep the ffp on hard disk in sync with the ffp on the USB stick if we need to update or add app?

Anonymous said...

Well I am trying to get this working now for two days with no effect. I completely lost you on 'create a ffp.local file and setup some shortcuts.'

No idea what to put in the file. I found the example in /ffp/etc/examples but there is no example on how to make these shortcuts.

Anonymous said...

YES! It works, With the information from the two install manuals here I managed to get it working after all.

Thx!

Anonymous said...

Could you please explain in further detail how to do the following.

To be able to unmount the first hard drive partition (i.e. /mnt/HD_a2) say for disk maintainance, you will need to copy the USB module (i.e. usb-storage.ko) to VRAM (/lib/modules is a good place to put it) before loading it. You can do so by editing the script setup.sh.

Not sure which /lib/modules you are referring to. What do we edit in setup.sh.

Linux newbie sorry about that.

Unknown said...

I have the same question about the following step:

To be able to unmount the first hard drive partition (i.e. /mnt/HD_a2) say for disk maintainance, you will need to copy the USB module (i.e. usb-storage.ko) to VRAM (/lib/modules is a good place to put it) before loading it. You can do so by editing the script setup.sh

What do we edit in setup.sh? Thanks!

Alwin said...

Hi Sidney,

Thanks a lot for your log, it helped my getting FFP to run from an USB drive as well!

Two thinks I missed in your log though, were:

setup.sh has to have the executable bit (chmod a+x setup.sh) in order to be executed upon boot.

I ran into much troubles getting the setup.sh to mount my usbdrive, because mine had the Fat32 filesystem. After formatting it to Ext3 (with a live dvd of Ubuntu), everything worked!

Regards,

Alwin

Unknown said...

I had the same issue in getting the drive recongnized. Before the reboot and df check, there is an instruction missing which is:
format the usb drive using the following:
mke2fs /dev/sdc1

334rt said...

Hi, & thanks for the guide. I think I successfully completed all the steps.

Is there a good way to check if my machine is running ffp files from my usb stick even after reboot?

Ranieri said...

Ervin, you can run lsof to show what files are kept open by what. FFP deamons will keep their shared libraries open, either on the HD or the USB stick.