Drives not adding to pool after a failed or uncompleted Balance

Hi there.

I am new, very new in all this btrfs stuff, so please excuse me if this info is not new or not important.
I installed latest Rockstor on a virtual machine, then updated it using the unstable train.
After that, wanting to see what this OS can handle in terms of user abuse i began to do all kind of nasty stuff.
The Rockstor OS handled itself beautifully becoming my prime candidate in replacing my current FreeNAS Box, but…
After a few rapid changes of raid level and adding or subtracting disks the balances associated with few of the events never finished. Their status is 0% and i do not think they will ever change.
Now, when in want to add a few extra drives, the OS keeps telling me

Traceback (most recent call last):
File “/opt/rockstor/eggs/gunicorn-0.16.1-py2.7.egg/gunicorn/workers/sync.py”, line 34, in run
client, addr = self.socket.accept()
File “/usr/lib64/python2.7/socket.py”, line 202, in accept
sock, addr = self._sock.accept()
error: [Errno 11] Resource temporarily unavailable

The current status of the balance jobs is:

6 finished August 14th 2016, 3:35:02 pm 100
5 started August 14th 2016, 3:34:48 pm 0
4 started August 14th 2016, 3:33:29 pm 0
3 finished August 14th 2016, 2:07:57 pm 100
2 finished August 14th 2016, 1:36:35 pm 100

You can clearly see that 4 and 5 are at 0% and the percentage never changes even after reboot, new balance job, or scrub.

Also no new balance can’t be initiated even if i try the force option:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File “/opt/rockstor/eggs/gunicorn-0.16.1-py2.7.egg/gunicorn/workers/sync.py”, line 34, in run
client, addr = self.socket.accept()
File “/usr/lib64/python2.7/socket.py”, line 202, in accept
sock, addr = self._sock.accept()
error: [Errno 11] Resource temporarily unavailable

Hope it helps and sorry for my poor english.
Best Wishes.

@soulwise Welcome to the Rockstor community.

Yes the balance feedback in the Web-UI is definitely due to get an upgrade as currently it fails to report in-progress balance tasks. However there is a pending code change that should make things a little better in this department, although there is more to be done here in the future but at least it’s a start.
The pull request reference is:

and the issue that lead to this first attempt to ‘upgrade’ this behaviour is:

Could you get the current status of balance from the command line:

btrfs balance status /mnt2/pool-name-here

And paste the result in this thread.

That way we can confirm the current state.

As for prior balances, only one balance operation can take place on each pool so the readings that show prior balance task info as started with 0% complete are bogus and can safely be ignored. This area is definitely due for improvement and a start has been made here with possible additional future enhancements noted within the above pull request.

Hope that helps to at least settle you mind on this buggy balance reporting.

I’m afraid I don’t yet see why a new balance can’t be initiated but lets see what the above command returns first and maybe I or others can pin it down.

You could also try a balance from the command line but note that it may take quite some time, depending on the size and configuration of the pool and is not reported in the Web-UI but may help to clarify what’s going on.

btrfs balance start /mnt2/pool-name-here

See the btrfs wiki btrfs-balance page for other balance commands. There are plans to reflect command line initiated balance within the UI in the future and to include pause/resume and cancel functionality within the Web-UI also.

The result of the command is:

ERROR: balance status on ‘/mnt2/Soulshare’ failed: Operation not permitted

No changes from last time. I can not add drives, i can not initiate new balances.
As i said, i am very new and i think i am not very well prepared to answer your questions on the software side so i think thai it will be in our best interest to give you access to the VM i am running on my machine to see for yourself. If you agree send me the details. I use Teamviewer.

Thanks!

I’m afraid I can’t enter into such an endeavour right now but could you post the result of:

btrfs fi show

That way we will all have more info to work with. Thanks.

btrfs fi show returns:

ERROR: cannot open /dev/sda3: Permision denied
ERROR: cannot open /dev/sdc: Permision denied
ERROR: cannot open /dev/sdd: Permision denied

@soulwise You will have to use the root user for these commands as they require root’s permissions.

Hope that helps, sorry I should have mentioned this, my mistake.

Shortly after the events above, my VM crashed, no error , nothing. So, i wanted to investigate some more. I now have a “real” machine setup with the stable Rockstor Release available form the ISO image installed onto an SSD and three disks 1 TB each running for two days by now in Raid 1.

Remarcably stable despite my best efforts so i think today i will start to incorporate the box in my production workflow ( i shoot and edit videos for a living ) an see how it behaves.

Thank you.