Inside Rockstor I need to execute one docker container that needs access to a physical disk. And I want to “block” or “hide” this disk in the disk section. The problem is to hide this disk from actions like pool creation.
I don’t want to “remove” the disk from the disks page, because I want to check the SMART values.
And the reason for this container (that I’m trying to create a Rock-Ons template) is because it needs to handle the full disk, and not a file on top of BTRFS presented as a virtual disk.
I hope you understand the reasons for this request. This could be similar to the LUKS “Whole Disk Role”. So, I only request a method to “label” one disk as “User Whole Disk Role”.
One way to do this could be to create a new pool with a single disk (which I think should be possible), and a single share on that pool, which you would then use for that Rockon only. That way you can still see the disk, its SMART values, etc. and if you wanted to add a second disk in the future to that pool to grow it (or replace the existing one with a bigger one, or other scenarios).
Note: Currently, quotas are not enforced in Rockstor (mostly due to ongoing issues in upstream until recently), so a given share can exceed whatever quota you might set and essentially use the whole disk. Or you don’t enable quotas, especially if you know you will only have one share on that disk (i.e. pool) anyway.
The “disk” needs to be hardcoded passed to the container as a device. I.e. in the form of /dev/disk/by-id/_____________. And what I need to do is to “exclude” this device from the Rockstor list of “available” disks for pools.
I don’t want to “hide” this device from the disk page. It’s useful for the SMART functionalities. But the problem is that this disk at time is available when doing any “pool” action. That’s the point to “block” to not touch the disk content.
After more testing, I see that when the disk is used by the container then appears one message inside the interface: “Disk is unusable as it contains partions: …” So, almost in some cases this “block” seeams to work.
Anyway, I suggest to add a “manual” labeling option.
Thanks for providing some update here. And, yes, it seems like your planned Rockon is supposed to “own” the disk and create partitions, etc. - that will naturally lead to a block, since Rockstor is designed to consider “whole” available devices.
BTW, there is also the Scrutiny Rockon that provides a disk monitoring dashboard with some history, that includes SMART info, if you’re interested in that. I believe it has a very low CPU overhead (as does the Netdata Rockon for a multitude of other monitoring parameters).