Recently I migrated my home NAS from OpenMediaVault to Ubuntu Server.
The reason for this was some major issues after upgrading from OMV4 to OMV5. After spending a lot of time to figure out what’s wrong with my NAS after the upgrade, I figured that the main advantage of using OMV (less maintenance) had become an disappointment. So the decision to migrate to Ubuntu Server was made.
I use SnapRAID for my NAS disks, mainly because it scales well (for a home NAS), does not depend on special hardware and is quite simple to use and understand. However, Ubuntu Server 20.04 could not find SnapRAID in it’s package repositoy.
$> sudo apt install snapraid Reading package lists… Done Building dependency tree Reading state information… Done E: Unable to locate package snapraid
After a brief internet search an alternative package repository showed up called ppa:tikhonov/snapraid.
In order to add a new PPA repositories to Ubuntu, it is necessary to enable PPA support by installing the software-properties-common package first.
$> sudo apt install software-properties-common
Now the required package repositorty for SnapRAID can be added like this:
$> sudo add-apt-repository ppa:tikhonov/snapraid
So let’s try again.
$> sudo apt update ... Err:4 http://ppa.launchpad.net/tikhonov/snapraid/ubuntu focal Release 404 Not Found [IP: 2001:67c:1560:8008::19 80] ...
Huh? It appears there is no release for Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa) yet.
To work around this, the apt source file can be edited, to use a different release instead. Checking on the launchpad page showed that the latest SnapRAID release was for Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic Beaver) and 18.10 (Cosmic Cuttlefish).
The file /etc/apt/sources.list.d/tikhonov-ubuntu-snapraid-focal.list can be edited as follows, to switch to a different release package (this file was added by the add-apt-repository command above). I have chosen to use the latest release which is available (which was for cosmic).
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/tikhonov/snapraid/ubuntu cosmic main
#No release for focal exists… trying to use cosmic or bionic instead.
#deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/tikhonov/snapraid/ubuntu focal main
#deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/tikhonov/snapraid/ubuntu focal main
After updating the package list, the SnapRAID package can be installed without further issues.
$> sudo apt update
...
$> sudo apt install snapraid
...
$> snapraid --version
snapraid v11.3 by Andrea Mazzoleni, http://www.snapraid.it
Seems to work alright. All that remains to be done is to set up regular sync and scrub jobs for SnapRAID in cron.
Please note that this method is not applicable in general, as some packages may only work with specific Ubuntu releases or may break between releases.
BTW later on I saw the SnapRAID repo on github which has a more recent release available, which I probably could have used if I had seen it sooner.
References:
William
It looks like I’m a few weeks behind you in this journey. I just made the commitment to move from OpenMediaVault to Ubuntu Server. Having the same issue with no SnapRaid release in the repository for 20.04, I considered building from source, but researched my options — that led to your blog. I ultimately decided to compile from source. It was actually quite straightforward and quick.
andrsmllr
You are right, compiling from the sources is not that hard. It just so happened that the first search result that popped up when I was looking for alternatives, was an ppa repo that is more up-to-date. I now have SnapRAID 11.3 running vs. v11.5 which is the latest release on Github.
I think more people are going to do the migration we have taken, since it feels like OpenMediaVault is not as stable as it used to be and has many issues with backward/forward compatibility.
It’s definitely a good way to learn new skills, when you decide to set up and configure fstab, Samba, SnapRAID, LUKS encryption etc. yourself. 🙂