this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2024
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I've got a QNAP NAS and two Linux servers. Whenever the power goes down, the UPS kicks in and shut downs the NAS and the Linux servers, all good. The servers + NAS are automatically started when the power comes back on line using WOL. All good.

The problem is that I have apps running using Docker which heavily rely on connections to the NAS. As the Linux servers boot quicker than the NAS, the mount points are not mounted, and thus everything falls apart. Even when I manually re-mount, it's not propagated to the Docker instances. All mount points use NFS.

Currently, I just reboot the Linux servers manually, and then all works well.

Probably easiest would be to run a cron job to check the mounts every x minutes, and if they are not mounted, then just reboot. The only issue is that this may cause an infinite loop of reboots if e.g. the NAS has been turned off.

I could also install a monitoring solution, but I've seen so many options that I'm not sure which one to do. If it's easier with a monitoring solution, I'd like the simplest one.

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Just specaluting.. is it possible to mount NFS through systemd and make docker service dependent from that mount?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sorry, I'm absolutely not a Linux expert :) I use /etc/fstab for the mounts, and to manually re-mount I run "mount -a".

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I think this is the way!

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I think that is a good question to write something positive about SystemD.

I start my services with SystemD. I also moved my containers and docker-compose stack to be started by systemd. And it does mounting and bind-mounts, too. So I removed things from /etc/fstab and instead created unit files for systemd to mount the network mounts. And then you can edit the service file that starts the docker-container and say it relies on the mount. SystemD will figure it out and start them in the correct order, wait until the network and the mounts are there.

You have to put some effort in but it's not that hard. And for me it's turned out to be pretty reliable and low maintenance.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

The absolute easiest and simplest would be to modify your grub config to have a longer timer on the boot menu, effectively delaying them until the NAS is up.

That doesn't necessarily mean it's the best option- there are ways to make the actual boot process wait for mounts, or to stagger the WOL signals, or the solutions others have mentioned. But changing grub is quick and easy.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Try looking into "autofs".

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thanks! I've just set that up. That would seem to solve the solution, right, without reboots?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Yes. The important detail is that it remounts the path once the path gets called. So I setup a cron job to "ls" the path every few minutes to make sure it's always remounted quickly.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Best option is to delay docker startup until the mounts are ready.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Read systemd mounts and systemd dependencies.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's been a while since I set it up, but from memory my mount point was set to be owned by root and immutable. That stopped any of my docker containers making new files and folders if the mounted drive or network location was not mounted or unavailable.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah I used /etc/fstab which are static mounts.

I switched to autofs and that seems to be much better, as it does the mounts "at runtime", ie when requested.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Not sure how Docker behaves, but in a Stack/Compose file you can define volumes to use a specific driver, such as smb. E.g.:

volumes:
  smb-calibre:
    driver_opts:
      type: "smb3"
      device: "//mynas/ebooks/CalibreDB"
      o: "ro,vers=3.1.1,addr=192.168.1.1,username=mbirth,password=secret,cache=loose,iocharset=utf8,noperm,hard"

So Docker will take care of mounting. Paired with restart: unless-stopped, all my Containers come back online just fine after an outage.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters
DNS Domain Name Service/System
NAS Network-Attached Storage
Plex Brand of media server package

3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 9 acronyms.

[Thread #509 for this sub, first seen 13th Feb 2024, 14:05] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

The other options of making the containers dependent on mounts or similar are all really better, but a simple enough one is to use SMB/CIFS rather than NFS. It's a lot more transactional in design so the drive vanishing for a bit will just come back when the drive is available. It's also a fair bit heavier on the overhead.

Using NFSv4 seems to work in similar fashion without the overhead though I haven't dug into the exact back and forth of the system to know how it differs from the v3 to accomplish that.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

You can use bind mounts instead of volumes to prevent the container to start when the target is missing.

https://docs.docker.com/storage/bind-mounts/

I'm not sure what happens if the target goes down while the container is running. And you would still need a monitoring solution for telling the container to start when the target comes up.