(beginner) Storage mistakenly created inside PVE storage? Need help fixing/doing it properly

[qda]

So I am more or less a complete beginner here (apologies in advance!), and have been trying to follow various guides.

I'm running PVE 8.1.3 on an old PC with a single 1TB drive. I have a LXC for running Plex, and I wanted to create a storage volume for holding media files that I could also mount on a local Windows machine. So I mounted a 480GB storage ("homeshare", SMB, I think) to the LXC and followed some guides to mount it on the Windows machine as well.



This is what I have under "Datacenter" > "Storage":



Everything seemed fine except I recently noticed that the HD space for the PVE node is filling up almost completely. Running the du -smh /* command revealed that the "/homeshare" folder was taking up 96GB. I assume this means that I made a mistake somewhere and managed to mount the SMB storage inside the PVE node. To confirm this, I copied some files using the Windows machine into the /homeshare folder, and sure enough, the disc usage in the node increased:



The strange thing is that deleting files from /homeshare (again from the Windows machine) does not reduce the space used at all. Some Googling led to the fstrim -a command, which didn't do anything when run from the node's Shell.

Can someone help me fix this mess? I would really appreciate help with 1) recovering the space, and 2) creating the storage/mount properly. I am totally okay with deleting the existing storage/mount and recreating it. Thanks in advance!

 

[bbgeek17]

What likely happened is you wrote data to /homeshare when nothing was mounted there. When you added a mount that hid the files already located in that folder. You need to unmount /homeshare and examine the directory after that.
You did not indicate how you mounted your additional disk, whether its done manually or through fstab. You may want to add "is_mountpoint" option to your storage definition:

 --is_mountpoint <string> (default = no)
           Assume the given path is

This will tell PVE that it should expect this to be mounted before using.

---

Blockbridge : Ultra low latency all-NVME shared storage for Proxmox - https://www.blockbridge.com/proxmox

 

[Dunuin]

You may want to add "is_mountpoint" option to your storage definition:

--is_mountpoint <string> (default = no)
Assume the given path is

This will tell PVE that it should expect this to be mounted before using.

Command would be: pvesm set homeshare --is_mountpoint /homeshare
With that the storage will fail if the SMB share isn't mounted instead of filling up your root filesystem.

 

[qda]

What likely happened is you wrote data to /homeshare when nothing was mounted there. When you added a mount that hid the files already located in that folder. You need to unmount /homeshare and examine the directory after that.
You did not indicate how you mounted your additional disk, whether its done manually or through fstab. You may want to add "is_mountpoint" option to your storage definition:

 --is_mountpoint <string> (default = no)
           Assume the given path is

This will tell PVE that it should expect this to be mounted before using.

---

Blockbridge : Ultra low latency all-NVME shared storage for Proxmox - https://www.blockbridge.com/proxmox

Okay, this may be a dumb question, but where should I unmount /homeshare from? I've tried unmounting it via the web UI from the Plex LXC, and now, under Resources, it says:



I then removed the homeshare entry from Datacenter > Storage (which I shouldn't have done?), and I tried the Remove action from the Plex LXC Resources page. It gives the following message, presumably because I've removed the entry from Datacentre > Storage:



Now the Plex LXC Resources page has this, even after restarting the container:



Despite removing everything, in the PVE shell, the homeshare folder is still the same size as before. It contains only three items:



Should I try removing it? I feel a bit like a bull in a china shop.

Edit: I think I did everything through the web UI when first mounting it. It was a few months ago and I'm afraid I don't remember exactly which steps I followed. Is there a way to figure it out? Based on the fact that the term "storage definition" does not ring any bells, I'm guessing that wasn't the option I used.

 

[Dunuin]

Okay, this may be a dumb question, but where should I unmount /homeshare from? I've tried unmounting it via the web UI from the Plex LXC, and now, under Resources, it says:

Do the reverse of how you mounted it. Something like umount /homeshare. You probably edited your PVE hosts /etc/fstab to mount it or you actually never mounted it in the first place which is why stuff gets written to the root filesystem.

I highly recommend properly documenting everything you do, so you can look up what you did months or years later.

 

[qda]

Do the reverse on how you mounted it. Something like umount /homeshare. You probably edited your PVE hosts /etc/fstab to mount it or you actually never mounted it in the first place which why stuff gets written to the root filesystem.

I don't remember mounting it in the PVE node, so perhaps that's it. My /etc/fstab in the PVE shell looks like this:

# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
/dev/pve/root / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1
UUID=C215-8345 /boot/efi vfat defaults 0 1
/dev/pve/swap none swap sw 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0

Does this mean I can simply delete the homeshare folder from the PVE shell? The only file visible from shell is homeshare/images/110/vm-110-disk-0.raw (110 is the Plex LXC), which ls -l --block-size=G tells me is 480GB (this is what I had set the size of homeshare to be). Can I just delete the whole thing?

 

[Dunuin]

Does this mean I can simply delete the homeshare folder from the PVE shell? The only file visible from shell is homeshare/images/110/vm-110-disk-0.raw (110 is the Plex LXC), which ls -l --block-size=G tells me is 480GB (this is what I had set the size of homeshare to be). Can I just delete the whole thing?

Depends if you want to lose the data you stored on it in plex.

 

[qda]

Depends if you want to lose the data you stored on it in plex.

Oh, I don't care about that data. Just wanted to check I wasn't doing something stupid. Also, I found the line unused0: homeshare:110/vm-110-disk-0.raw in the conf file for the Plex LXM. I assume I can just remove that, since homeshare no longer exists, right?

 

[Dunuin]

So I mounted a 480GB storage ("homeshare", SMB, I think) to the LXC and followed some guides to mount it on the Windows machine as well.

Thats not a SMB share. Thats a virtual disk. If you want a SMB share you should create something like a OpenMediaVault VM or LXC with cockpit/webmin/fileserver and a virtual disk to store your media on it. Share that media via SMB. Mount that SMB share on the PVE host. Bind-mount that mountpoint from the PVE host into the plex LXC.
PVE is not a NAS. If you want to share something via SMB you need to setup some kind of SMB server yourself.

 

[qda]

Thats not a SMB share. Thats a virtual disk. If you want a SMB share you should create something like a OpenMediaVault VM or LXC mit cockpit/webmin/fileserver with a virtual disk to store your media on it. Share that media via SMB. Mount that SMB share on the PVE host. Bind-mount that mountpoint from the PVE host into the plex LXC.
PVE is not a NAS. If you want to share something via SMB you need to setup some kind of SMB server yourself.

Ah sorry, I just meant that I shared it out using SMB from the Plex LXC.

Update: Removed the homeshare directory from the host, and the space is freed up. Everything seems dandy. Many thanks for your help!