Solving a refreshing login screen on an Open Media Vault 5 server

Solution

Free up space on your root volume. See this great forum post: [How-To] Fix full OS filesystem – GUI login loop

Avoid the problem in the future

Simple – make sure your root volume doesn’t fill up.

Some options:

  • Buy a large hard drive
  • Make sure the server’s outbound email / notification services are functioning (and check your email)
  • Login and verify the root volume has free space allocated with “df” infrequently
  • Use a server monitoring service to report the disk space
  • Spend a bunch of time configuring a Graphana instance at home like this or this and put it in a place where it can be observed.

Problem

When I attempted to login to my web interface for my Open Media Vault server, the screen would refresh and bring me back to an empty login screen. No fun! How am I supposed to fiddle around with Node-Red, Home Assistant and PiHole?

After running df, I found my root volume was full. Looking at the list of volumes, / was used at 100%, with 0 blocks available:

Last login: Wed Dec 14 16:46:39 2022
[email protected]:~$ df
Filesystem      1K-blocks      Used  Available Use% Mounted on
udev               990264         0     990264   0% /dev
tmpfs              202936      2992     199944   2% /run
/dev/sda1        72400968  68738728          0 100% /
tmpfs             1014668         0    1014668   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs                5120         0       5120   0% /run/lock

This command lists volumes and sorts to show only the top 10 volumes

[email protected]:/$ sudo du -xhd1 | sort -hr | head -n 10
65G     .
42G     ./sharedfolders
19G     ./var
4.5G    ./usr
286M    ./boot
13M     ./home
8.3M    ./data
8.1M    ./etc
3.5M    ./root
1.7M    ./srv

I can see that my /var directory is taking up 19 gigs.

Using the ncdu utility, /var is reportedly only taking up 4 gigs.

Looking into /var, I see what I expected- a lot of storage taken up in /logs:

ncdu 1.13 ~ Use the arrow keys to navigate, press ? for help
--- /var -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                         /..
.   3.4 GiB [##########] /log                                                                           . 630.2 MiB [#         ] /cache
. 321.7 MiB [          ] /lib
.  49.5 MiB [          ] /backups
    7.3 MiB [          ] /www
. 128.0 KiB [          ] /spool..

…and /journal is responsible for most of that:

ncdu 1.13 ~ Use the arrow keys to navigate, press ? for help
--- /var/log -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                         /..                                                                                2.8 GiB [##########] /journal
  138.0 MiB [          ]  daemon.log.1
  105.1 MiB [          ]  daemon.log

Another culprit was docker’s filesystems:

ncdu 1.13 ~ Use the arrow keys to navigate, press ? for help
--- /var/lib/docker/overlay2 -------------------------------------------------------------------------
                         /..                                                                              1.1 GiB [##########] /b6be9adc7a3ab5b180028f5a332dc5bbd71bfbaa3784fc7847bba2358b7487e9
  921.3 MiB [#######   ] /401f5e649ba06b0782cf425c45b5dcddeb41351339641806e7b32244c7b9d28a
  916.8 MiB [#######   ] /8c134dd74390b5d10719483cf40a22ae1ebbbf3ff5051555a293d95bc9af43fd
  574.3 MiB [####      ]

So, I used sudo docker system prune -a -f, resulting in:

sudo docker system prune -a -f


Deleted Containers:
c9e3773f2cbb4ac7067b89bdcf1c0133b0b37c3f6ac446774070d6c754955405
40fd33305c81320dd7a5fb936e1e85042b89c34305fb4a565f97c76f14538fcf
e538f72bb3ca901d42796c9b5fa85afaa0d716dee2bcaac598448a9d63cdb30a

Deleted Images:
untagged: linuxserver/letsencrypt:latest
untagged: homeassistant/home-assistant:latest
<.. Many more entries ..>

Total reclaimed space: 7.122GB

Success!

After freeing up some disk space, I was able to login to Open Media Vault with no issues.

Windows 10 on the Proliant DL380 Gen5

TLDR; Since Windows 10 Pro isn’t officially supported on the DL380, you should find and install the most recent driver for the storage controller.

Dual Xeons with 64GB of ram? Um yes, please!

I found an old server on Facebook Marketplace for ah pittance and decided to set it up as a budget gaming system. I had several videos about the flood of cheap Xeon processors that hit the market years ago and knew the performance to cost ratio was surprising.

So, what are the steps to get Windows 10 installed on the DL380? If you have bootable Windows 10 installer media (a dual-layer burned DVD or a bootable USB drive), there is only one main step: get a compatible driver for your storage controller.

Yep, that is really all you need.

Watch the youtube video here, if you prefer:

https://youtu.be/Kz5qhFNKYqs

But, a word of caution: most Proliant servers have great utilities that have been created to help you install your OS, such as SmartStart. Forget all that. 🙂

Instead, boot to your installer media and proceed through the standard Windows 10 install. You’ll come to the portion of the install where you choose which drive to install Windows 10 unto. Annnnd, if you don’t have a controller driver… you will be stuck here.
So, before the install, I strongly recommend looking for the latest driver you can find for your storage controller. During boot, I saw the controller was labelled HP P400 SmartArray. Then, I searched through the HP Enterprise site and various forums for a controller driver for that storage card. I compared the release dates until I found a release date that was after 2015- the release date of Windows 10.
Most of HPE’s drivers or utilities are executable that need to be extracted to a directory. I formatted a USB drive in NTFS and loaded a bunch of drivers. At the storage screen, I was able to browse to my USB drive and selected the folder of different drivers I had downloaded. The installer auto-selected the correct driver, and my drive showed up correctly- a 120GB Kingston SSD- but any SSD would be fine (I recommend the Samsung EVO series. They get great reviews and the 1TB is a great price when I last checked).

To wrap it up, my DL380 is humming (loudly) along after Windows 10 installed. It isn’t as snappy as I thought it would be with dual Quad Xeons, 65GB ram and an SSD with normal tasks (installing files, etc).

I’ll report back with benchmarks when I get ’em!

0x80300001 error? Reinsert your Windows install media.

TLDR; When you get the error “Windows cannot be installed on this drive. Error code: 0x80300001”, just re-insert your install media (DVD, USB Drive).

I was installing on an HP Proliant DL380 Gen5 with a HP P400 SmartArray card. I had removed the USB drive that had the windows 10 installer on it, and plugged a USB Drive with the array drivers into the same port.

So, after browsing for my array storage controller drivers, setting up the partitions, I attempted to move to the next step in the Windows 10 installer.

I received the error: “Windows cannot be installed on this drive. Error code: 0x80300001.” Bummer. I had made it this far- the installer could see my drive, but I wasn’t allowed to continue!

This post helped me realize that I all I needed to do was just remove the USB drive with the drivers in it, and re-insert the USB Drive that had the Windows 10 installer on it.

After that, I was able to successfully continue with the OS install.

Almost forgot! If you need a Windows 10 Pro 64-bit DVD, you can get it here: