A Drobo is a cool little storage unit. Just add disks, and it takes care of figuring out how to maximally protect from data loss. One does not, as with other storage units, have to install matching disks. Nor are arcane decisions about how the data is laid out asked. It pretends to be just a pile of storage, and does the smart thing. The product line is below:
So you bought a Drobo and want to use it under linux. Great! Plug it in and Go! Really! It can be used just as a normal disk. Plug it in like any USB thumb drive. For old Linux hands, just use a partitioner, such as parted, and build an ext3 file system and set the mount point. See the Setup_ section for details on manually setting things up from the command line without any special software. For those with other tastes, there is also a GUI that can take care of it:
[ Screen Shots ][ Download ][Links and Help][ Index]
You can use Drobos without any special software. The blue capacity lights will fill up as the disks fill. When it gets too full, Drobo will ask for another drive with its drive lights. Just feed it drives when it asks, and that is all. So what is the dashboard good for?
- If the drobo is hard to see Drobo, the software can replace the lights on the front panel.
- Verifying if new firmware available, and update installing it.
- To see information about the hard drives in the Drobo without taking them out.
- To change the drobo's settings from their defaults (like a 2 TiB LUN size)
- For DroboPro, there are many settings (ip address?) one might need in order to configure it properly for use.
- If you have a problem, the vendor might ask you to produce a diagnostics file.
So that is where drobo-utils, the linux dashboard, comes in.
[Links and Help][ Index]
- drobom - the interface (command line + view for a GUI)
[Links and Help][ Index]
[Links and Help][ Index]
[Links and Help][ Index]
Below are highlights included in each release.
If more information is needed, then there are a number of resources available:
- Project -- development home page. source code there as a download too...
- README - Documentation for humans.
- Manual Pages - traditional unix style documentation (man pages)
- Group - The Google groups is the most active discussion forum
- Drobo - Who makes Drobos.
- HomePage - Software home page.
- DEVELOPERS Developer documentation
- DroboSpace - Vendor forum
- Email - The developers list, one of us will surely answer.
- Email Me - one can email me directly.
Contents
last revised: December 30th, 2009
copyright:
Drobo Utils Copyright (C) 2008,2009 Peter Silva ([email protected]) Drobo Utils comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; For details type see the file named COPYING in the root of the source directory tree.