Plum (Photo)

Introduction

The host plum.seaoffate.net will be at an IP address of production.20. The purpose will be to show photos using Piwigo. The main premise is that plum will have a hard drive for it's OS as normal but read only access to the photo archive.

Strawberry

To separate the photo archive from the webserver and avoid any data loss of the original photos we will store the files on a different VM and share the files by a read only NFS. All pictures will be uploaded to this other VM that has read and write access. This other host is named strawberry and has an IP address of prod.21.

Hard Drive

Strawberry has a normal HD for it's OS but it has a large additional drive from the pearpool/PoolForPear/Pdata/shared, this is listed as AllSharedFiles on datacenter->storage and has an initial size of 4TB. It is mounted at /mnt/shared. To give a plum access to photos there is a directory called photo, this is the limit of plum's sight of the files on /mnt/shared and if some other VM needs to have access to a different share we could create another share off of mnt/shared or share /mnt/shared completely.

Strawberry & Plum Drive Sharing

Setup the Hard Drive

First we need to login to strawberry and format the Hard disk and mount it to /mnt/shared. Run

lsblk 

or

sudo fdisk -l 

to identify the disk to mount, it will probably be "sdb" or "/dev/sdb" or some thing similar it will be the large one in any case as we are starting with 4tb. We will not be creating a new partition, just directories, so no need for that, we will format the entire drive. To format the entire drive with ext4 we use the command (obviously, use the actual drive shown by lsblk or fdisk -l)

sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdb

Next we create the mount point for /mnt/shared if it does not already exist

sudo mkdir /mnt/shared

If it does exist see if there is anything stored there and possibly move it somewhere else. but if it is empty it is ok to use as is. Now there is somewhare to mount the drive we can use the mount command

sudo mount /dev/sdb /mnt/shared

this will mount dev/sdb to the mount point /mnt/shared. To prove that it worked try

ls /mnt/shared

You should see the lost+found directory, which is created by ext4. We now need to configure /etc/fstab (for Automatic Mounting). We will need the UUID to add to /etc/fstab so run

sudo blkid /dev/sdb

and copy the UUID number. Next we need to edit fstab

sudo nano /etc/fstab

and add the line

UUID=your_uuid /mnt/shared ext4 defaults 0 2

Replace your_uuid with the value from blkid /dev/sdb.Save and exit. To verify that the fstab edits were ok use

sudo mount -a

If there is anything wrong there should be an error message. The last thing to do is to create the photo directory

sudo mkdir /mnt/shared/photo

Create an Upload user

To do any SFTP uploads we will need an user to upload photos, we will call it "photoup"

sudo adduser photoup

set permissions with

sudo chown uploader:uploader /mnt/shared/photo
sudo chmod 775 /mnt/shared/photo

make sure permissions are correct for /mnt/shared

sudo chown root:root /mnt/shared
sudo chmod 755 /mnt/shared

Configure NFS Server

We need to install the NFS server

sudo apt update && sudo apt install nfs-kernel-server

We need to export the directory by editing the exports file

/etc/exports

and add the line

/mnt/shared/photo 192.168.100.20(ro,sync,no_subtree_check)

Save and exit. Then to apply the export we do sudo exportfs -a sudo systemctl restart nfs-kernel-server

We need to edit the sshd config

/etc/ssh/sshd_config

Towards the bottom there should be a line

Subsystem       sftp    /usr/lib/openssh/sftp-server

just below that line add

Match User uploader
   ChrootDirectory /mnt/shared
   ForceCommand internal-sftp
   AllowTcpForwarding no
   X11Forwarding no

Save and exit. Now apply the config and make sure it works

sudo sshd -t
sudo systemctl restart ssh
sudo systemctl status ssh

Testing

We should test that the SFTP server is working by using a SFTP client like filezilla to connect and upload a text file from a local VM like the mgtConsole(lemon). use the following settings

• host = strawberry.seaoffate.local
• username = photoup
• password = whatever was set when photoup was created
• port = 22

We should be able to upload a test.txt file to the directory photo if not troubleshoot before going to the next thing.

Plum Setup

Now that the photo directory is setup and exported by strawberry we can mount it as a NFS share in Plum. To that end login to Plum then install the nfs client

sudo apt update && sudo apt install nfs-common

Create Mount Point

sudo mkdir /photo

Mount NFS Share by editing the /etc/fstab file

sudo nano /etc/fstab

add a line

192.168.100.21:/mnt/shared/photo /photo nfs ro,defaults 0 0

this mounts the /mnt/shared/photo directory from strawberry to /photo on plum with ro pemissions. if we wanted to call it pictures we would have it as

192.168.100.21:/mnt/shared/photo /pictures nfs ro,defaults 0 0

save and exit. Then do

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo mount -a

We can check that the shared photo directory is working by doing

ls /photo

WE should se the test.txt file there we can test that it is RO by deleting it

sudo rm test.txt

It should return the error message

rm: cannot remove 'test.txt': Read-only file system

Webserver Setup

There will be a webserver on Plum to display all of the photos. We will be installing Piwigo as the CMS.

Reverse Proxy

We will have to forward browser requests from both local and remote so there will be three config files to edit one for plum.seaoffate.local, photo.seaoffate.local and another config for plum.seaoffate.net.

Plum

The same set of servers to listen to as above so seperate config for plum.seaoffate.local, photo.seaoffate.local and plum.seaoffate.net. They will all be serving the same data so we create that first.

sudo mkdir -p /var/www/plum.seaoffate
sudo chown www-data:www-data /var/www/plum.seaoffate

Next we create Virtual Host Configuration Files

sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/plum.seaoffate.local.conf

We need to put in the following config

<VirtualHost *:80>
   ServerName plum.seaoffate.local
   DocumentRoot /var/www/plum.seaoffate

   ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/plum.seaoffate.local-error.log
   CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/plum.seaoffate.local-access.log combined

</VirtualHost> save and exit. Then the next with

sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/photo.seaoffate.local.conf

and fill in

<VirtualHost *:80>
   ServerName photo.seaoffate.local
   DocumentRoot /var/www/plum.seaoffate

   ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/photo.seaoffate.local-error.log
   CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/photo.seaoffate.local-access.log combined

</VirtualHost>