Don’t know if I’m looking for help so much as I thought I would share an experience I ran into getting a WebODM system up and running in case someone else runs into similar issue, or in case there is a better solution than what I came up with that someone could send my way.
The setup:
Bare metal fresh Ubuntu 16.04 server install on an old, unused desktop PC. Have a 500Gb HD allocated as a system drive with 250Gb as the root partition and the remaining half setup as swap.
Have a second set of two 4Tb hard drives setup in a mirrored array (mdadm). Allocating 1Tb to mount at /www since that appears to be where WebODM stores the data and the remaining 3Tb will be setup as a local network file share for data storage.
WebODM installed via purchased script for Ubuntu server: https://www.opendronemap.org/webodm/server-installer/
The issue:
When using a separate drive/partition for the /www folder, the nodeodm service would not start properly. Message giving when trying to start is “Failed to start nodeodm.service. Unit nodeodm.service not found.”
Tried a couple different things, but essentially if I used a separate partition mounted via /etc/fstab at /www, the service failed. If all the data was just in /www under the normal, root drive partition it would start and run just fine.
My fix:
After researching, it appeared that the problem is that the service uses a symlink in /etc/systemd/system for nodeodm.service that points to the file in the /www/services folder, and the partition must not be getting mounted before the service is trying to load during startup. I copied the file over to the /webodm/service folder (seemed like a nice, logical choice) and recreated the symlink in /etc/systemd/system to point to the new location. Rebooted and everything looks to be running properly now.
I’m running for now, but I do worry that a future update may break things if this is not the “proper” way to fix it. So open to thoughts, suggestions on that. Otherwise, like mentioned above, just looking to share with the community in case someone else hits the same issue.