How do you set up plotman if you don't have any buffer drives or remotes?

Chia Tools & Scripts
1 
Plotman 10:09:47 (refresh 8s/20)  |  <P>lotting: (active) max jobs (12) <A>rchival: (not configured)
Jobs (12): [1        2        3      .4!]
Prefixes:  tmp=/mnt/tmp/00  dst=/mnt/dst (remote)
  #    plot id    k   tmp   dst    wall   phase    tmp      pid   stat      mem   user    sys     io
  0   5034ef88   32     .    01    5:11     3:6   168G   183727    RUN     5.2G   5:51   0:16   0:04
  1   7617d6e2   32     .    00    5:42     4:0   109G   181386    SLP   258.5M   6:13   0:18   0:04
  2   fd8db84e   32     .    01    6:14     4:0   109G   178896    SLP   324.6M   6:24   0:18   0:04
...
  9   0de15687   32     .    00   10:33     4:0   109G   158974    SLP   258.5M   7:26   0:22   0:05
 10   08496e6d   32     .    00   11:03     4:0   109G   156649    SLP   258.5M   7:22   0:23   0:06
 11   3345c620   32     .    00   11:33     4:0   109G   153899    SLP   258.5M   7:30   0:22   0:06
tmp   ready                       phases                         tmp   ready                       phases                            dst   plots   GBfree         inbnd phases
  .      --   3:6 4:0 4:0 4:0 4:0 4:0 4:0 4:0 4:0 4:0 4:0 4:0      .      --   3:6 4:0 4:0 4:0 4:0 4:0 4:0 4:0 4:0 4:0 4:0 4:0       00    110     0        4:0 4:0 [+2] 4:0 4:0 4:0
                                                                                                                                     01    0       11997    3:6 4:0 4:0 4:0 4:0
Archive dirs free space
<archiving not configured>
Log: 0 (<up>/<down>/<end> to scroll)

I mounted a second drive some time before the last job that would fit on the first one started, and expected plotman to schedule all new jobs to that drive as soon as there was no more space on the first one. Apparently that’s not the case though, and it just keeps randomly assigning jobs to one or the other, completely clogging up the queue. Is there anything I can do to divert job 11 and all the the other ones assigned to dst/00 to dst/01?

Am I completely misunderstanding how plotman works? I’ve read the instructions on Github like 10 times now, but those only explain the setup for archiving/rsyncing to a remote as a final destination and using local hard drives as temporary buffer. I don’t have any buffer drives, I only have a bunch of external hard drives that are meant to be the final destination.

Would hugely appreciate if somebody could explain how to set up plotman for local use to me.

2

In case anyone else is struggling with this, Kyle and Eric were nice enough to help me with this on the plotman GitHub.

The short answer is that plotman is currently not designed for local archiving, but there is a workaround. Just give plotman a single dst directory, and then create a symlink at that location pointing to the drive you want to fill up.

For example if you have your first drive mounted at /mnt/dst/01, create a symlink to /mnt/dst/00 or wherever your plotman dst dir is located like this:

ln -sfn /mnt/dst/01 /mnt/dst/00

As soon as the the drive is full, you can bend the link to wherever your next empty drive is mounted.

ln -sfn /mnt/dst/02 /mnt/dst/00

Make sure you use the -n flag, you might not be able to change were the link points otherwise. Don’t try to manually remove the link and create a new one, this will cause your jobs to crash.

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