Built a new FreeNAS 9.3 Server for home office / lab

[Dave Genton]

Broke down to separate work/home servers and activities and ensure family has stable place to store data long term.

Purchased Supermicro X10SL7-F MB, Xeon E3-1241 v3 and 32GB Crucial 1.35v ECC Memory. LVDDR/CPU choices made based on intentions server would run 24/7/365 yet still perform well. Components are tucked into Fractal-Design's Define R4 silent case using their 750w Gold Integra p/s. For now I moved over existing drives from old server consisting of 7x2TB Seagate Barracuda's, 128GB Kingston SSD for ZIL, and dual Kingston Datatraveler 8GB USB drives for zfs boot mirror. Going to upgrade drives to WD Red 4TB once I figure out optimal configuration.

Looking for ideas from the pro's as I like idea of multiple vdev's for higher performance, and I figure I could drop to Z2. Chose z3 based upon findings for having 7 drives in use for the pool.

Question I have is on the LSI-2308 SAS which I have already flashed into IT mode and updated firmware which is currently 19. Now upon boot up I get the alert that firmware 19 is mated with driver 16. I cannot find any information on firmware 16 vs 19, compatibility of driver with firmware 19 etc. Is official recommendation to downgrade firmware to 16 so it matches driver and leave it at that ?? That's frankly what I need to know, wishing documentation on these subjects were easier to gather up.

FYI: For other threads I've seen. Yes this booted up in IR mode and it worked fine. Saw all drives initially, OS booted and FreeNAS was online without errors. Flashing to IT must be done in UEFI mode, not dos. Boot into UEFI utility, insert and map usb key to fs0: and execute script.

Thanks in advance,
Dave

 

[Ericloewe]

The driver and firmware must be matched. That's LSI's policy and that's what we know will work and can complain about if it doesn't.

So, P16 is the one you need. You'll need to get it from the archive section of the download page.

I don't think P19 was very problematic, but it did have a few quirks with P16 drivers. P20 is a disaster with P16 drivers.

 

[Dave Genton]

Perfect ! Thanks Eric, That's what I wanted to confirm before changing it. I have it downloaded since I got all the parts together, just didn't flash it yet. I'll do that soon and call that server officially in production.

 

[Ericloewe]

Don't call it production before it's tested. Jgreco would have a heart attack.

 

[Dave Genton]

Don't call it production before it's tested. Jgreco would have a heart attack.

WOW, Eric, I didn't have a single hiccup with this server despite just moving disks from old server to this new one until I did the firmware downgrade just now. Its booted up but says that my zpool is status "unknown" and sending alerts stating this. Monitor is scrolling errors of malformed LUN's for each LUN it has, GUI just states error(0) Error getting available space. Should I revert firmware back to 19 for now or have you heard of or seen this, something expected I need to do I wasn't aware of ?

 

[Dave Genton]

Sorry, false alarm I guess to keep me on my toes. I rebooted OS again so I could break in and look at LSI adapter settings. Wanted to see if anything changed but they were all looking fine and the reboot required to do this evidently fixed the issue. I dont think it cycled after the script was done flashing the adapter. So consequently this 2nd boot did so and it came up in half the time I thought it would, zero errors, looking thru data now without delays or skips across the network. This little box is rocking ! and so glad to FINALLY have IPMI and IP KVM at home since it makes work life so easy. Now its time to upgrade the VMware ESXi Lab Server and stress them both tonight.

thanks again,
dave

 

[Ericloewe]

Sorry, false alarm I guess to keep me on my toes. I rebooted OS again so I could break in and look at LSI adapter settings. Wanted to see if anything changed but they were all looking fine and the reboot required to do this evidently fixed the issue. I dont think it cycled after the script was done flashing the adapter. So consequently this 2nd boot did so and it came up in half the time I thought it would, zero errors, looking thru data now without delays or skips across the network. This little box is rocking ! and so glad to FINALLY have IPMI and IP KVM at home since it makes work life so easy. Now its time to upgrade the VMware ESXi Lab Server and stress them both tonight.

thanks again,
dave

IPMI is really one of those things you can't live without after trying it.

Glad the problem solved itself. I'll try to remember to recommend an additional reboot next time I describe the flashing procedure.

 

[Dave Genton]

IPMI is really one of those things you can't live without after trying it.

Glad the problem solved itself. I'll try to remember to recommend an additional reboot next time I describe the flashing procedure.

YOU SAID IT ! I am a Data Center engineer so use it daily at work to design and install mostly Cisco Unified Compute Systems along with Network and Storage Fabrics. Thought it was neatest thing such sliced bread and "cutting edge". Not being a server guy and realizing its not that new :) Just using my IP transport now instead of cables and wires. Home lab will never be the same, now VMware server is up and running soon to start testing against new FreeNAS. Both upgraded with new server class motherboards, Xeon CPU's and blah blah..

 

[Ericloewe]

I just know my router's replacement is getting a server board. No way I'm not getting IPMI for that thing.