A couple of connection questions...

[unseen]

I'm just about to start my first FreeNAS build. I've based the system on the following components:

Case: In Win MS04-01 with 265W PSU
Motherboard: ASRock Rack E3C224DI
CPU: i3-4150
RAM: 2 x 8GB ECC DDR3
Hard Disks: 4 x WD Red 3TB

It's a modestly priced configuration based on slightly older but very capable hardware. I have a gigabit network at home to fully support the greatly increased throughput that I'm expecting from the FreeNAS compared to the 20MB/s that I got from the Marvel based QNAP that I'm replacing.

So anyway, the last of the parts arrived yesterday and now that it's Friday evening, I was going to start on my build. As I was matching up cables, plugs and sockets, a couple of questions came up that I hope someone who has built something similar can help me with.

The SATA backplane that's included with the MS04-01 case has a SGPIO connector that will mate to the motherboard (if only there was a cable supplied with the case). Am I correct in assuming that FreeNAS will be able to use the SGPIO to correctly drive the LEDs on the drive enclosures?

I noticed that the backplane has a fan connector and a bank of DIP switches that set the temperature limits. It also includes a buzzer that will beep if the fan stops working or the temperature gets too high. Would it be best to connect the large fan at the rear of the case to the backplane or should I use the motherboard for both the CPU and case fan?

The case has an LED on the front panel marked "FAIL". Is there any way I can use this with the motherboard I have chosen and FreeNAS to make the LED illuminate when FreeNAS detects a problem with a disk, memory or temperature?

Just a few simple questions I hope. If anyone has used the case and motherboard in question and has any other advice they might give me, I would love to hear from you!

 

[Chris Moore]

I noticed that the backplane has a fan connector and a bank of DIP switches that set the temperature limits. It also includes a buzzer that will beep if the fan stops working or the temperature gets too high. Would it be best to connect the large fan at the rear of the case to the backplane or should I use the motherboard for both the CPU and case fan?

I would think that, in this case, the rear chassis fan is mostly responsible for keeping the drives cool, so I would connect it to the hard drive backplane. You want to keep the drives cool and be made aware if they are not. I would expect there is a led header on that HDD backplane that you can connect your fail LED to so it can visually alert you of any failed status in addition to the audible alarm.

Be sure to setup your monitoring scripts.

 

[unseen]

That makes sense, thanks!

 

[unseen]

I've been having some fun with my new FreeNAS machine!

The build went without a hitch and everything seems to be running nicely. I couldn't use the front panel FAIL LED as although there are outputs on the backplane to drive external LEDs, there isn't a generic FAIL output, only one per disk. I can see the individual disk LEDs through the front cover though, so it's not a big problem.

I'm not sure the SGPIO interface is fully supported though as I don't see any entries in /dev/led for my disks. :( This is pretty surprising considering I'm using a stable server platform that's been around for some time.

One bug I did notice was that the upsmon process gets started with 'myups' as the UPS name instead of what you enter in the identifier field for the UPS service. No problem, I renamed it to myups and the ups.log started to get data written to it instead of NA NA NA ...

I also noticed the blazer_usb driver would die after a while and cause upsmon to start logging "Driver not connected" errors. Adding 'pollinterval = 10' to the configuration seems to have solved that for the moment.

Coming from a QNAP NAS previously, I have to say that I'm surprised by how basic the monitoring support is in FreeNAS. There's very little on the web interface to allow me to swiftly check temperatures or SMART status for example. I also miss the ability to have the NAS go to sleep and reduce power consumption when there are no users home to access the NAS.

We'll see how I get on with it over the coming weeks.

 

[danb35]

There's very little on the web interface to allow me to swiftly check temperatures or SMART status for example.

No, FreeNAS doesn't expect that you'll live in the web GUI. If there's a problem, it will email you.

 

[Chris Moore]

I have some of the commercial rack-mount QNAP systems at work and, although they run on Linux, they are designed to primarily be an appliance and they limit what you can do to what is available through the GUI unless you want to do some serious hacking.
In contrast, FreeNAS is a BSD Unix server with a web management console and they kind of expect you to SSH in and use the console because many of the more powerful things you can do with it are not actually accessible from the GUI. I don't speak for the devs, but I don't think they have tried to make the GUI the only way to get things done. However, if it is available through the GUI, that is probably the most reliable way to get it done.

If you are ready to SSH in and do some things in the console, there are scripts that can monitor and/or automate many of the things that you might want to do, but the results are all in text.

Here is a link to a thread that starts out with a good description of how to get scripts working on your FreeNAS.

Here is a resource with some monitoring / reporting scripts on it.

 

[unseen]

Thanks for the scripts link Chris, they are very useful indeed and it saves me the job of writing similar functionality myself.

I'm certainly no stranger to the shell as I've been working with various flavours of UNIX for the last couple of decades and am quite happy touch typing the full range of punctuation symbols. ;)

Maybe it's just the fact that I'm new to FreeNAS, but I have the feeling that it has a bit of an identity crisis. On one hand, it's got a nice friendly web interface and third party plugins to manage and share my music and videos but on the other hand, some features I'd take for granted in a personal NAS server require that you're capable of hacking scripts and configuring server grade functionality like IPMI. The whole feeling seems to be a little bit like an awkward teenager that doesn't really know what they want to be when they grow up.

 

[Chris Moore]

The whole feeling seems to be a little bit like an awkward teenager that doesn't really know what they want to be when they grow up.

Part of the reason for that is the fact that you can take the FreeNAS operating system and install it on almost any hardware. In an effort to make it as flexible as possible, they need to leave some things unchanged from the base OS which is BSD. The QNAP systems I have at work are pretty much custom hardware and they have tightly bound a customized version of Linux to that custom hardware and made an effort to do everything for you. It doesn't leave much flexibility and you probably can't run that OS on any other hardware.
It is all down to how much flexibility you want and the fact that FreeNAS has ZFS which is the whole reason I use FreeNAS at home and, all the new servers I am building for work are using ZFS.

 

[Ericloewe]

In contrast, FreeNAS is a BSD Unix server with a web management console and they kind of expect you to SSH in and use the console because many of the more powerful things you can do with it are not actually accessible from the GUI. I don't speak for the devs, but I don't think they have tried to make the GUI the only way to get things done.

I wouldn't put it quite like that. The underlying OS is available and is useful for diagnostics and stuff like burn-in. It's definitely not a good idea to try to manage FreeNAS from the CLI.

 

[Chris Moore]

I wouldn't put it quite like that. The underlying OS is available and is useful for diagnostics and stuff like burn-in. It's definitely not a good idea to try to manage FreeNAS from the CLI.

I did say it was best to do it in the GUI if possible, and it is worth noting that you can break the GUI if you change things that are not supposed to be changed, but I was referring to setting up the "Utility scripts for FreeNAS" that let you send reports to yourself by email. That is one of many things you can do that don't have a way to configure them in the GUI and I didn't think the developers were trying to keep us out of the underlying OS to be able to do that.