FreeNas Not Starting Completely

[MelThorpe]

I have been running FreeNas for years off a USB drive. Recently I have had some errors about writing to da0 and FreeNas has been running a bit slow. I was meaning to investigate the error this weekend, but last night it looks like it finally came to a halt.

The boot up screen says it could not connect to the web interface, but I do get the start options where I can go into the shell, configure network interfaces, etc.

I have link lights on the network cards and they are blinking like there is traffic happening.

If I got into the shell on FreeNAS and try to ping anything, I get no route to host.

So I am entirely sure if there is problem with the load up procedure, or I have to reinstall FreeNAS on a new USB drive, or if there is a hardware problem.

Does anyone have any troubleshooting steps I can go through to figure out where the issue is? Log files somewhere, etc?

Thanks,
--Mike

 

[joeschmuck]

Please read the Forum Rules as it provides you some details that we need to know about your system in order to provide you reasonably good help.

Thanks and hope to be hearing from you again soon.

 

[Chris Moore]

It is not something where there are standard steps because people don't use the same hardware, configured in the same way, for every FreeNAS system build.
Is da0 the designation that was for your boot device?

The behavior you are describing sounds like a failed boot device. Was your just a single USB module, no mirror? The

 

[MelThorpe]

Sorry, I missed the rules.

SuperMicro X7SPE-HF-D525
4GB RAM
(6) 2TB drives in RAID 10 via onboard SATA.

It is just the single USB stick for the boot, no mirror.

Im pretty sure it reports as da0, but I cant get into the web interface. I dont know the shell all that well.

By standard I meant, is there a boot log of some sort that gives all the details of what happened during the boot process, etc?

I am hoping that its just the USB stick and I can reinstall to a new USB stick and get it back up and running.

 

[MelThorpe]

As it is booting it seems to bring up the network interfaces, but there are lots of errors about not being able to load Python files and URIs not found.

 

[ThreeDee]

It's been recommended that an SSD be used for boot drives instead of USB drives .. but at the very least it looks like, as stated already, that your current thumb drive is toast.

...for the record, I am still using a thumb drive for boot without issue so far .. but am currently working on changing that.

 

[MelThorpe]

Ive been using FreeNAS for a long long time (8.3x I think, on 11.1 I believe now). Its been a great, sort of, "set it and forget it" system. I've been meaning to upgrade the hardware one of these days, but haven't had a chance to dedicate the time to it lately. And now I just would like to get it back up and running. =)

I know you can export a config file, is it stored on the USB stick somewhere? Or is it just a matter of creating a new install on a USB stick/SSD drive and importing my storage volumes?

 

[MelThorpe]

the USB stick is seen at scbus7 target 0 run 0 (pass6, da0)

 

[joeschmuck]

4GB RAM

FreeNAS now requires 8GB RAM minimum. Problem solved. You should either upgrade your RAM or roll back to FreeNAS 9.3.x (I don't recall off the top of my head what version of FreeNAS requires 8GB RAM but it was a while ago).

 

[MelThorpe]

It was actually the thumb drive. I reinstalled to a new thumb drive and it is back up and running and imported my volume without a problem. Ive been upgrading since 9x and never got the error about the minimum amount of RAM until I just did a clean install on my hardware. It still let me install though. I will upgrade the motherboard at some point, but I need to plan it. =) Thanks!

 

[joeschmuck]

Yes, the minimum RAM warning took a lot for me to twist arms to have incorporated. I actually wanted it to stop the installation and also generate a warning if you upgraded but I didn't win that argument. My point of view if purely from a stability point of view.

Anyway, I hope your system continues to work for you.

 

[MelThorpe]

My motherboard doesn't support 8GB of RAM so I have no choice at this point until I decide what motherboard to replace it with. Its been on v11 since it was released and never had any issues up until now, so my fingers are crossed as well. =)

 

[joeschmuck]

You could be using a lot of SWAP space which is causing the slowdowns. You can check this by looking at your swap report to see how active it is. If you have some jails/plugins running you may want to stop as many as you can to free up some RAM.

Cheers.

 

[MelThorpe]

I only have one jail running Plex. The only other services that are running are AFP and SSH. The swap report says no swap is currently being used.

 

[joeschmuck]

Zero swap is of course what we all desire to maintain all the time and so far so good. Keep an eye on the swap space if you notice things are slowing down, I suspect that is going to be your problem assuming Plex isn't using too much CPU horsepower to slow things down.

Well I wish you the best of luck and if it works, I wouldn't change it.