ARC-1160/smartctl loop @boot

[ler]

I reported this a while back, but NO ONE ever gave me a way to get the procstat/etc that Xin Li wanted.

When rebooting my FreeNAS box with a ARC-1160 controller, the identifydisk routine invokes smartctl and it eats 100% cpu and the boot hangs.

This is STILL true with last nights update to 9.3.1

Ideas?

None of the other consoles are active, etc.

if I ctrl/c it, it boots and works just fine.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

ARC-1160

Probably best to get a different HBA, e.g. the perennial forum favorite IBM M1015 or equivalent.

 

[ler]

That's not going to happen. PCI-X HBA's are hard as hell to find, and with 16 Ports, even harder.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

That's not going to happen. PCI-X HBA's are hard as hell to find, and with 16 Ports, even harder.

Sounds like you need more suitable hardware if you're going to continue with FreeNAS.

 

[ler]

Ya know, I keep hearing this, but **EVERYTHING** else works great, and the HW was reasonably inexpensive.

I don't need people telling me to CHANGE THE HW. What I need is a way to stop the smartctl @boot loop.

Changing HW is NOT GOING TO HAPPEN.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

What I need is a way to stop the smartctl @boot loop.

Changing the hardware or changing the OS are probably the only options.

Changing HW is NOT GOING TO HAPPEN.

Then consider changing the OS. Yelling at me won't help.

FreeBSD doesn't support every possible hardware device or combination of devices. FreeNAS supports a smaller subset of all possibilities. If you want to run FreeNAS, you need to accept this.

 

[ler]

The OS and FreeNAS work PERFECTLY modulo this quirk at boot.

I'm a big FreeBSD fan. and also a big FreeNAS fan.

The HW is **SUPPORTED**, just that something that the identifyDisk routine is doing AT BOOT doesn't come back. Ctrl/C that, and we work PERFECTLY FINE -- just means I can't do a remote reboot.

I'm not yelling AT you, just emphasizing what I need/want. (if it's not possible, I'll see if I can find what the boot script is doing, and instrument it).

 

[dlavigne]

NO ONE ever gave me a way to get the procstat/etc that Xin Li wanted.

What exactly did Xin ask for?

 

[ler]

https://bugs.freenas.org/issues/10050


'procstat -kk -a'

 

[dlavigne]

Thanks. Josh added detailed instructions on that ticket.

 

[cyberjock]

I'm glad you aren't taking the barrage of "get better hardware" as an insult. 99.9% of people here want a very solid, very reliable, system. So the feedback you are getting is because you're opting out of a solid/reliable system. :P You're choice to use the hardware you have goes contrary to that, so several people (including myself) are questioning if FreeNAS is a good choice for your server.

I had an ARC-1280ML-24. Few tips.

1. SMART will NOT work properly on Areca controllers. Tried to get it to work and the bottom line is you really can't. Since that card isn't even recommended by the developers and is so rarely used there was no point in spending developer resources to hack something together to make it work.
2. You're already in that territory where everyone is telling you to replace it for your own data's safety. I hacked together a working solution as a script and emailed me nightly, and I later found out that even that didn't work as well as I had hoped and I had 2 bad disks in my RAIDZ2 zpool for I-don't-know-how-long but it could have ended badly for me. After rebuilding the failed disks I realized that trying to make it work in the interest of saving money, blah blah blah was NOT worth it.
2. Areca stuff is basically "supported" as in "the driver exists" but you are very, very much in the minority. I would never trust it with my data (I did, and I learned that lesson).
3. Do not be surprised if suddenly you find yourself with a zpool that is unmountable and cannot be accessed. We warned you. :P

In short, you are circumventing primary mechanisms for verifying the health of the system and disks in FreeNAS. Buyer Beware! If this is okay and you are okay with the risk, feel free to continue on with what you are doing. Just don't be surprised if you have serious problems, ask for help in the forums, and the answers are "cannot help you.. the hardware corrupted your data". Even calls to iXsystems for repairing stuff what we're trying to explain won't get your data back. :(

I wish you luck in whatever choice you make. :)