At my witt's end... Installation/Various issues

[Tinus Blaauw]

Hi Everybody,

HP N54L Server
16GB RAM (Initially, now only 8G - see below)
5x 4TB Seagate ST4000DM000 drives
1x 30GB USB stick

OK, so where do I start?

Got this brand new a couple of days ago - installed 9.2.1.3, just to find out there is a problem with transferring of the ZFS snapshots through SCP - known bug - so downgraded to 9.2.1.2

So, finally, ZFS pools and everything has bee configured, replication job from another machine was running perfectly. Every now and again, the WebGUI would stop to respond. Had to SSH into the box and restart 2 processes... njinx and djenga? - not sure about the names now any more.

Anyway, the WebGUI non responsiveness became more apparent the past 24 hours, until this morning where it did not respond at all. Upon plugging in a screen on the server, the machine appeared to be in a rebooting frenzy, every time giving a kernel panic.

First deduction - probably just a installation that went bad - so reinstalled. Same endless !@#!@$ loop with the kernel panic.

To cut a long story short - found the original 2x8GB DIMM's had a manufacturing fault or something, so replaced that with 2x4GB's. Also tried VARIOUS flavours of 'cooked' bios's --- in order to get the onboard SATA port on full speed (3.0 Gbps).

Whenever the machine now boots, it FREQUENTLY hangs at some sort of mDNS thing - sorry for the lack of the exact name - but concentration is not that high anymore, as I have been battling with this machine since 8am, and it's not almost midnight!

I have redownloaded freenas images, burnt new disks, etc. etc. etc. - same continous problem. I've changed everything possible EXCEPT for the physical server and hard drives (bear in mind the installation is onto a USB disk - and I have swopped those out too!)

Before starting this post, I switched on the server - and about a minute ago, it finally botted to the console setup screen again. So the better part of about 5 minutes where it 'hung' on the mDNS error.

To make things worse, I have an EXACT same machine (different BIOS, and different RAM), and it runs like a dream.

Any/all help appreciated!

Regards
Tinus

 

[cyberjock]

Well, without going into extreme detail, your last sentence seems to almost imply a hardware problem of some kind. I'd get on the same BIOS version and duplicate your settings in the BIOS. If it still won't work I say your chances of success are very low.

Other than that, I don't have any specific recommendations. 8GB of RAM with 20TB of disk space is going to be a recipe for a slow server. I'd seriously consider getting back to 16GB of RAM before trying to troubleshoot a "slow server" further. If you are very very short on RAM, which I'd consider you to be borderline at least, your server can perform so slowly it appears to be hung. It sucks because it makes troubleshooting much harder.

 

[Tinus Blaauw]

Well, without going into extreme detail, your last sentence seems to almost imply a hardware problem of some kind. I'd get on the same BIOS version and duplicate your settings in the BIOS. If it still won't work I say your chances of success are very low.

Other than that, I don't have any specific recommendations. 8GB of RAM with 20TB of disk space is going to be a recipe for a slow server. I'd seriously consider getting back to 16GB of RAM before trying to troubleshoot a "slow server" further. If you are very very short on RAM, which I'd consider you to be borderline at least, your server can perform so slowly it appears to be hung. It sucks because it makes troubleshooting much harder.

Hey Cyberjock,

Thank you, yes - I plan on going back to 16GB, but it's not locally available, so can only get it from Germany next week. GUTT feeling tells me it is hardware - the problems are too random for it not to be - but then again, where? And on what basis can I return this server, SHOULD it be the problem? If you understand what I mean :)

I've basically just finished setting up the new installation again, imported the zfs volumes, and the rebooting is significantly faster than what it was - still the mDNS error tho...

 

[Tinus Blaauw]

Just a bit of an update - ended up being faulty RAM. Sent it back to amazon for a refund. Also the mDNS is apparently specific to IPv6. Disable that, and no mDNS error...

 

[timbiotic]

Tried to message you Tinus but it didn't work. I noticed from one of your bug reports that one of your boxes use an adaptec 51645. I got one of these free and wondered how you set it up with freenas. Guessing you just pass through somehow. Originally I bought a 3ware for all my drives but realized too late that the one I bought supports sata only. My drives are seagate 3tb SAS. You can message me if that works. I know this isn't on topic of this thread.