SOLVED Boot drive failing

[Greg_E]

Sorry for the obvious noob questions and thanks in advance:

I've been running a USB3 boot drive on an internal USB3 connector (didn't think about the heat issues) with 11.1-U5 and it's been fine up until they started to turn the cooling off over the weekends and the room the server is in gets to about 100 degrees F during the day. I was able to bring it back up by moving the drive to a USB2 port on the back of the server and did a fresh save of my configuration (system --> general --> save configuration button and put it on a flash drive). Is this really the only file I need to save to get this working again from a CD/DVD?

I have this server "joined" to my domain (not sure if this is the proper term) so that I can pull Active Directory info for the shares, will I need to fool with this since the new boot with different boot drive may have a different SID? Or is the SID going to be the same and no conflicts in anything?

Planning on putting in at least 1 SSD, might do a mirrored pair of SSD for the boot drive, need to read up on the best way to mirror them (drive controller vs. some kind of software mirror).

Is there a way to "simply" add the SSD's and mirror them with the USB drive, then detach the USB drive? That would be most elegant if possible. I saw another post about duplicating the boot drive that suggested setting up a mirror through the web interface, then detaching the second (or third) drive to store off site, but I didn't completely grasp everything. there was also a link to a Solaris guide to do something similar through a shell, but again I didn't fully grasp it. Here's the thread https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/backing-up-the-system-os-device.62371/#post-444697

Not that experienced with Freenas, so if anyone is willing to walk me through the process, I'd appreciate the help. Links to tutorials on making a mirrored boot environment would also be greatly appreciated. Time to go download 11.1-U5 since I don't have it on disk, I let the system download and update from 11.1-u2 (skipping U4 due to being in the middle of a semester and not wanting the student's files to disappear if there was a problem).

Hardware specs. are:

SuperMicro X10 board
Dual Xeon processors
On board SATA to 8 HGST drives (one big ZRaid2)
Samsung USB3 boot
32GB of Kingston ECC ram (approved for the main board, I think)
LACP dual 1GB links - LACP configured on the Enterasys C5 switches (works for what I need)
local keyboard, video, mouse if needed

Was working great since January when I built it.

Lower end Samsung 850 EVO SSD drives will be going in for boot because they are what I have on hand right now (most recent firmware if that matters). Last 2 open ports on the main board as well

 

[Elliot Dierksen]

I have never joined a FreeNAS to a domain, so I can't speak to that. I would say that you should be able to save the config, and then restore if after you have done the installation on a new boot drive. It SHOULD be right back where it was after the config restore. I would say to shut it down smoothly and save the old boot drive as a fallback.

 

[Greg_E]

Thanks, I'll give it a try.

 

[Greg_E]

I decided to play things safe. When I bought this hardware, I bought 3 of the same flash drives. What I did was to mirror the old drive since it was mostly working, used the web GUI to accomplish this (system --> boot --> status menu tabs), when finished I shut the system down and pulled the original drive. System booted fine off the new drive, put in the third drive and mirrored again so that I now have two boot drives and hope that I won't have a repeat of the heat problem since these drives are now external and maybe will run cooler. Had to use one of them in a USB3 port and the other in a USB2 port. I'll check temperature once in a while.

the only issue with fixing the problem this way is that it cloned over a corrupt log file, every time the system starts it gives an error on a log file it can not clean. I'll deal with that when I have time.

The other way of doing a clean install has more info that I dug up that may or may not be in the user manual. If you have 2 drives that you want to run in a mirror, during the initial install you can select both of those drives, and the installer will handle making the mirror and copying the data between them.

Going to mark this as solved even though I didn't try to go through the fresh install, I'll check it when I build a second server from identical hardware when I get time (connecting it to a test network since it would cause a conflict).