Built a FreeNAS for home

[Crotalus]

Hi there,

I recently retired after working in the IT environment for more than 30 years. The company decided that I could be replaced by someone from India. I wrote my first program, assembler for an IBM 370. Also used PL/I and COBOL for years. Had some contact with HP-UNIX as a developer using C with some system administration.

I have had a FreeBSD sever currently running Version 9.3-RELEASE in my basement for several years. It is based on an old ABIT motherboard that has 8 GB memory with an AMD Athlon socket 939 single core processor running at 2.2 Gz. I have MySQL, SAMBA, Tomcat, and HTTP installed and used. The only problems have been with hardware. Things like hard drives buying the farm. The thing is fast for old hardware.

I put together a FreeNAS box as follows;

Motherboard ---> ASRock E3C226D2I
Processor -------> Intel Core i3-4370 LGA
CPU Cooler -----> Noctua NH-U12S
Memory ---------> Crucial EEC 16GB (8 x 2)
Flash Drive -----> PNY 16GB
Hard Drives ----> HGST HUS724020ALE640 (4 2TB HHD for a total of 8TB)
PSU -------------> Silencer MX III Semi-modular 500 Watt
Case -------------> Fractal Design Node 304

The wire management in the case was a nightmare, but it is a great little case. I have the unit in my basement and I placed a thermometer over the fan in the back and the highest temperature has been 74F. I have no idea what the CPU temperature is.

Install went well until I tried to set up the shares. Since is SAMBA is installed I thought I could use SWAT. Wrong! I could change /etc/inetd.conf and /etc/rc.conf but there are no SWAT modules in FreeNAS. I also thought I could do it the easy way by editing the config file but decided not to do so. FreeNAS may be based on FreeBSD but there are changes. I got the shares to work using the GUI interface.

I have one other problem with a runaway log file that I need to fix. I may have to post the problem another area as I have yet to figure it out.

Enough babbling!

Keith

 

[DrKK]

Sir:

1) FreeNAS is an appliance. If you find yourself even TOUCHING things like /etc/rc.conf or other system config files, you are most definitely doing it wrong. You can actually harm your appliance by doing that, and the changes won't be persistent. *DO NOT* say again, *DO NOT* mess with any system files. If it's not in the GUI, do *NOT* change it. If this is a problem for you, I suggest you install FreeBSD 9 or 10, and do your own NAS administration, and not use the appliance.
2) If you think putting a thermometer over the fan in the back is the best way to measure temperatures, and you have no idea how to read a CPU temperature, then, I think you might want to do some basic learning about server administration. Whatever IT you did must not have actually involved maintaining server hardware. No offense is intended. If you want to see your CPU temperatures, you can do so either through IPMI or by grepping out the necessary information from sysctl. The easiest way for someone that doesn't know what they're doing is to drop to shell, and issue an "ipmitool sensors".

 

[Crotalus]

1) I was seeing how the system worked by experimenting. Reading the source code could be time consuming. I don't have a problem with the way it works, just seeing how it works. It is very apparent that things are not persistent by the way it works by using the files on the hard drives in the array and not on the boot device. At this time it does not matter if I destroy anything that I can rebuild.

2) I was not trying to read the CPU temperature, just the temp in the case as an attempt to see how the fans were moving the air. I don't have the IPMI installed yet. That is on the to do list. This is work in progress at this time and I don't believe that the system is in any way the final configuration.

 

[SweetAndLow]

Ipmi isn't something you really install. That motherboard will acquire another IP address you can access that will allow you to do everything in a web browser. You can also access ipmi through the cli if you want. Check your router to see if another dhcp lease got acquired by something on your network.

 

[DrKK]

Ipmi isn't something you really install. That motherboard will acquire another IP address you can access that will allow you to do everything in a web browser. You can also access ipmi through the cli if you want. Check your router to see if another dhcp lease got acquired by something on your network.

I wasn't going to say anything.

 

[Crotalus]

Ipmi isn't something you really install. That motherboard will acquire another IP address you can access that will allow you to do everything in a web browser. You can also access ipmi through the cli if you want. Check your router to see if another dhcp lease got acquired by something on your network.

By install I should have said that I don't have a port to plug it into. I need to get a small switch so I can uplink the existing port. At the moment where the box is I have access to only one port from the switch.

I was reading the information on the ASRock site about the interface. It looks like a good GUI.

 

[SweetAndLow]

Asrock boards actually do bonding so you only need 1 port.

 

[DrKK]

That's correct. Your IPMI will failback to your regular port, sir, on its own IP address.

 

[Crotalus]

Thanks for the information. IPMI works fine except for the infamous JAVA security issues I had to deal with.

At idle the CPU temperature is 31C and motherboard temperature is 30C.

Doing 4 simultaneous copies from a Windows 7 computer with all files greater than 25GB, two writes and two reads I get a CPU temperature of 40C and a motherboard temperature of 33C. The system runs very cool. I love that Noctua cooler.

Thanks again!