Can't downgrade Corral to FreeNAS 11 nightlies, or 9.10.2

[DympyDev]

Hey all,

I was one of the unlucky users that finally thought of trying out FreeNAS after Corral was stable, so after a weekend of transferring data through SMB to the new FreeNAS server, I embarked on my journey!
At first I loved the GUI for Docker, though it had its quirks, I had some experience with Docker on my previous Ubuntu Server, so having access to Docker was awesome!
Then came the announcement that Corral was sent back to technical preview, and I was kind of shocked.
I knew Corral was not stable for me, with random crashes and errors that required server restarts most of the time, so I wanted to revert to the more stable 9.10.2 or FreeNAS 11 (or technically 9.10.3).

So after reading through the migration posts, I concluded that, if I was not mistaken, I could simply go to the update menu and install the FreeNAS 11 Nightly.
So I did, and it failed...
I ended up with a lot of "Error: disk I/O error" messages, occasionally separated with an "[: : bad number]" message, only for it to end in a message telling me that "fstab: /etc/fstab:0: No such file or directory"...
After a little bit being stuck on these messages, the boot process would continue, or so I thought...
It threw a lot of errors about modules not being able to start, including the webui, basically leaving me dead in the water.

So I restarted, opened the boot menu and started my old Corral 10.0.4 version to give it another shot.
This time I tried the FreeNAS 9.10.2, because, based on what I read in the migration post, this _should_ also work.
Sadly, after the automatic reboot, the same thing happened as what happened to the FreeNAS 11 Nightly...

Okay, not what I expected...
So after a few other tries, I accepted my defeat and created a liveboot USB drive for the FreeNAS 11 Nightly (as that was the one that had the best Corral support) and got to work.
Initially I tried to upgrade the existing installation, however, somehow near the end, my SSD locked up or something and the installation failed.
"Ah, no biggy!", I thought to myself, "I'll just install a clean version, if I'm not mistaken I can just import my ZFS pool and I should still have all my data!"
But I got the same error as with the upgrade installation.

At this point I gave up, rebooted my server and started Corral again.
Can anyone help me, especially with the disk error and missing fstab errors, as that route seemed to actually do something?

Thanks in advance,

Dymion.

 

[Sean Coston]

I was going to say it was a hardware or BIOS config issue until you said "At this point I gave up, rebooted my server and started Corral again."

Funny that Corral boots right up after seeing a bunch of disk I/O errors. On Corral, did you upgrade your pools?

SDC

 

[DympyDev]

Funny that Corral boots right up after seeing a bunch of disk I/O errors. On Corral, did you upgrade your pools?

Unless Corral does this by itself.
Previously I was just running Ubuntu server with all my drives formatted as ext4, I bought a new 8TB drive, formatted that for ZFS and added it to the freshly installed Corral install.
After that I copied over all my files through SMB, and each drive that was copied over got added to the ZFS pool that originally only had the 8TB drive in it.
As of now, my ZFS pool consists of one(1) 8TB drive and three(3) 4TB drives, I didn't mess with any of the settings, as I believed Corral would just pick the right settings.

Based on this, I believed I fell into the following category/description from the migration post:

I never used 9.10!
I upgraded my pool!
Good news! FreeBSD 11 only adds two feature flags: sha512 and skein for checksumming and dedup. Most users will not have actually used these in any dataset, so they should still be marked as "enabled", so pools that were either upgraded or created in Corral will mostly just import in 9.10.2. If you actually used either of these feature flags, you most likely knew what you were getting yourself into.

 

[Ericloewe]

So after reading through the migration posts, I concluded that, if I was not mistaken, I could simply go to the update menu and install the FreeNAS 11 Nightly.
So I did, and it failed...
I ended up with a lot of "Error: disk I/O error" messages, occasionally separated with an "[: : bad number]" message, only for it to end in a message telling me that "fstab: /etc/fstab:0: No such file or directory"...
After a little bit being stuck on these messages, the boot process would continue, or so I thought...
It threw a lot of errors about modules not being able to start, including the webui, basically leaving me dead in the water.

Yeah, that's bound to not work very well.

You need a clean install, since the config files are completely incompatible. If you have a 9.10 config file, you can upload it afterwards.

 

[DympyDev]

Yeah, that's bound to not work very well.

You need a clean install, since the config files are completely incompatible. If you have a 9.10 config file, you can upload it afterwards.

Okay, so to sum it up:

1. I need to create a flashable USB drive containing the latest FreeNAS 11 Nightly
2. I install this Nightly onto the 120GB SSD currently containing my Corral install (and some failed installs + old Corral versions)
3. I wipe this SSD while installing the new FreeNAS 11 Nightly
4. I start the new install and import my ZFS pool (not sure on how to do this last one, but I think I can figure it out, any pointers are more than welcome)
5. Everything is great and peachy, I can create a new VM to house my Docker containers and all my data is still here

I really want to be sure that I'm about to be taking the correct steps, as I've spent most of today trying to get this all to work.

Thanks in advance!

 

[Ericloewe]

• I need to create a flashable USB drive containing the latest FreeNAS 11 Nightly

• I install this Nightly onto the 120GB SSD currently containing my Corral install (and some failed installs + old Corral versions)

• I wipe this SSD while installing the new FreeNAS 11 Nightly

Sure, but backup any config files before, just in case.

import my ZFS pool

Trivial: http://doc.freenas.org/9.10/storage.html#import-volume

Everything is great and peachy, I can create a new VM to house my Docker containers and all my data is still here

Basically.

Do note that you might be affected by Corral's unique aclmode. You'll want to check out the migration FAQ again, since I updated it recently with information on that topic.

 

[DympyDev]

Sure, but backup any config files before, just in case.

I exported the config from the preferences, a "freenas10.db" file.
Other configs I either don't care about because I will recreate them (the docker configs for example) or I can't find them (I'm still not up to speeds on where to find what in the Corral UI).

Trivial: http://doc.freenas.org/9.10/storage.html#import-volume

My ZFS pool is not encrypted, so if all goes well I'll go straight to figure 8.1.8.
I'm also going to let my disks sit in the same position using the same SATA connections on the motherboard, even the same PSU connections, so I'm guessing I won't need to export the drives.

Basically.

Do note that you might be affected by Corral's unique aclmode. You'll want to check out the migration FAQ again, since I updated it recently with information on that topic.

It seemed I was, thanks for the reminder!
I think I'm going to be taking the leap now and hope everything will end up okay, I'll post a step-by-step description if everything succeeded so it could perhaps help others who are in the same boat as me.

Thanks again for your help!

 

[Ericloewe]

Cool, I'm looking for edge cases and other problems that should go in the FAQ. I hope to have a step-by-step set of instructions closer to FreeNAS 11's release, since that's when many of the people who are waiting will start migrating back.

 

[nitedmn]

Has the FAQ been updated? If so can you provide a link to the instructions? I'm one of those people that were waiting for the release of FreeNAS 11 before trying to get off of Corral and I'm having this exact problem.

 

[Ericloewe]

It's been continuously updated, and there are guides to some of the edgier... edge cases.

It's in the Resources section:

https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...ng-from-freenas-corral-to-freenas-9-10-11.36/