Cant Install TrueNAS over Serial Console

[adeelleo]

Hi Guys,

So i have been banging my head against this for some time now.

My objective is to install TrueNAS on a WD Sentinal DX4000.

I have manged to connect to the device over a serial console and have managed to change the BIOS boot setting to boot from the USB.

I get to the point where the TrueNAS Installer screen shows up with the multiple options to install TrueNAS.

I select 2 as the option to install over Serial, since the device does not have any VGA output. But i get the below errors and the console stuck there.

can't find 'openzfs'
can't find '/boot/entropy'
can't find '/etc/hostid'
Start @ 0xffffffff80377000 ...

I did manage to run TrueNAS on this device some time back and it was running fine for several months before i decided to do an update. I was running FreeNAS on the same device as well in the past and i actually upgraded from FreeNAS to TrueNAS. I never did a fresh install of TrueNAS on the device before.

Last time that i installed FreeNAS it was a hit and trial as i installed FreeNAS on another system and then just put the USB on this device and it worked and got an IP from DHCP and the rest of the config i did from the web browser.

This time around i wanted to do it the right way so configured serial console and have things working except the install keeps failing.

I have already tried creating the USB setup multiple time on multiple USBs using multiple creation software like Win32 Disk Imager & Rufus etc.

Any suggestion are most welcome.

Best regards,

Adeel Akram

 

[adeelleo]

No one has any bright ideas or suggestions??

 

[David deck]

I have had the same thing happen. Had freenas on this unit for years, had upgraded to 11.xxx with no issue over the years. finely updated to truenas 12.0 and ran fine. did have trouble with Plex not running and was working on that, reboot the server after some minor changes and it crashed. did things by the book and did a clean install of TN 12.0, same thing over and over. I have looked for over for a week and no help from community or any site over the issue. I get the same issue after the Turenas Installer window. I have a VGA so it is use line 1.

can't find 'openzfs'
can't find '/boot/entropy'
can't find '/etc/hostid'
Start @ 0xffffffff80377000 ...

Keep changing BIOS, bought new SSD, new USB and no go.

David

 

[adeelleo]

Well, with such a big community, not getting even a single response after more than a week was kind of disappointing.

I guess more focus is on selling their own branded storage boxes rather than helping make it run on more hardware options.

I am curious though how you got the VGA on the box.

I was planning to remove the motherboard and install a generic PCI VGA card on the PCI 1X Slot on the board that is connecting the disk Back-plane.

Adeel

 

[jgreco]

Well, with such a big community, not getting even a single response after more than a week was kind of disappointing.

I guess more focus is on selling their own branded storage boxes rather than helping make it run on more hardware options.

This is a community support forum. Neither I nor the other contributors are employees of iXsystems, with the exception of a few posters with iX badging in their user profiles.

Being rude in the form of "more focus on selling their own branded storage boxes" is not fair; iX is already giving you access to an enterprise-grade NAS software platform for free.

Being rude in the form of "with such a big community, not getting even a single response" suggests you believe that random people out on the Internet owe you a solution of some sort.

Quite frankly, most people will never have used serial consoles. Some of us have used them extensively for decades, and still set up new serial infrastructure when we set up new data centers, but we're very much a minority, and it has probably been quite some time since I've done a serial console install of FreeNAS, if I even ever have, because most of the gear out there supports ILO/IPMI/DRAC. I do serial consoles primarily to capture and record the output from crashes.

I suspect that the serial install option is "infrequently used", so if it worked in the past, I'm guessing that your problem isn't one of something like "port isn't on COM1:". You could try posting a Jira ticket to see if you could tease somebody at iXsystems into verifying that the serial console install still works. If it's given as an option, and it doesn't work, I expect they'd be interested in fixing it.

 

[adeelleo]

This is a community support forum. Neither I nor the other contributors are employees of iXsystems, with the exception of a few posters with iX badging in their user profiles.

Being rude in the form of "more focus on selling their own branded storage boxes" is not fair; iX is already giving you access to an enterprise-grade NAS software platform for free.

Being rude in the form of "with such a big community, not getting even a single response" suggests you believe that random people out on the Internet owe you a solution of some sort.

Quite frankly, most people will never have used serial consoles. Some of us have used them extensively for decades, and still set up new serial infrastructure when we set up new data centers, but we're very much a minority, and it has probably been quite some time since I've done a serial console install of FreeNAS, if I even ever have, because most of the gear out there supports ILO/IPMI/DRAC. I do serial consoles primarily to capture and record the output from crashes.

I suspect that the serial install option is "infrequently used", so if it worked in the past, I'm guessing that your problem isn't one of something like "port isn't on COM1:". You could try posting a Jira ticket to see if you could tease somebody at iXsystems into verifying that the serial console install still works. If it's given as an option, and it doesn't work, I expect they'd be interested in fixing it.

Thanks for the response jgreco.

No rudeness was intended in my last message. If it came across like that i do apologies to the community champions. I said i was disappointed.

I fully understand that the community members are not iXsystems employees and I appreciate the work they are doing to support people.

I was just surprised that no one had ever tried a serial install when its there as an option.

Your assumption that it might be broken looks probable.

I have no idea how to open a Jira ticket to involve iXsystems. Can you suggest how that can be done.

Best regards,

Adeel

 

[David deck]

I am using a Lenovo H430 desktop that my work got rid of, we used as a Windows Server 2008 at the time, It was beefy, we move to a rack system with Dells, I got it and put 5 2TB in it, I mainly to run Plex and use it for personnel file backup.

David

 

[jgreco]

I was just surprised that no one had ever tried a serial install when its there as an option.

Your assumption that it might be broken looks probable.

My guess is that the art of the serial console is too esoteric for most. If you worked on older UNIX gear, you may have had experience with a DEC VTsomething as a console, but during the '90's and '00's I think a lot of that was lost. There are hobbyists today who are used to getting access to their microcontrollers via serial, but that seems to be something of an edge case. Serial seems to have been relegated to those of us who do infrastructure engineering, and need it for stuff like configuring networking gear, or OOB access.

The *vast* majority of people doing remote work on their FreeNAS systems do so over the network with IPMI or similar technologies. Obviously, that won't work if you don't have a VGA port. As far as I know, all the TrueNAS gear sold by iX has both VGA and IPMI capabilities, so it's not something that is a real use case for them. However, FreeBSD has very good serial console support, you just need to make sure the details are correct. I'm guessing they'd like it to work if it isn't a bunch of work. The FreeNAS console UI is clearly designed to be compatible with serial.

I have no idea how to open a Jira ticket to involve iXsystems. Can you suggest how that can be done.

"Report a Bug" at the top of the forum website.

 

[Redcoat]

I am using a Lenovo H430 desktop that my work got rid of, we used as a Windows Server 2008 at the time, It was beefy, we move to a rack system with Dells, I got it and put 5 2TB in it, I mainly to run Plex and use it for personnel file backup.

David

David, you're not trying to use the serial console are you? If not, please start a new thread - something like "TrueNAS 12.0-U.2.1 won't install", for instance, with a full description of your system per the Forum Rules (see masthead) and what you have done so far, and let's see if we can get you going.

 

[David deck]

I am not trying to get help, i was looking for answer to my issue, Adeelleo post was the first time I saw someone with the same loading issue, that being:

can't find 'openzfs'
can't find '/boot/entropy'
can't find '/etc/hostid'
Start @ 0xffffffff80377000 ...

I was responding because Adeelleo said he did not have VGA access, I wanted him to known that I did have VGA access and still had the same issue.

David

 

[jgreco]

I am not trying to get help, i was looking for answer to my issue, Adeelleo post was the first time I saw someone with the same loading issue, that being:

can't find 'openzfs'
can't find '/boot/entropy'
can't find '/etc/hostid'
Start @ 0xffffffff80377000 ...

I was responding because Adeelleo said he did not have VGA access, I wanted him to known that I did have VGA access and still had the same issue.

David

Having the same symptoms is not the same thing as having the same issue. Boot loader going off into the weeds can happen for a variety of reasons, alas. @Redcoat made a good suggestion if you're looking for a solution.

 

[jgreco]

I select 2 as the option to install over Serial, since the device does not have any VGA output. But i get the below errors and the console stuck there.

can't find 'openzfs'
can't find '/boot/entropy'
can't find '/etc/hostid'
Start @ 0xffffffff80377000 ...

So if I'm reading this correctly, that's actually the handoff from the boot loader to the kernel...

I was thinking about this a bit last night. What happens if you select the option to go to the boot loader prompt, and then try

set console=serial
boot -v -h

I don't have an example of the iX TrueNAS bootloader setup handy, but the idea here is to make sure that the console is ACTUALLY set to serial (both the "set console=serial" and the "boot -h" do this) and to ask for a verbose boot ("boot -v").

It is possible that this will tease out some additional clues.

 

[adeelleo]

So if I'm reading this correctly, that's actually the handoff from the boot loader to the kernel...

I was thinking about this a bit last night. What happens if you select the option to go to the boot loader prompt, and then try

set console=serial
boot -v -h

I don't have an example of the iX TrueNAS bootloader setup handy, but the idea here is to make sure that the console is ACTUALLY set to serial (both the "set console=serial" and the "boot -h" do this) and to ask for a verbose boot ("boot -v").

It is possible that this will tease out some additional clues.

Good suggestion jgreco.

Let me try that and get back to you.

Your help is much appreciated.

The fact that David is having the same errors with VGA seems to indicate that this is not serial related.

My guess would be the UEFI BIOS. But not sure why it was working before an does not work now.

Best regards,

Adeel Akram

 

[adeelleo]

So if I'm reading this correctly, that's actually the handoff from the boot loader to the kernel...

I was thinking about this a bit last night. What happens if you select the option to go to the boot loader prompt, and then try

set console=serial
boot -v -h

I don't have an example of the iX TrueNAS bootloader setup handy, but the idea here is to make sure that the console is ACTUALLY set to serial (both the "set console=serial" and the "boot -h" do this) and to ask for a verbose boot ("boot -v").

It is possible that this will tease out some additional clues.

Below is what i get when following your instructions:

Type '?' for a list of commands, 'help' for more detailed help.
OK
OK set console=serial
console serial is invalid!
no valid consoles!

Available consoles:
vidconsole
comconsole
nullconsole
spinconsole

OK set console=comconsole
OK boot -v -h

Loading kernel...
/boot/kernel/kernel text=0x16514a4 data=0x140 data=0xa12eb0 syms=[0x8+0x1a3ec8+0
x8+0x1f7a6d]
Loading configured modules...
can't find '/etc/hostid'
-

Serial does not seem to be a console option. It must be comconsole. I selected all 4 consoles on 4 separate tries just to be sure. On selecting other consoles the input stops. So comconsole is the right one. Which is being selected by default as well with the Option 2 during the installer.

 

[jgreco]

It is indeed comconsole, sorry.

 

[adeelleo]

So i opened a jira ticket and below is the response i got:

William Grzybowski added a comment

Hello,

Thanks for the report, however unfortunately there isn't much we can do without direct hardware access.

Serial is a touchy subject because it also may depend on rate and it may vary from hardware to hardware and we are afraid of changing it without full testing. We have our own hardware that depend on some specific things.

What I suggest is for you to try https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/installing-freebsd-over-serial-console.62005/#post-389125

We will probably handle this better, automagically with the future SCALE release.

 

[Dimasm161]

Hi, I have the same problem.
can't find 'openzfs'
can't find '/boot/entropy'
can't find '/etc/hostid'
My solve - recreate boot USB flash with other program. At last time I use Rufus and setup works well.

 

[adeelleo]

Hi, I have the same problem.
can't find 'openzfs'
can't find '/boot/entropy'
can't find '/etc/hostid'
My solve - recreate boot USB flash with other program. At last time I use Rufus and setup works well.

Did you install using the serial console install option or the standard install option?

 

[Dimasm161]

I installed using standard install option (I mean with monitor and usb keyboard).

I tried to install about ten times. First eight times my device don't "saw" boot flash or freeze after boot start. I tried different image writing tools and different write modes.

And at some point my device detected and booted from flash but after that I have a same error message like you. Google guided me to this topic.

After that, I changed usb flash drive, updated Rufus, write image again and it all worked out!

I think that error reason - the boot program can't load files from flash. It can be bad flash or wrong write image mode. Using VGA or serial - doesn't mater.

 

[adeelleo]

So after a couple of weeks trying to make FreeNAS/TrueNAS work on the box i decided to give OpenMediaVault a go.

I installed debian through the serial console following the below youtube guide. (Kudos to Martin for his efforts).

OpenMediaVault on DX4000 - Part 2 Prepare USB Stick

This is part 2 of a Video series to install OpenMediaVault on a WD Sentinel DX4000. In this part we will prepare the USB thumb drive with a modified Debian i...

www.youtube.com

The debian install went like a breeze with a serial console making the changes to the grub.cfg file that he suggested.

After installing debian i followed the below guide for installing OpenMediaVault on the machine without any issues:

Installation on Debian — openmediavault 5.x.y documentation

openmediavault.readthedocs.io

Managed to install ZFS on OpenMediaVault using the below guide:

Installing ZFS on a New Openmediavault Install Using Proxmox Kernal

Today, we'll install ZFS on a New Openmediavault Install using Proxmox kernal. ZFS is great for servers with multiple drives that need error checking.▶Suppo...

www.youtube.com

Managed to import the zfs pools in OpenMediaVault.

Note: (I can see the Pools in the ZFS section but have still not been able to have the data already on the pools shared again through SMB. Maybe I am missing a step on how to share data again. Some user/permission configuration might be required. I can create a shared folder on the same zfs pools and read and write data in that shared folder)

Conclusion:
If this is easily doable in OpenMediaVault it should also be doable in FreeNAS/TrueNAS.
If someone can suggest similar configuration changes in case of TrueNAS as well it might work with a serial console install.
I even tried to install TrueNAS Scale which is a debian based release and made the same changes in the grub.cfg file but the USB failed to boot.