Clone Jail drive to change hardware.

[SeaFox]

My FreeNAS is an old Dell desktop P4 tower, and I want to move it temporarily to a small AMD embedded-style build I just did. I'm doing this to get immediate benefits in power usage and noise (not to mention size). There's one problem -- my jails are currently on an old PATA drive and the new build does not support PATA drives.


The current FreeNAS system supports both interfaces (I have a SATA drive as the data disk). Note: these are both UFS drives.

What I want to do it plug in a SATA drive to the old system and clone my jail disk to it, then move it and the data disk over to the new box. Will this work if I give the new SATA Jail drive the same name the old PATA drive had and restore my saved settings from the old machine?

 

[dlavigne]

Did it or did you try something else?

 

[SeaFox]

No, I haven't tried it yet.

I've found out my network controller is not supported by FreeNAS out of the box.

This is what I'm using, BTW

The machine doesn't see anything connected on the port when it's plugged into my router. I'm unable to get an IP via DHCP and when I set it up as static I can't ping it from another computer.

Since I can't even gain access to the GUI I haven't bothered working on this jail issue.

 

[cyberjock]

Haha. ECS stands for every customer is a sucker.

Any that's desktop hardware and is totally unsatisfactory for free as. Please read out forum stickies.

 

[SeaFox]

Haha. ECS stands for every customer is a sucker.

Oh, look! It's the hardware snobs! Right on cue to ridicule your attempts to do something because you didn't rush right out and drop hundreds on a Supermicro, 16 gigs of ECC and four WD Reds. What do you mean running FreeNAS on commody hardware? We're building Servers (with a capital S) here!

 

[pschatz100]

SeaFox,

Hardware snobs or not, the system doesn't meet the specs for running Freenas 9 with ZFS. How does one trouble shoot a system on unsupported hardware? Your comment about the network controller not being supported is a great example.

Many people have built economical systems for FreeNAS on commodity hardware - they just make careful choices.

I'm am interested in the answer to your original question about cloning jails - but I don't see how you can get much help when FreeNAS doesn't even run on your machine.

 

[SeaFox]

Yes, cloning the jail is still a topic I am looking into. I was awaiting another motherboard to be sent to me, and I received it yesterday (an Intel board that will make use of a Core2 Duo and some RAM I have laying around here), but I'm going to be sending it back to the eBay seller instead. Its condition was misrepresented in the auction listing and I am not satisfied with what I received. But maybe in a week or two I can revisit this situation.

Meanwhile, I've set up an install of XPEnology on the ECS board. Installation and configuration went just fine and the system is networking with no issues. Of course, Synology's software is Linux-based, and I've had no issues with Linux and this NIC.

 

[pschatz100]

SeaFox,

Most hardware related issues are really due to FreeBSD support, not FreeNAS itself. Linux has broader hardware support, no doubt. There are good AMD configurations out there, but one has to be selective.

Many people don't understand that FreeBSD is not Linux. The many posts from frustrated Linux users confirms this.

 

[Whattteva]

Yeah, in general, Linux is much better with hardware support than the BSD's. It's one of the major factors why they're much more popular install base.
There are even plenty of distros that are dedicated to making the oldest, slowest, crappiest hardware work great while still offering a GUI environment.

People need to realize the "Free" in FreeNAS only applies to the software itself, not the hardware as well.