Detaching ZFS volume hangs/crashes Freenas

[whythelolface]

Hi guys.
I'm new here, so be gentle :).

I've run in to a really frustrating problem.

When detaching a volume, freenas progress bar scrolls infinitely and freenas crashes in the background. Doesn't matter if i hit 'mark disks as new' or not.

So I want to remove the volume and create a new one and am unable to do so!

This happens with a fresh volume which was created for testing purposes, with no data on it.

It also happened before a few times with a different volume, but after a series of reboots/drive pulls/reformats I managed to get rid of it. This one won't budge.
Whyyy oh whyy, please someone shed some light on this?

 

[cyberjock]

Uh, not sure what you are trying to do, but the whole reason for a NAS is you build it and leave it alone. You shouldn't be needing to remove and add volumes regularly. If this is your intention you may want to find another OS to use.

FreeNAS expect you to create volumes and leave them there for very long periods of time. For this reason FreeNAS throws some log files and such on there that are basically "always open". Those files are likely why you are unable to export the pool after you create it.

 

[whythelolface]

Hi, thanks for replying.

I understand that. But the objective in question comes under the "build it" bit. I'm just trying to set up a new volume after getting some new drives and getting rid of some old ones.

Exporting/removing a zfs volume is built-in functionality, so there's clearly a problem under the bonnet.

I don't need any logging functionality so if it is the logs, i'd like to disable them.

Is there any diagnostics I can do to find the culprit?

 

[Robert Smith]

You can try disabling logging; I think there should be a checkbox for it. Also, stop the CIFS service, if you have it running.

 

[whythelolface]

Great thanks, will try that.
CIFS is already stopped. As are all other services apart from UPS.

 

[jamiejunk]

Did you create the pools in the gui or the command line? I created some via the command line and had this same problem.

 

[whythelolface]

Hey guys.
jamiejunk - It was all done in the gui.

I didn't find a solution to this problem and things went worse - the system stopped booting properly, maybe related or maybe not.

I started from scratch with a fresh install.
The system was still having issues with these drives - refusing to wipe the drives that were previously part of the zfs volume. In gui and cli.

So I created a linux boot usb and deleted the partitions on the drives using gparted.
Maybe it's something to do with FreeNAS using data drives to store it's swap file, subsequently denying any unmount requests? I don't know, I'm no expert but linux wiped them fine.

After this it was all plain sailing. FreeNAS happily created a new zfs volume.

It's a backup server - so I'm happy that it's working now, unhappy to have to resync ~20tb of data.

Thanks guys

 

[panz]

Did you try putting the .system volume on another, dedicated, disk?

 

[whythelolface]

Panz,
Thanks for your suggestion. I didn't try this no, sounds like it could be a good option however sata ports are precious on this particular build - so I don't have the luxury of dedicating a disk to the system.

I ran into another issue soon after I declared my happiness with it, which was that the system would freeze up while receiving data via cifs, kicking off cifs clients and rebooting (didn't determine if it's a system reboot or webgui reboot, but would be out of action for 10 minutes or so).
This was on a fresh system, 1 hour after the install.
I threw in the towel with FreeNAS and installed Nas4Free (probably a curseword on this forum, so apologies :p). Added a couple of storage pools and transferred 1.2TB over cifs so far and everything is still going strong, so now I think I'm probably definitely happy.

Thanks for your help anyway guys.

 

[panz]

If system reboots spontaneously it's like you have some hardware problem... So, it is going to happen whatever OS you install.

 

[whythelolface]

This was my initial thought - but then the system has been running FreeNAS for 1yr+ without this problem. And it's a bone stock HP Proliant microserver with safe temps so I think it's very unlikely to be hardware related.
And Nas4Free is happy with the same config, so I don't know.
Since it's in a production environment I don't really have a lot of opportunity to tinker with it, so I'm going to leave it well alone for as long as it's doing it's job with acceptable levels of performance.

 

[Robert Smith]

Maybe you have Watchdog enabled? I, for instance, could not get Watchdog drivers to work under FreeNAS. Without Watchdog drivers with Watchdog enabled, the system would reboot constantly (duh, that is what it is for, LOL).

Just an idea…