Did I just get lucky, or is this expected behaviour?

[zadeet]

Good Day everyone

I am a long time FreeNas user, and one very satisfied user at that! Freenas is, in my experience at least, pretty much "plug and play", and the performance and stability are astonishing, so a huge compliment to the developers! I have "lurked" on this forum a long time, without posting, merely due to the fact that in about 20 freenas installations Ive performed over the last few years Ive never had any trouble!

So recently I upgraded the hardware of my home freenas from an archaic Pentium 4 HT 3.4G with 3g ram to a newer core i5 3570k with 16g ram. My biggest fear was possible data loss/corruption or having to reconfigure all my data sets/shares etc all over again. So my research indicated I merely need to export my volumes and do a configuration backup followed by a fresh installation of freenas on a usb thumb drive on new hardware. I could then restore my backup on the new machine and auto-import the volumes. So I followed this procedure but accidentally plugged in the thumb drive before reinstalling. Cut a long story short, the new machine booted flawlessly on the old installation on the thumb drive!! no need to reinstall freenas or restore backup, just auto import volumes! Freenas correctly detected and configured the new hardware, and performance is flawless as always.

Is this just my luck, or is it by design? I'm SERIOUSLY impressed either way!..:o

Regards

Craig Deetlefs

 

[cyberjock]

That's by design! There's no reason to think that the thumbdrive would require a reinstallation(unlike some OSes...*cough* Microsoft). I've take then same USB stick and used it on 3 different machines with the same hard drives without any issues. In fact, several people have had motherboard or CPU failures and we tell them to pull the hard drives and USB and just stick them in the new machine. Voila, instantly your "new" FreeNAS server with no data or settings lost!

 

[zadeet]

Hi Cyberjock thanks for the reply.

As you probably realized, I come from a Microsoft background, working (not by choice) in a predominantly windows background, so one doesn't expect something like this to be possible from an OS! But nonetheless this is nice to know.

Regards

Craig...

 

[JaimieV]

It's pretty much *only* Windows which needs careful cajoling to work on new hardware, every other OS out there autoadapts. Even the ones that aren't Unix-based!

 

[cyberjock]

I made a clonezilla copy of a Linux Mint 13 installation a month ago to a different machine(decided I want to jump into the Linux world since Windows seems to be on its way out) and to my astonishment(I'm most experienced with Windows too) it worked perfectly after 1 reboot.

 

[jgreco]

It's pretty much *only* Windows which needs careful cajoling to work on new hardware, every other OS out there autoadapts. Even the ones that aren't Unix-based!

Solaris is known to be sometimes as finicky as Windows. Linux will often do "helpful" things like reassigning I/O devices; taking a Linux HDD from one chassis to an identical chassis that merely has different MAC addresses can result in the helpful "renumbering" of all your ethX interfaces. But yes generally better than Windows. ;-)

 

[JaimieV]

Yeah, Solaris doesn't do a hardware redetect as part of the bootup process, unless you ask it to - legacy from being biggish Unix installations with maybe a dozen CPUs (often different varieties) and many, many different I/O devices, from before standardised "Hi, I'm a [disk array controller]" announcements during initialisation. It can take a couple of hours to do in a big rig, best avoided on normal reboots!

Windows actually does do a redetect (at least two at different times in bootup) but doesn't seem to do anything useful about it...