Downgrade samba version on FreeNAS 9.2.1.3

[rk1]

Hello,

I upgraded the 9.2.1.3 and am experiencing serious issues with CIFS. I followed instructions given to the many users experiencing the same issue, and add the following to my config.:
change notify = no
kernel change notify = no

This made things bareable, but although usable, I experience constant samba panic's and horrible performance.

Is there any way to safely remove samba 4 and go back to samba 3 without nuking Freenas?

Any help would be greatly apprecaited - thank you in advanced!

 

[Herald.Yu]

Up Up Up, I also met the same problem!

 

[cyberjock]

Anyone going to provide hardware specs(or *any* of the stuff we ask for in the forum rules) or should I just delete this thread?

 

[rk1]

I apologize.

This is running as a virtual machine. 14GB of RAM, 1 CPU with 4 Cores. Freenas detecs a VM instance and loads the vmware tools drivers automatically. The main store is ZFS, 2TB.

I also tested on a crappy core2duo with 4GB of RAM barebones, 1TB western digital "green" ZFS store. Same issues, any load causes all sorts of panics.

Over the weekend I downgraded to Freenas 9.2.0 which has samba 3.x, and all my problems have gone away. I was trying to avoid re-installing and migrating data with this thread, but unless you have a way to downgrade (i think it would be useful to have instructions), delete this thread as you wish.

I previously posted details to bugs.freenas https://bugs.freenas.org/issues/4131 but did not get much of a response.

 

[Daniel Gollás]

I apologize.

This is running as a virtual machine. 14GB of RAM, 1 CPU with 4 Cores. Freenas detecs a VM instance and loads the vmware tools drivers automatically. The main store is ZFS, 2TB.

I also tested on a crappy core2duo with 4GB of RAM barebones, 1TB western digital "green" ZFS store. Same issues, any load causes all sorts of panics.

Over the weekend I downgraded to Freenas 9.2.0 which has samba 3.x, and all my problems have gone away. I was trying to avoid re-installing and migrating data with this thread, but unless you have a way to downgrade (i think it would be useful to have instructions), delete this thread as you wish.

I previously posted details to bugs.freenas https://bugs.freenas.org/issues/4131 but did not get much of a response.

Hi rk1, I'm having horrible stability issues on my server with 9.2.1.2 . Constant smbd kernel panics, and at least a random reboot every couple of days. Could you please describe your downgrade process? Did you simply write down your configurations, booted to an older version, imported your volumes and recreated your settings?

NFS performance is fantastic, but stability issues are killing us, and I think it all started when we started hooking up the CIFS users so downgrading to a previous version with a stabler version of samba seems like the best option.

Thanks!

My setup is the following:

Supermicro Motherboard with Dual Xeon E5-2603
128 GB DDR3 ECC/Registered RAM
18x 4TB Western Digitar RE4 drives (3 RAIDZ-2 vdevs, 6 drives each)
120 GB Samsung 840 SSD L2ARC
6x Intel 1GbE in link aggregation using LACP
20-30 concurrent NFS users reading/writing thousands of 50MB-70MB files all day (VFX House)
2-5 concurrent CIFS users doing mostly reads.

 

[joelmusicman]

As I understand it, you have two possible COAs:

Upgrade to latest FreeNAS (9.2.1.4)which fixes some CIFS issues.
If you have a saved config file from the 9.2.0 series then you can flash a USB stick (I'd recommend using a different thumb drive from your primary!) and upload your config file. Not sure how hard it is to rebuild that info if you didn't save it.

 

[rk1]

Hi Daniel,

Since i did not get a response here, I did not want to chance running Samba 3.x on Frenas 9.2.1.3. I used my config file from 9.1.1 when I re-installed 9.2.0. All data had to be rsync'd since it will not allow you to import a ZFS volume created on a higher version.

I've spent a good week trying to make freenas + samba 4 work (9.2.1.3 or the 9.2.1.4 beta), but it's simply unusable. Stay on 9.2.0 which is the last version before the Samba 4 switch until this stuff is sorted. I'm surprised it's still out there for download.

Hi rk1, I'm having horrible stability issues on my server with 9.2.1.2 . Constant smbd kernel panics, and at least a random reboot every couple of days. Could you please describe your downgrade process? Did you simply write down your configurations, booted to an older version, imported your volumes and recreated your settings?

NFS performance is fantastic, but stability issues are killing us, and I think it all started when we started hooking up the CIFS users so downgrading to a previous version with a stabler version of samba seems like the best option.

Thanks!

My setup is the following:

Supermicro Motherboard with Dual Xeon E5-2603
128 GB DDR3 ECC/Registered RAM
18x 4TB Western Digitar RE4 drives (3 RAIDZ-2 vdevs, 6 drives each)
120 GB Samsung 840 SSD L2ARC
6x Intel 1GbE in link aggregation using LACP
20-30 concurrent NFS users reading/writing thousands of 50MB-70MB files all day (VFX House)
2-5 concurrent CIFS users doing mostly reads.

 

[Daniel Gollás]

Hi Daniel,

Since i did not get a response here, I did not want to chance running Samba 3.x on Frenas 9.2.1.3. I used my config file from 9.1.1 when I re-installed 9.2.0. All data had to be rsync'd since it will not allow you to import a ZFS volume created on a higher version.

I've spent a good week trying to make freenas + samba 4 work (9.2.1.3 or the 9.2.1.4 beta), but it's simply unusable. Stay on 9.2.0 which is the last version before the Samba 4 switch until this stuff is sorted. I'm surprised it's still out there for download.

Thanks for your reply! You mean that you can't import a ZFS pool from 9.2.1 to 9.2.0? Isn't that exactly what ZFS would allow us to do? I can recreate the settings pretty easily (email, ldap, shares, etc) but the data must remain on the disks since I have nowhere else to put it.

 

[Daniel Gollás]

As I understand it, you have two possible COAs:

Upgrade to latest FreeNAS (9.2.1.4)which fixes some CIFS issues.
If you have a saved config file from the 9.2.0 series then you can flash a USB stick (I'd recommend using a different thumb drive from your primary!) and upload your config file. Not sure how hard it is to rebuild that info if you didn't save it.

Thanks Joel! I don't think 9.2.1.4 is an option since I keep seeing complaints about it.
I don't have a config file from 9.2.0 since this server started out with 9.2.1 (it did say stable on the website!). I'm getting information from rk1 that I won't be able to import my zfs pool from 9.2.1 into 9.2.0 but I don't exactly understand why since they are both ZFS v5000 right?

 

[warri]

Thanks for your reply! You mean that you can't import a ZFS pool from 9.2.1 to 9.2.0? Isn't that exactly what ZFS would allow us to do? I can recreate the settings pretty easily (email, ldap, shares, etc) but the data must remain on the disks since I have nowhere else to put it.

Only if the pool has been created on a higher version or upgraded to enable new features which haven't been available in the old version. So it all depends on which pool version your pool is, and if its on v5000 (feature flags), which features you actually have enabled. If you didn't manually enable anything after upgrading to 9.2.1.x, then you should be fine with going back.

information from rk1 that I won't be able to import my zfs pool from 9.2.1 into 9.2.0 but I don't exactly understand why since they are both ZFS v5000 right?

Since v5000 the pool compatibility is not detectable by looking at the version number anymore. As I mentioned above, you have to check which features are actually enabled on your pool. A list of features can be found here, a good presentation about feature flags here, and a list of feature flags added by FreeNAS can be found in the release notes:
- 9.1.0 introduced v5000, but I couldn't find the actual feature list.
- 9.2.1 added: enabled_txg hole_birth, extensible_dataset, bookmarks

So if you created the pool with 9.2.1, those features will be enabled and any versions < 9.2.1 won't be able to import the pool. If you created the pool with 9.2.0, and haven't manually enabled new features on upgrading to 9.2.1, the pool is still backwards compatible.

 

[Daniel Gollás]

Only if the pool has been created on a higher version or upgraded to enable new features which haven't been available in the old version. So it all depends on which pool version your pool is, and if its on v5000 (feature flags), which features you actually have enabled. If you didn't manually enable anything after upgrading to 9.2.1.x, then you should be fine with going back.



Since v5000 the pool compatibility is not detectable by looking at the version number anymore. As I mentioned above, you have to check which features are actually enabled on your pool. A list of features can be found here, a good presentation about feature flags here, and a list of feature flags added by FreeNAS can be found in the release notes:
- 9.1.0 introduced v5000, but I couldn't find the actual feature list.
- 9.2.1 added: enabled_txg hole_birth, extensible_dataset, bookmarks

So if you created the pool with 9.2.1, those features will be enabled and any versions < 9.2.1 won't be able to import the pool. If you created the pool with 9.2.0, and haven't manually enabled new features on upgrading to 9.2.1, the pool is still backwards compatible.

Thanks warri. That is terrible news and we actually found out about it last night when trying to auto-import our 9.2.1-created pool into 9.2.0 when we got an error stating that the hole_birth feature was not supported. I find it quite baffling that a bug-fix numbered (x.x.1) release would completely blow away compatibility with the previous bug fix release, let alone the rest of the ZFS world as cyberjock has stated on other posts.

Our solution to migrate back to 9.2.0 was to boot into 9.2.0 and create a new pool (as we had a few smaller disks lying around and space in our server to plug them in), export it, boot into 9.2.1, import it, copy all the data from our 9.2.1 pool to it, reboot into 9.2.0, recreate our original pool and restore the data from the 9.2.0 compatible backup. We tested it out with a few files and it worked, so now we are copying 14TB of data to the backup in hopes of getting it all working again. I will post and update if it all goes well.

I strongly believe that that 9.2.1 and greater releases should be removed from the main page and tagged as betas, with clear warnings about their absolute incompatibility with the rest of the ZFS implementations available, along with the instability issues with SMB 4. At least there should be a sticky in the forums stating how 9.2.0 is the last truly stable and compatible release and that all pools created in 9.2.1 (not only the converted ones) are locked into that release.

Thank you all for your help! This is a very helpful and knowledgeable community!