FreeNAS Crashes on Boot

[SwisherSweet]

I tried to add a PCIe Flash card (Kingston Hyper-X Predator) for a SLOG but the machine would boot, so I took it out and it booted fine. I realize this card doesn't have power backup; the purpose was to see how a SLOG would improve my performance before I invested in a real one.

I have had some compatibility issues with that PCIe Flash card and the video card in the past NVIDIA GT-120, so I removed the video card and and tried to boot, but it never came up on the network.

I turned it off and put things back to the way they were (removed PCIe Flash and reinserted video card).

Now, the system crashes when booting. There are various errors, and the only thing I know to do it record a video of the errors while they are playing out, since I cannot access them otherwise.

I hope my pool is OK and all that is screwed up is my boot SSD.

Any ideas on what I need to do next?

Sad day :(

A little more setup information:

• Mac Pro, 2 x 6 Core 3.46Hz Xeons, 64gb ECC RAM
• FreeNAS-9.10.2-U3 (e1497f269)
• 7 x 3TB Toshiba drives in "primary" data pool in raidz2
• 5 x 2TB Seagate drives in "backup1" backup pool (externally attached) in raidz1
• NETGEAR GS-308 Switch

 

[SwisherSweet]

Well, I somehow corrupted the boot drive. I ended up reinstalling FreeNAS, and restoring my config and I'm up and running again.

I have no idea what I did to cause the problem. Perhaps taking the video card out and booting? I thought I read on this forum that others are running headless FreeNAS servers.

What a scary event, especially for a noob like me.

While I did have a backup config, it was about 2 weeks old, so I now have to tweak the new install a bit, and my replication keys are needing to be fixed. Still, beats configuring from scratch.

Sigh....

 

[danb35]

You probably have backups of your config in /var/db/system/configs-longhexnumber/.

 

[SwisherSweet]

You probably have backups of your config in /var/db/system/configs-longhexnumber/.

Thank danb35. I have already formatted the boot drive, so I no longer have any previous configs (I checked).

 

[danb35]

You've done what you've done, I guess, but the .system dataset is normally on your pool, not on your boot device. So the lesson learned from this is to make sure you're running something to back up your config regularly.

 

[SwisherSweet]

Thanks danb35. To be clear, I didn't format my pool drives, and my .system dataset is not found in either of my pools ("primary" or "backup1").

Code:

Me@Megatron:/mnt/primary % cd .system
.system: No such file or directory.

Code:

Me@Megatron:/mnt/backup1 % cd .system
.system: No such file or directory.

I agree, I learned several lessons here. Luckily, the only change since my last config backup was my host name change.

 

[danb35]

There's a .system dataset, but it isn't found in /mnt/pool/.system; it's usually mounted at /var/db/system. What's the output of zfs list | grep .system?

 

[SwisherSweet]

As an aside, I followed these instructions to backup my config automatically:

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/backup-config-file-every-night-automatically.8237/

 

[SwisherSweet]

Code:

zfs list | grep .system
configs-7c35bc62b22f460fb3766e1c156d5c44/
cores/
ixdiagnose/
nfs-stablerestart
nfs-stablerestart.bak
rrd-7c35bc62b22f460fb3766e1c156d5c44/
samba4/
syslog-7c35bc62b22f460fb3766e1c156d5c44/
update/

Yeah, I found them:

Code:

Me@Megatron:/var/db/system/configs-7c35bc62b22f460fb3766e1c156d5c44 % cd FreeNAS-9.10.2-U3\ \(e1497f269\)/
Me@Megatron:/var/db/system/configs-7c35bc62b22f460fb3766e1c156d5c44/FreeNAS-9.10.2-U3 (e1497f269) % ls
./		   20170603.db  20170608.db  20170612.db  20170617.db  20170621.db
../		  20170605.db  20170609.db  20170613.db  20170618.db  20170622.db
20170601.db  20170606.db  20170610.db  20170614.db  20170619.db  20170623.db
20170602.db  20170607.db  20170611.db  20170615.db  20170620.db
Me@Megatron:/var/db/system/configs-7c35bc62b22f460fb3766e1c156d5c44/FreeNAS-9.10.2-U3 (e1497f269) % 

So these are not stored on the boot drive even though they are under /var?

 

[danb35]

So these are not stored on the boot drive even though they are under /var?

They are stored in the .system dataset. When you first install FreeNAS, that's on the boot pool, because that's the only place for it to go. Once you create a storage pool, FreeNAS automatically puts the .system dataset there instead. Its location is configurable, but it seems nobody sets it manually.

Or, for a shorter answer: No, they normally aren't stored on the boot drive.