FreeNAS mini has died - Next steps?

[NorCalTechSupport]

Good morning FreeNAS people. On Friday morning my FreeNAS mini with four 6TB HDDs died.

While in the IT room the FreeNAS mini had a flashing amber light where the 1Gb network attached.

I brought the mini into my office and connected a monitor and no response?

On the face of the mini there is a green light next to power and a flashing green next to Network but the other 2 lights have no lights of any color?

There is a faint blue light on the front of the four drive sleds.

What is the best way to recover this FreeNAS mini? The drive pool was a Z1 and it was about 65% full (I think). I know it was not above 75% full as this is a backup drive in my network.

Can I buy a new FreeNAS mini and transplant the HDDs?

Is there a secret button to bring the motherboard or power supply back online?

By the way I have a brand new FreeNAS miniXL sitting on my office floor (never powered on so really NEW).

Thanks Team,
NorCalTechSupport

 

[m0nkey_]

The FreeNAS mini using the C2x50 chipset which has a known hardware fault which prevents it from booting. I believe ASRockRack are still honoring replacements out of warranty, however you will need to go via iXSystems. Open a support ticket with them and they may be able to offer a replacement motherboard.

https://www.ixsystems.com/support/

 

[danb35]

...and if they don't, and/or if you just need it online sooner, yes, you can transplant your boot device and drives into another FreeNAS Mini (or any other system, really), and be back up and running.

 

[NorCalTechSupport]

I am continuing to investigate and will add a bit more data here: I was able to access the management user through the main port, I have not switched network ports on the FreeNAS mini. Here is an interesting message in Server Health Error Message:
webgo: pam_radius_auth: Could not open configuration file /etc/pam_radius_auth.conf: No such file or directory

 

[NorCalTechSupport]

Thank You! I am getting a new motherboard overnight shipped to me. Tech support at iXsystems asked a 1/2 dozen questions and then confirmed my dead motherboard. All I am waiting on now is someone is supposed to email me with a credit card request and I have not gotten that email yet. The CC request just makes sure I ship the old motherboard back to iXsystems.

 

[m0nkey_]

Thank You! I am getting a new motherboard overnight shipped to me. Tech support at iXsystems asked a 1/2 dozen questions and then confirmed my dead motherboard. All I am waiting on now is someone is supposed to email me with a credit card request and I have not gotten that email yet. The CC request just makes sure I ship the old motherboard back to iXsystems.

Awesome. Good to know the C2x50 hardware fault replacement is still being honored! :)

 

[NorCalTechSupport]

GREAT FreeNAS mini support. On Monday I reported to iXsystems my FreeNAS mini was dead and after 5 minutes of question/answer I was told I would be getting a new motherboard shipped overnight for free! I did have to use my CC to guarantee I would send the defective board back.

On Wednesday at 7:30 PM FedEx showed up with my new motherboard. Poor driver, I am located at least 90 minutes away from the nearest fedEx facility.

Thursday morning the old and new boards were swapped and the FreeNAS mini was taken back to the backup vault and everything went perfectly. Just to be sure I logged into Acronis and mounted the FreeNAS shared volume. Then I manually started an incremental backup and it came out perfect. Then overnight all of the affected department backups ran with 100% success!

The only minor issue and I found it while writing this post is my management network isn't working? I will work on that now.

Thanks m0nkey, danb35 and all FreeNAS forum users in general. I am so glad we found a product like FreeNAS.

On a side note has everyone seen what is happening to SuperMicro? Motherboards infected with hardware malware! YIKES!! It is looking like there may be some sort of large shakeup at SuperMicro they are being delisted from stock exchange already.