Hardware question Supermicro H8SLL-i

[urobe]

Hey there,

I was planing to build my first FreeNAS and was looking at Sockel 1150 setup. However, I have an old server laying aroung:

Supermicro H8SLL-i
2GB ECC ram
AMD Opteron 148 2.26 GHz

The NAS doesn't need a lot of performence, as it will serve as a monthly backup drive. Once a month about 800GB of steady streaming from one user.

I basically want to get my feet wet and see if I like it or not. If I do, I'll replace the daily backup and the storage the actual useres access as well with a freenas.

So, my question is, does anyone know if the hardware will work? If so, I'd get two more GB ram. As a first test, for starters I would stick with version 9.2.1.9.

Any input is greatly appreciated.

-Tobi

 

[Spearfoot]

Hey there,

I was planing to build my first FreeNAS and was looking at Sockel 1150 setup. However, I have an old server laying aroung:

Supermicro H8SLL-i
2GB ECC ram
AMD Opteron 148 2.26 GHz

The NAS doesn't need a lot of performence, as it will serve as a monthly backup drive. Once a month about 800GB of steady streaming from one user.

I basically want to get my feet wet and see if I like it or not. If I do, I'll replace the daily backup and the storage the actual useres access as well with a freenas.

So, my question is, does anyone know if the hardware will work? If so, I'd get two more GB ram. As a first test, for starters I would stick with version 9.2.1.9.

Any input is greatly appreciated.

-Tobi

Welcome to the forum!

8GB is the recommended minimum amount of memory for running FreeNAS. You are likely to have problems with only 4GB of RAM, which is the most that board supports.

 

[urobe]

Thanks for the reply. that was why I would stick to version 9.2.1.9, which has a minimum of 4gb recommended.

 

[Spearfoot]

Thanks for the reply. that was why I would stick to version 9.2.1.9, which has a minimum of 4gb recommended.

Oh! Sorry, you mentioned that and I missed it!

Well then, it ought to work... Version 9.2.x is quite old and won't really give you an accurate perspective on the current version of FreeNAS. but I believe there are several users here who still use it on production servers.

Good luck!

 

[Stux]

You might still have issues with 4GB. It's before my time, but my understanding is the minimum was raised because of issues.

 

[gpsguy]

The recommendation for 8GB of RAM, goes way back into the FreeNAS 8.x days.

You could try the 32bit version of 9.2.1.9.

 

[urobe]

Thanks for the input, I think I'll gonna try the 32bit version. I have so many questions that I think are easiest answered with trial&error...

Oh! Sorry, you mentioned that and I missed it!

Version 9.2.x is quite old and won't really give you an accurate perspective on the current version of FreeNAS.

I'm mostly interested in user & volume mgmt. Is the current version in this regard much more flexible?

 

[tvsjr]

Your first experience with FN on a more than 2 year old version that's dead-end... I don't see this ending well.

 

[urobe]

Your first experience with FN on a more than 2 year old version that's dead-end... I don't see this ending well.

hmm, is there somewhere a log of the features added to the single versions? My needs are rather basic, I think. I'm mostly excited about ZFS and the use "regular" hardware.
I found in the meantime 2 more UDIMMs for 15 Euro, which I already ordered. I think that's not too much for trial machine.

 

[tvsjr]

Each version has a Release Notes and/or Changelog. You can find them in the <version>/RELEASE folder here: https://download.freenas.org/

 

[brando56894]

If you just want to do trial and error and get get your feet wet you're honestly better off testing out a newer version in a VM that has more RAM available.

 

[urobe]

If you just want to do trial and error and get get your feet wet you're honestly better off testing out a newer version in a VM that has more RAM available.

I thought about that, but my computer doesn't really have the specs to run a vm nor the physical space for the added drives. And I don't want to install it on the server itself. There would be one computer in the network that would qualify, but I didn't want to burden the user with the vm.
I looked through the added features, and I don't think there's something substantial that I'll be missing. Some of the fixed bugs seem to be more important. We'll see, if I can't get it to run, I'll rethink the vm option.

 

[urobe]

Alright, I have the additional RAM, and I wrote the img file to a usb stick, added another usb stick, as the later boot drive. The system boots, and starts from the USB stick, but before I get to the install/upgrade, shell, reboot system, ... screen, the process stops with the following message:

Code:

KDB: enter: panic
[ therad pid 649 tid 100068 ]
stopped at        kbd_enter+0x3a: movl    $0,kbd_why

Anyone any idea what's going on?

Any input is greatly appreciated.
-Tobi

 

[Spearfoot]

Alright, I have the additional RAM, and I wrote the img file to a usb stick, added another usb stick, as the later boot drive. The system boots, and starts from the USB stick, but before I get to the install/upgrade, shell, reboot system, ... screen, the process stops with the following message:

Code:

KDB: enter: panic
[ therad pid 649 tid 100068 ]
stopped at        kbd_enter+0x3a: movl    $0,kbd_why

Anyone any idea what's going on?

Any input is greatly appreciated.
-Tobi

It's a kernel panic: the OS threw up its hands and gave up, probably because you only have 4GB of RAM. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but if you want to tinker with FreeNAS you'll need a machine with at least the minimum specifications, especially with regards to RAM.

 

[urobe]

Thanks for the reply. I was installing the 32bit version of 9.2.1.9, which minimum is 4GB. Is there anyway to find out more details, of whats going on?

 

[urobe]

Is there really no way to find out why the kernel paniced? I heared that AMD CPUs are generally not as well supported as Intel, and I read somewhere that the USB stick could give some trouble.
Regarding that it is an AMD system and that the USB stick was a generic one, I think those could be the issues as well. The USB stick is obviously easy to change, which I will do this the coming weekend.

But there must be some way to tell why the system refuses to install?

Any help and or pointer is greatly appreciated.

 

[nightshade00013]

In all honesty FreeNAS after version 9 and that board are just not a good mix. You are already coming across that as you can tell with the issues. It is around a ten year old board and architecture and you are asking it to run modern software. I would throw an older linux or FreeBSD version on it and use it as a box to goof around learning how things work via the command line and maybe use it as a simple game server but for FreeNAS all it will bring is headaches.

Something from below would probably work ok and at least give you some experience setting up stuff on FreeBSD which FreeNAS is based off of.

http://ftp-archive.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD-Archive/old-releases/i386/

 

[urobe]

Thank you for your feedback. I wasn't sure if it would work, that's why I asked beforehand, and the answer I got was that it should work. Oh well.

In about 7 months I get another much newer server that will be replaced. It's a HP proliant ml150 g6 (xeon E5520). This one has 16GB of registered ECC Ram. From what I can see is that most people get UDIMMs instead of RDIMMs.

Is this for cost reasons only, or is there a disadvantage of using RDIMMs with FreeNAS?