Help: FreeNAS 8.2 Not Booting. Screenshot included [SOLVED]

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voyager529

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Hello all!

So I upgraded to FreeNAS 8.2, looking to get Transmission installed, along with trying out Firefly or MiniDLNA. While I realize that stupid me probably shouldn't have done this on his main NAS that holds all his data (shame on me I know), it's realistically the only real test environment I've got - I'ma go out on a limb and say that everything works perfectly in virtualbox.

Anyway, I read through the tutorial, made a pair of ZFS datasets for the plug-ins to live in, made an IP alias, installed all three plug-ins, enabled them, and rebooted (Windows habit...). It came back up just fine, but I was at work at the time and didn't have easy access to my router to forward the ports of the IP alias. While I was mucking around in the config, the three canned ZFS tuning parameters looked like they could use some tweaking. A few different tutorials I found on ZFS tuning indicated that the first one should be 50-70% of your total system RAM, so I set that one to 6144MBytes (I've got 8GB installed). I then set the second one to 3072, as those same tutorials indicated that the second tuning variable should be set to roughly half of what I set the first variable to be. I rebooted, and all was well. While both sets of changes were admittedly fairly drastic, the NAS came back to life both times without an issue.

Fast forward to when I get home. I attempted to point Opera toward the IP address and ports of the new services to configure them. They refused to load. While in retrospect the smarter move would have been to restart the plug-in control instead of the entire NAS, Windows habit struck again. This time, it took an oddly long time for the NAS to load. After 6-7 minutes, it still wasn't responding to ping (let alone any sort of web/ssh services working). I connected a monitor to the VGA port, and saw the attached screen shot. I attempted to boot into safe mode, and the results are identical.

I don't know if the plugin installation and/or the ZFS tuning have anything to do with the error below. Googling for "Kernel Panic 12" yields a decent quantity of results. While most of the results were reminiscent of the "Wisdom of the Ancients" XKCD (http://xkcd.com/979/), there were several other reports of incients like these, some going all the way back to the 6.x releases of FreeBSD. One suggestion involved reseating the RAM. I've got no issues doing so inherently, but we have a guest who's presently occupying the guest room/server room, so that'll have to wait until tomorrow. This (https://support.freenas.org/ticket/345) thread indicated an issue with a motherboard SATA controller being in ATA mode (or not being in ATA mode...I skimmed a bit). This can't apply to me because I'm presently using one of those IBM/LSI SAS controllers that one of the extremely helpful people in the IRC room directed me to purchase. There were no motherboard BIOS changes of any kind, or any changes in any other piece of hardware at all. Another suggestion would be to sit tight until the next beta release happens and install that from a CD-ROM as an upgrade install, but unless that build is coming out tomorrow, it'd be really nice to have my data before then. Of course, the last ditch effort involves grabbing a new USB flash drive and installing from there while importing the ZFS volume, but that is a bit of a challenge at this point as well (and there's a LOT of user/group/share configuration I'd like to keep if it's all the same).

So, any help in this regard will be greatly appreciated. As to not become a member of the "wisdom of the ancients" brigade, I'll respond here the best I can with findings.

Thanks in advance!

Joey
 

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ProtoSD

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The chances that your "tuning" messed things up are pretty good. Where/how did you change the settings, the GUi or command line/loader.conf?

EDIT: You can try this too after the guests are awake.

From the screenshot choose #6
You'll get an "OK" prompt
You can type help etc., but you can also do "more /boot/loader.conf" or examine other files.
So find the variables you set (if they were in loader.conf)
Or just type "show" to see what's been set
Now you can try "unset variable-name"
When you're done unsetting the offending varibles you can continue booting by just typing "boot"
Unsetting just does it ONCE for this boot, so you'll need to fix it where ever you set it originally.

Also, here's a good little (LONG) tutorial: http://harrykar.blogspot.com/2010/06/freebsd-booting-and-shutting-down.html


attachment.php
 

voyager529

Dabbler
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Jul 27, 2011
Messages
36
Fixed/resolved

The chances that your "tuning" messed things up are pretty good. Where/how did you change the settings, the GUi or command line/loader.conf?

EDIT: You can try this too after the guests are awake.

From the screenshot choose #6
You'll get an "OK" prompt
You can type help etc., but you can also do "more /boot/loader.conf" or examine other files.
So find the variables you set (if they were in loader.conf)
Or just type "show" to see what's been set
Now you can try "unset variable-name"
When you're done unsetting the offending varibles you can continue booting by just typing "boot"
Unsetting just does it ONCE for this boot, so you'll need to fix it where ever you set it originally.

Also, here's a good little (LONG) tutorial: http://harrykar.blogspot.com/2010/06/freebsd-booting-and-shutting-down.html


attachment.php

This method right here def works.

The issue was tuning gone wrong. I still haven't figured out the "correct" values to put into my system, so I set them back to the defaults and all seemed to be well. Also of note, they do need to be changed in the GUI, and apparently disabling the tuning tweaks doesn't do the trick. For this to work you do need to actually change the values, either by GUI or CLI (unsurprisingly I found the GUI a bit easier in this regard).

Thanks so much for your help!

Moderators note: If possible to add 'fixed' or 'solved' to the topic header for this thread, it may help others.

Joey
 

ProtoSD

MVP
Joined
Jul 1, 2011
Messages
3,348
Thanks for posting back Joey. I'm glad you were able to follow the fix and get things working again.

-- Proto
 
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