How to improve turn on time

[monarchdodra]

I'm using freenas as a home server, mainly for ZFS redundancy, and as centralized data storage. It doesn't get much action, and could spend about 20h a day turned off, instead of being idle.

The problem is that when it is off and I do want to access it, the damn thing takes about 5 minutes before being ready. It is a huge pain. Especially since I don't know if it's ready, meaning I just try try try to access my data until it is ready. Furthermore, my usage is not regular, so timers don't tell too much :/

Are there any *tricks* to speed up load time? The OS is stored on a plain budget USB key. Would getting a newer (and faster) USB key improve much? I'm not sure time is actually wasted reading the key, as much as it is spent loading services...

Also, does anybody know of a way to be "notified" when the thing is ready? I was thinking of just having a script print "bell" to the output, which would work. Any other ideas?

So yeah, if you have any tips for the home user that doesn't need a 24/7 machine...

 

[cyberjock]

I will tell you that using a rather fast USB3 key only saved something like 15 seconds or so. I have never tried using an SSD, but you might see some better bootup times with an SSD. Remember that anything over 2GB is unusable, so even buying the smallest Intel SSD(or whatever brand you want) may help.

Other than that, you could recompile the kernel and remove all the hardware drivers you don't use.

That's about the only 2 options you probably have. Bootup time hasn't been considered a significant problem because the typical use case for FreeNAS servers will be up 24x7. So who cares if it takes 5 minutes to bootup if you only bootup a handful of times a year.

But do tell me more about this "bell" thing. I have a ticket in to add a startup beep when the system is done booting and a beep when the system is shutting down (similar to what pfsense does) but I don't know how to make the system speaker actually make noise in FreeBSD. :P

 

[ProtoSD]

But do tell me more about this "bell" thing. I have a ticket in to add a startup beep when the system is done booting and a beep when the system is shutting down (similar to what pfsense does) but I don't know how to make the system speaker actually make noise in FreeBSD. :P

http://manned.org/beep/bf539e20

Plus the speaker.ko kernel module will do what you want.

/usr/ports/audio/beep

 

[monarchdodra]

I will tell you that using a rather fast USB3 key only saved something like 15 seconds or so. I have never tried using an SSD, but you might see some better bootup times with an SSD. Remember that anything over 2GB is unusable, so even buying the smallest Intel SSD(or whatever brand you want) may help.

Other than that, you could recompile the kernel and remove all the hardware drivers you don't use.

That's about the only 2 options you probably have. Bootup time hasn't been considered a significant problem because the typical use case for FreeNAS servers will be up 24x7. So who cares if it takes 5 minutes to bootup if you only bootup a handful of times a year.

But do tell me more about this "bell" thing. I have a ticket in to add a startup beep when the system is done booting and a beep when the system is shutting down (similar to what pfsense does) but I don't know how to make the system speaker actually make noise in FreeBSD. :P

Yeah, that's what I figured. I don't feel like bothering with recompiling the kernel (too much work). I'll just live with it I guess, but if there was any good tricks, I was up for grabs.

http://manned.org/beep/bf539e20

Plus the speaker.ko kernel module will do what you want.

/usr/ports/audio/beep

I was thinking just printing out "\a" on a standard script. That said, it may just output to the standard speaker, as opposed to the motherboard speaker. That said, I just realized my motherboard (ASUS E35M-I) has neither speaker, nor speaker connector, so there goes that solution :/

Thank you both.

 

[gpsguy]

I just do a continuous ping "ping -t" and know that it's got another minute or so to go, after it pings successfully.