HP h240 not recognized

[unf0rg0tt3n]

Hey guys,

Just installed truenas scale and I love what is done with the interface! I do have trouble importing my storage pool which has a HP H240 in IT mode as controller. The pool doesn't het recognized at all. Also the drives aren't found either.

Are the drivers present?
Or is there another solution?

Thanks,
Dennis

 

[unf0rg0tt3n]

HP H240 gets found within the os when running lspci:

02:00.0 Serial Attached SCSI controller: Hewlett-Packard Company Smart Array Gen9 Controllers (rev 01)
Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company H240
Physical Slot: 0-1
Flags: fast devsel, IRQ 16
Memory at fe600000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=1M]
Memory at fe780000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=1K]
I/O ports at 5000
Expansion ROM at fe700000 [disabled] [size=512K]
Capabilities: [80] Power Management version 3
Capabilities: [90] MSI: Enable- Count=1/32 Maskable- 64bit+
Capabilities: [b0] MSI-X: Enable- Count=64 Masked-
Capabilities: [c0] Express Endpoint, MSI 00
Capabilities: [100] Advanced Error Reporting
Kernel modules: hpsa

dmesg gives:
hpsa 0000:02:00.0: board not ready, timed out.

Ran ssacli installed from HP repositories:

=> ctrl all show

Error: No controllers detected. Possible causes:
- The driver for the installed controller(s) is not loaded.
- On LINUX, the scsi_generic (sg) driver module is not loaded.
See the README file for more details.

 

[jgreco]

In general, you need to use an LSI HBA, not a RAID controller or off-brand HBA, with FreeNAS/TrueNAS. This is true for a variety of reasons, many of which are discussed in

https://www.truenas.com/community/r...bas-and-why-cant-i-use-a-raid-controller.139/

this article. This absolutely applies to the H240 under FreeNAS (FreeBSD) and for various reasons I would not be shocked for it to not work that well under Linux, though in your particular case it looks like something else is wrong at a more basic level.

 

[unf0rg0tt3n]

In general, you need to use an LSI HBA, not a RAID controller or off-brand HBA, with FreeNAS/TrueNAS. This is true for a variety of reasons, many of which are discussed in

https://www.truenas.com/community/r...bas-and-why-cant-i-use-a-raid-controller.139/

this article. This absolutely applies to the H240 under FreeNAS (FreeBSD) and for various reasons I would not be shocked for it to not work that well under Linux, though in your particular case it looks like something else is wrong at a more basic level.

Thanks for your reply!
I doubt something is wrong with the controller itself, have been using it for a year without any issue. The controller is running in HBA mode not raid mode, it's flashed by the seller.

I have read the article you suggested when I first installed freenas :)

Working great in Truenas core, just not in scale;

 

[jgreco]

Can't comment on it in Scale.

I can say that in FreeBSD, it started showing up here in the forums a few years back and some of them were showing up as the CISS driver, which is also known as the "cess pool" driver, because it will ruin ZFS pools. I believe significant effort has been put into making it work under the newer HP Smart Array (HPSA) driver, and "several years" is a good timeframe for a thing to migrate from "mostly works" to "pretty reliable" if enough generic FreeBSD servers are using it, but I would still strongly caution you that you are using a card that doesn't have the grueling billions of run-hours accrued that the LSI's do under the extremely taxing demands of ZFS on a NAS.

I got nuttin' as for why it isn't showing up in Scale. Usually, Linux has somewhat better driver support than FreeBSD, so it is really unusual for something to work in Core but not Scale. I have a lot of cards floating around here but an H240 isn't among them, so I can't really try it out to see if anything obvious pops up. Hopefully someone else will show up with an idea.

 

[unf0rg0tt3n]

Can't comment on it in Scale.

I can say that in FreeBSD, it started showing up here in the forums a few years back and some of them were showing up as the CISS driver, which is also known as the "cess pool" driver, because it will ruin ZFS pools.

even when lspci -v says it's using the kernel module: hpsa?

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

even when lspci -v says it's using the kernel module: hpsa?

He was referring to the FreeBSD driver ...