Installation advice on upgrading

[cobramonkey]

So I've been having issues with my FreeNAS server functioning correctly. Plugins were working very slowly, if at all, the webgui takes minutes to load, and the webgui can't find any available plugins to install from the net. Which is all new. My server has been setup and running successfully for 2 plus years. I was advised that I should replace my USB OS installation. I want to know what's the proper way to upgrade without losing my data. I simply don't have enough external drives available to backup everything on the server.

FreeNAS-9.2.1.5-RELEASE-x64
Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1220 v3 @ 3.10GHz
32666MB

 

[DrKK]

If the webgui is not finding plugins, suggest you go to Network->Global Configuration in the GUI, and see if "IPv4 Gateway" and at least one of the "Nameserver" entries have something in them. The IPv4 default gateway should be the IP address of your router, and the Nameserver entries should be whatever DNS server you want to use (if you don't know what this means, you can't hurt yourself by using Google's DNS: 8.8.8.8). See if that solves your problem with the plugins listing.

As for everything being strangely slow, your hardware looks ample for your usage. You either have a problem with a corrupted boot device, or the hard drives are dying (when a hard drive begins dying, one symptom can be that access times get super bad). You can check for corrupted boot device by running the "verify install" in system->update. Let me know how you make out with these steps.

Also, if you could pastebin the results of "smartctl -qnoserial -x /dev/ada0" (replacing ada0 with each of your drive designators in turn), and post the links, let me have a look at your drive health.