Loading TrueNAS Scale on a Dell R720xd with Dual SD Cards..

[WB3FFV]

I have a Dell R720xd that has the dual SD card module installed, that was not in production use. I decided to try and load Scale on the server, but for whatever reason I am having a heck of a time.

If I try and load scale, it will start the install and tell me it's extracting, get to a few percent and then hangs. I have tried both the current Alpha ISO, and the current nightly to see if any difference, but nada. If I load TrueNAS Core, perfect, comes right up and is happy, I have it running Core now with no issues. If I try and load something like CentOS Linux, again it seems to load up and boot from the SDcards as well. So I am at a loss as to why Scale just bombs on the load, I have tried it multiple times, with multiple flash cards for loading, but it always seems to hang so to speak on extracting, forcing me to reboot.

Has anyone tried this environment, or have any ideas as to what I might be doing wrong??

I was thinking Scale would be good to load, as the server has two 12 core Xeon's and 192GB of RAM, so figured a good platform to load a few VM/containers on the server as well..

Regards...

 

[JohnDigital]

This doesnt apply specifically to TrueNAS, and may or may not work, but in the past ive encountered this type of thing. With a random Linux distro i cant remember now, but I have in the past used this method with a laptop with SD reader. But my experience is different, sounds as though you are using two cards/slots, so this laptop route likely wouldnt work for you.

Do the "install" to a flash card on a separate machine with SD slot and transfer the boot device to the intended server as the first boot device. In my experience, this works great. I transfer my Linux machine to new guts every couple years and I just move the drives, boom, working.

 

[HoneyBadger]

SCALE is based on Debian - can you try that distro specifically to see if there's something in that that prevents the launch. I'd also be concerned that SCALE will just chew through the write cycles on your SD cards as well.

 

[JohnDigital]

Yep and I almost guarantee a Deb deriviative is when I had issues too. How long are you waiting before you give up? There might just be tons of data being installed to those disks and they are going at 10MBs or so if your lucky. Might take a minute. Just a thought.

 

[WB3FFV]

This doesnt apply specifically to TrueNAS, and may or may not work, but in the past ive encountered this type of thing. With a random Linux distro i cant remember now, but I have in the past used this method with a laptop with SD reader. But my experience is different, sounds as though you are using two cards/slots, so this laptop route likely wouldnt work for you.

Do the "install" to a flash card on a separate machine with SD slot and transfer the boot device to the intended server as the first boot device. In my experience, this works great. I transfer my Linux machine to new guts every couple years and I just move the drives, boom, working.

That would probably be tough to do, as it is a special board that hardware mirrors two cards so in a failure you can just replace the bad card.

 

[WB3FFV]

SCALE is based on Debian - can you try that distro specifically to see if there's something in that that prevents the launch. I'd also be concerned that SCALE will just chew through the write cycles on your SD cards as well.

I haven't downloaded Debian, but did have CentOS and Ubuntu laying around, which seemed OK. Sure I can download a Debian release and give it a try. I have usually found FBSD to have more compatibility issues that Linux, but maybe just my luck of the draw on this one.

You mention is chewing through write cycles on the cards, is the Linux based scale that much more active on the boot drives than core? I just ask as I have had Core running for a while, and notice very light activity on the boot drives vs the stores. I do know I have found a few posts on the net about people running TrueNAS Core/FreeNAS on the SD cards with out troubles, and didn't think Scale would be that much more active on the boot drive, but maybe that is a bad guess on my part..

 

[WB3FFV]

Yep and I almost guarantee a Deb deriviative is when I had issues too. How long are you waiting before you give up? There might just be tons of data being installed to those disks and they are going at 10MBs or so if your lucky. Might take a minute. Just a thought.

I let it sit there for at least 30-45 minutes once just to see what might happen, where Core would load in under five minutes and be ready for action. I figured it could be busy, but after going on an hour, I figured I had a problem..

 

[HoneyBadger]

You mention is chewing through write cycles on the cards, is the Linux based scale that much more active on the boot drives than core? I just ask as I have had Core running for a while, and notice very light activity on the boot drives vs the stores. I do know I have found a few posts on the net about people running TrueNAS Core/FreeNAS on the SD cards with out troubles, and didn't think Scale would be that much more active on the boot drive, but maybe that is a bad guess on my part..

Per @Kris Moore - none of the work to reduce writes to the boot/root filesystem has been done yet on SCALE, so the alpha/beta releases will be the same general activity level as installing full Debian.

TrueNAS SCALE Announcement and Nightly Image Downloads

Hello TrueNAS and FreeNAS Community, With TrueNAS 12.0 BETA now released, the iX engineering team is making some great progress with TrueNAS SCALE. In anticipation of the long July 4th holiday weekend here in the US, we are pleased to make available for the first time the official nightly...

www.truenas.com

This might change as we get closer to RC/RELEASE but even CORE is discouraged on cheap flash media. A Dell IDSDM with supported higher-endurance cards installed is also different than someone rigging up a $5 Amazon special in a USB-to-SD converter.

 

[WB3FFV]

This might change as we get closer to RC/RELEASE but even CORE is discouraged on cheap flash media. A Dell IDSDM with supported higher-endurance cards installed is also different than someone rigging up a $5 Amazon special in a USB-to-SD converter.

Ah OK, and that part makes perfect sense. For sure I am not talking about the $5 solution as you mentioned, I went with a pair of high endurance 32G Kingston cards as that is what Dell used in the smaller size cards. I also know I didn't need 32G, but figured that in general more memory cells improve longevity, and flash is far more affordable than it used to be. Also as you mentioned I am using the Dell IDSDM and figured having mirrored flash would improve reliability. Now if I can just get Scale loaded, as I can go with Core if needed, but it seemed like Scale was where things were going. Also I am very familiar with KVM on Linux, so figured with all the processor and ram in the server I could take advantage of it for some local tasks vs separate boxes..

 

[WB3FFV]

As a follow-up, I saw somewhere that the OS can have issues with the megaraid controller, so I got off my backside and re-flashed the controller to the LSI IT firmware which I know I needed to do anyway. After that, it seemed to load Scale OK. Not sure if it was the controller, or the fact the SD drive had been used and setup before, but regardless I am happy to report that Scale is actually loaded and running.

 

[inman.turbo]

As a follow-up, I saw somewhere that the OS can have issues with the megaraid controller, so I got off my backside and re-flashed the controller to the LSI IT firmware which I know I needed to do anyway. After that, it seemed to load Scale OK. Not sure if it was the controller, or the fact the SD drive had been used and setup before, but regardless I am happy to report that Scale is actually loaded and running.

Thanks for reporting. This is good news. I have a similar SD setup (Poweredge R440) that I've been wanting to give a try with this.