Lost NIC settings and Pool During Reboot

[vidx]

Hi guys,

This is my first post so please go easy on me. I built my first NAS system last month mainly for Plex and Deluge and installed TrueNAS-12.0-U5.1 and upgraded to TrueNAS-12.0-U6 recently.

The problem I'm going to describe is after the upgrade to U6. With every reboot, I will lost the network interface settings. It will be stuck at "lo0: link state changed to UP" for a good 10 minutes or so.

After a long wait, I will get to the login prompt with several "Failed to run middleware call. Daemon not running?" messages. There will also be "truenas ntpd[13521: error resolving pool 0. freebsd.pool.ntp.org: Name does not resolve (8)" error every couple of minutes because the Pool is now missing.

I was able to login as root.

From there I could run

Code:

/etc/netcli

with a keyboard attached to the system to bring up the NETCLI and set a static IP for the interface card.

With that, I was able to access the Web UI. However, the Pool is now offline and I can't import it at all. Luckily, using the following command will bring back the Pool.

Code:

zpool import -m -R /mnt tank

These steps temporarily fixed the problems. Services were not running and using the UI, I was able to start OpenVPN Server and SMB. For some reason, all SMB shares are not accessible using Windows 10. I have to remove them and re-add with the same exact path to get it working.

Jails had to be manually started as well.

Everything was running fine on U5.1. I was able to reboot and very quickly get back into the UI. The IP address for the NAS is reserved on my router so whether I set a static IP or use DHCP on the NIC, it will always be the same.

Any clue what is happening? I have less than a month's experience with Truenas so I'm still very much a newbie with it.

 

[jgreco]

Welcome to the forums. For the benefit of those who cannot see the details in your signature, such as mobile users, the OP is apparently running an Asus B560 board with a Realtek 2500Base-T interface. I strongly recommend you include such details directly in your post in the future, else you may get requests to outline your hardware from people who cannot see this...

Realtek ethernet interfaces are typically a bad choice for a NAS. Some of them are simply terrible silicon, and there are some pretty horrible comments in some of the drivers about how problems have had to be worked around or are essentially unfixable.

FreeBSD and Linux both make every effort to support a wide array of devices, but this does not make every "supported" device a good choice for NAS use. A NAS is a highly demanding server application, and really requires a bunch of bits of correctness which Realtek often lacks. Possibly fortunately, the 2.5G/5G chipsets are not being widely cloned at this time, at least TTBOMK, so you're probably fighting a driver bug. There's a good chance that if you wait awhile, this may be found and resolved. The way that this often works, generally speaking, is someone wrote a driver for "revision A" of the ethernet silicon, present in U5.1, which was working great for you, and then someone with "revision B" silicon had an issue with it, submitted a patch, which made revision B work, but broke revision A. When you upgraded to U6, your revision A card broke. This has happened often over the years, such as the infamous DEC 21143 which actually ended up with two entirely separate drivers (de/dc) which both "supported" it, with different types of brokenness in each one, because hardware manufacturers kept changing board designs in ways that required driver customizations for each board.

However, the Realtek is unlikely to ever be a high performance device, as this simply isn't their market. You obviously have the option to roll back to U5.1, or to wait for the next update. However, I'm going to say that you made a mistake by buying the Realtek in the first place. It isn't a card known to work well. You might find it less problematic to switch to an Intel card. Intel authors their own drivers for FreeBSD and Linux, and they actually have staff dedicated to making these things perform well. That's not to say that they're always problem-free, but they're a definite step up from the Realtek.

 

[vidx]

Thank you for the reply! My apologies, I will include my system info the next time I post a problem.

The 2.5G Realtek interface is integrated into the motherboard which I used as it is. I have read several posts about the issues with Realtek and I will probably add a new card sometime down the road. While the NIC is about connectivity, how does that affect the whole system, including the Pool going offline?

I'm getting null for all the reporting services too.

And I'll go read up on how to rollback to U5.1 if there is no fix at this point in U6.

 

[vidx]

Rolled back to U5.1 and everything was fine again.

However, the problem is not related to Realtek. Before I made the change back to U5.1, I disabled the network interface card to test the issue and it did not help at all. The Pool remains lost until imported from shell.

 

[jgreco]

Well, that's clearly a problem with something. I would probably try exporting the pool, being ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN NOT TO WIPE THE DISKS, and then import it again with the GUI, and see if that helps.

 

[vidx]

Well, that's clearly a problem with something. I would probably try exporting the pool, being ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN NOT TO WIPE THE DISKS, and then import it again with the GUI, and see if that helps.

Yes, there is clearly something wrong but I could not pinpoint where the problem was. Rolled back to U5.1 and everything is working again. Despite the bad reputation Realtek has, it was not the cause this time.