mount -rw / ISSUE

[Decibel1000]

Hello people,
I'm having some issues that might be caused by not understanding very well the concept of FreeNAS using a thumb drive for the system volume (and this being R/O), however this is not the subject of this post.

I'm creating a backup script of several SMB shares that should start from the NAS server, so the files should be pulled from the FreeNAS server. For that to work I understand that I need the password data stored at the .nsmbrc file (root user) so the script can map the SMB shares without prompting for a password.
Without understanding very well how this system volume R/O concept works, I used the "mount -rw /" command to make the root user home directory R/W so I could make the changes I need. I could notice that after that the server started responding very slow to the terminal commands, but I kept going on. After having done the changes I made the system R/O again using the "mount -ur /" command to bring back the original volume attributes. After that the server froze, or almost froze. the only way I could bring it back was using a ctrl-alt-del from the console to a soft boot, and it took maybe 5 minutes to complete the restart.
After this restart the system was OK again. I went trough the whole procedure again trying to understand what happened and had the same results. After a restart the server came back to life again without issues.
So my question: what is happening? Is this procedure to alter configuration files wrong? I imagine that using the "mount -ur /" would also make the /var dir R/O. This might explain system hanging.

Thanks a ton for your help.

 

[Ef57uiKnN6]

Encounter exactly the same issue with my new FreeNAS box.
I thought that there is a serious problem, because I was used to get the prompt back very quickly after remounting read-only on my old box.

In my case it turns out that I was just a little bit to impatient.

New box:

Code:

[root@freenas2 ~]# time mount -uw /; time mount -ur /
+ mount -uw /

real	0m0.007s
user	0m0.000s
sys	0m0.002s
+ mount -ur /

real	3m5.638s
user	0m0.000s
sys	0m0.093s
[root@freenas2 ~]#

Old box:

Code:

[root@freenas ~]# time mount -uw /; time mount -ur /
+ mount -uw /

real	0m0.011s
user	0m0.000s
sys	0m0.005s
+ mount -ur /

real	0m17.332s
user	0m0.000s
sys	0m0.182s
[root@freenas ~]#

 

[Decibel1000]

Actually it's not only a lag after issuing the command. The server seems to hang as even the web interface doesn't respond any more.
Please, can you explain those numbers from your example? What those three minutes actually mean?

EDIT: I think I was impatient too ... However, this three minute figure isn't quite good. The whole system hangs during this time. Why it happens?

 

[cyberjock]

USB sticks don't handle random writes very well. If you have logs and other stuff going on it can create very long latency issues that may make you think the server is frozen. I bet if you do the 'mount -ur /' and wait it out for 5 mins or so it'll clear up.

 

[Decibel1000]

If you have logs and other stuff going on it can create very long latency issues that may make you think the server is frozen.

I'm setting the thumb drive to R/O, so no logs, no nothing is being written there.
As Ef57uiKnN6 exemplified, in some FreNAS older version this didn't seem to happen...