SOLVED Move boot from HDD to microSD

[DavidIrwin]

I have recently purchased an HP MicroServer Gen8 and installed freeNAS onto an old 250Gb HDD.

Having decided that freeNAS really does work and is relatively easy to get running for what I need I have now purchased a 32Gb microSD card to use as the boot device (there is a convenient microSD card slot inside the server so I don't need to lose one of the 4 HDD bays for the boot drive).

My question is fairly simple (I hope). Is there a mechanism inside freeNAS to move the boot device from the HDD to the microSD (which I believe is shown as a USB storage drive by the BIOS)?

Thank you

David

 

[hugovsky]

Just backup your config, reinstall freenas into the microSD and restore config.

 

[DavidIrwin]

Thank you. I may be being quite simple here, but have not yet found a config backup or export option. Is there a guide somewhere for how to do this?

 

[hugovsky]

You can read it on the manual here.

 

[DavidIrwin]

Thank you. I have failed test 1.. RTFM

 

[hugovsky]

No problem... You are still in time. But be sure to, at least, give it a quick look.

 

[SweetAndLow]

Don't use a SD card, it will probably be unpredictable. Use a USB stick like everyone else. If you ever have problems that will be the first thing you will get told to do. Pretty sure this info is in the manual or sticky posts.

 

[jgreco]

MicroSD is likely to rot quickly. Pick a good pair of USB keys instead, or at least one USB key and one microSD mirrored.

 

[DavidIrwin]

I have seen that but as I'm using an HP microserver with microUSB built into the motherboard and an HP approve microSD card slot (just like I supply my customers for use with VMware ESXi) I am confident there will be no issues with the hardware.
If there was an internal USB slot I would use that but really dont want a USB key hanging out the back of my server which is potentially vulnerable to someone else in the house knocking it, removing it, or otherwise messing things up.
I appreciate that should I have issues later I may have to do extra troubleshooting steps but this feels like the best option for me right now.

 

[jgreco]

Consider that some of the new readers like the AData are basically tiny:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA1K61JJ2814

These are fantastic for tight spaces. We use them on networking gear for auxiliary storage. It really isn't knockable (and trust me the front of a 48 port network switch is where that's likely to happen) and the biggest concern is that you might lose it if you remove it. ;-)

 

[cyberjock]

Well, good luck to you on the MicroSD cards.. there's a reason we don't recommend them.

Your "confidence" level is much higher than mine. I've tried them. I've watched the devs get frustrated while trying to troubleshoot an issue that ultimately was the direct result of using MicroSD cards. I did get a good laugh as the dev got very frustrated over it though. ;)

 

[jgreco]

Yeah, but at least with redundancy and ZFS checksums that might not be quite so bad. It'd be fun to see what the time to failure was.

 

[cyberjock]

They don't fail, per se. They just have weird and devastating lag spikes that create major problems for the OS and ZFS to deal with. Things eventually time-out and then the box crashes. You reboot and keep going, meanwhile nothing is actually "wrong" and no amount of ZFS scrubs or anything else give you a clue as to what is wrong. It's basically silent, but deadly, for your FreeNAS server.

 

[jgreco]

It did strike me that USB keys were kind of an odd choice for boot device with ZFS.

 

[no_connection]

Why should lag spikes be a problem for an OS that would reside in RAM? Or have they migrated it to run from disk now?
If it is indeed deadly for FreeNAS server then it should be fixed.

 

[jgreco]

The OS doesn't reside in RAM. It resides on the boot device.

 

[no_connection]

IIRC it used to load into RAM and run from there. The USB drive then didn't get accessed much other than config change and GUI. At least that is what was said before.
When did this change then?

 

[jgreco]

No, it used to store overlay configs and logs on a RAMdisk, but it's always been run in a read-mostly or read-only mode from a USB disk partition.

Code:

Filesystem               1024-blocks       Used      Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/ufs/FreeNASs1a           948903     387869     485121    44%    /
devfs                              1          1          0   100%    /dev
/dev/md0                        4663       3331        959    78%    /etc
/dev/md1                         823          2        756     0%    /mnt
/dev/md2                      152791      41804      98764    30%    /var
/dev/ufs/FreeNASs4             20263       9434       9208    51%    /data

With /data being rw and / being ro.

 

[joeschmuck]

Until I purchased a Raspberry Pi I had no idea how vulnerable an SD card could be, but they are.

What I did for my FreeNAS machine was took a USB header adapter (similar to this) and used a tie wrap to secure it to the interior of the case. This allowed me to use one of the motherboard internal USB headers.

 

[jgreco]

Vulnerable as in corruptible, or vulnerable as in physically?