New FreeNAS Build Questions

[iustinig]

I recently built a NAS machine with the new released Freenas 8.0. I did play with freenas before but this one is a bit different and hence some noob questions.

1. Since before I had Freenas installed on a hard drive i planned on doing the same with this one, but after i installed it, and if i understood this right, the drive is used just like a flash USB/card only @ boot to load the OS in the RAM (or something along this line). Is there a way of avoiding this... let the system on the drive and use the RAM for zfs?

2. This is also the first time I'm using zfs. I have a raidz1 pool with an effective capacity of 4.5TB. The data on this is not critical, and as such i am not planing on backing it up somewhere else, but i do want to keep an eye on it. My initial thought was a weekly scrub in the cron table. However i notice that if I do the crontab -e with any user or root the zpool entry is gone after reboot. How do I make is stick? Or is there a more elegant way of dealing with this task?

3. I have noticed that if I am to do a transfer from or to the NAS and try to watch a video from it in the same time, the playback is a choppy at times. I have 4G of RAM which I understand is at the edge of comfort for zfs. I enabled the prefetch option (by disabling the disabling) and while i don't see any crashes the problem persists. Where can i find some tutorial/guide regarding those nice loader zfs tuneup settings to maybe optimize the RAM assignment.

Thanks,
Iustin

FreeNAS-8.0-RELEASE-amd64
4GB RAM - 800MHz
Intel Q6600 - 2.4GHz

 

[Bohs Hansen]

1. Thats how it works now. Its intended to run from a USB stick or similar, no way to work around it afaik.

2. and 3. i dunno

 

[torrin]

2. Upgrade to 8.01Beta2 and use the UI for the cronjob, but by default there is a scrub every 30 days, and if you set up the email alerts, you will know if a drive goes bad right away.

 

[joeschmuck]

To your item 1... The OS resides on the USB device just as it would on a hard drive so it's not taking up valuable RAM. You could install the OS to a hard drive but since the system requirements are now 2GB of hard drive space for the OS, it's not economical to use a separate hard drive. The OS cannot be placed on the same hard drives as your data drives, that's the huge change.

And item 3... It looks like you have enough CPU and RAM horse power. The Release version is buggy with respect to CIFS, grab the Beta 3. Also you didn't mention what type of RAID/File system you have set up and drives. Are you using true network switches or are they hubs? This last comment is actually very significant. I had to change all my hubs out for 1Gbit switches throughout my wired house and it made every difference in the world. I can stream BluRay titles throughout my house with absolutely no glitching.

 

[iustinig]

Wow guys, thank for all the advice. I haven't had time to play with it and so far it;s working fine.
I gave up on the cron job until a new release will be available. For some reason I am a bit reluctant to switch to a beta; i might be a bit overcautious.
My system is on the hard drive already so i will leave it like that for now. If I'll need the slot in the future I'll move to a USB.
The raid I'm running is raidz (radid 5 like) . I watched a couple of 1080p's and they all play flawlessly except for when I also transfer data.

Funny... while I'm typing all this there is these "evil" voice in my head that says - "Upgrade to the beta". I guess I'll be giving it a try.

Once again guys thanks and if you have more advice it will be appreciated.

 

[ProtoSD]

You mileage may vary with the beta, I couldn't get beta 3 to boot (not completely), but beta 2 looks good. Since you're using 4GB of RAM, try the AMD64. As someone pointed out to me, it still works with Intel CPU's and it appears to save needing to rebuild the kernel to mess with memory settings in the loader.conf if you decide to tweak things later.

Good luck and stick with it if you have trouble at first, the features etc. are/will be great once the glitches get ironed out.

 

[iustinig]

So, i am running beta3 - the 64bit one. I did have one boot issue - the boot would stop at the first freenas menu. I fixed that by switching to IDE from AHCI in the bios for the upgrade process and then reverted back to AHCI after the upgrade
So far is running and I'll have to see how it performs later on. Now i read here "still works with Intel". Is there a plan for freenas not to work with Intel in the future ?!

One weird thing ...

My zpools status used to be so "pretty" it had 4 devices: ada1 ada2 ada3 ada4; nice and clean. After i moved to beta this is how it looks like:

config:
NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
volz ONLINE 0 0 0
raidz1 ONLINE 0 0 0
gptid/4476f393-9e14-11e0-bc1a-1c6f65c3653c ONLINE 0 0 0
ada1p2 ONLINE 0 0 0
gptid/455e7b02-9e14-11e0-bc1a-1c6f65c3653c ONLINE 0 0 0
gptid/45d519f9-9e14-11e0-bc1a-1c6f65c3653c ONLINE 0 0 0

errors: No known data errors

The data seems to be all there is just this naming thing that is new and i kind of liked the old one.

 

[joeschmuck]

Glad you upgraded to the Beta 3 version. You should try the watching video and transferring data to/from the FreeNAS box to see if there was any performance gains or losses. Just curious, are you watching the video on your computer or on a TV? If on your computer and you're transferring data as well fro the same computer, the slowdown very well could be your computer, not the FreeNAS.

 

[iustinig]

Here is another update and another question.

As far as having multiple "transfer threads" (watching movie and transferring in the same time) it looks like the beta3 fixed it.

I did some snooping around mainly due to my disk names being change in the zpool status window (see my previous post). I am no expert but it seems that during the upgrade process my disks were partitioned and that 2G on each disk was taken to build a 8G swap. Is this something that was supposed to happen? You can imagine my frustration when I have a 80G drive that hosts the system (I know i was supposed to run this from USB). Why not take 8G out of that instead if messing with the pool drives?

So far things are working fine no errors or crashes. I hope the the new pool "architecture" will not affect performance.

As always any input will be appreciated.
Thanks

 

[joeschmuck]

Yes, the 2G swaps files are designed to be there, I believe that is the swap space for ZFS that you see on the Reporting screen. I haven't used any of my swap space at all although I've tried so maybe it's lost space, I'll find out in a few months if I ever use it.

Please keep in mind that FreeNAS 8.x is being developed to run from a USB or Compact Flash drive, not a full size hard drive and that is what the programmers utilize when they build this project. If you chose to install it on a hard drive it will work fine but it will only use 2GB of that drive as of right now with Beta-3. I'm running a 4GB Flash drive that I had laying around and it will outlast my hard drives and has room to spare should it be needed later.

My advice is to find a way to replace that 80GB hard drive (sounds old as dirt) with a good USB flash drive before that hard drive of yours fails. Make a backup of your configuration as well.

 

[ProtoSD]

@iustinig

Interesting approach to getting your upgrade to beta3, glad you got it to work. I might try it, but it looks like beta4 might be out tomorrow or friday.

I also think they plan to give you the option of configuring your pools without that mandatory 2G partition in version 8.01. Unfortunately I kind of suspect if you already have it there it won't be so easy to remove later.

 

[iustinig]

Well since my stored data didn't exceed my available space on my other computers on the network I went ahead and did a new install on a flash card connected via IDE. My plan was to create a swap partition on an 80G prior to the install using gpart with a live ubuntu disk, thinking that if the install will find the swap already it won't touch the zfs drives. Also since I had the ugly looking names in the pool, I decided to destroy it and recreate it. It looks like this now:


pool: volz
state: ONLINE
scrub: resilver completed after 0h1m with 0 errors on Wed Jul 6 13:51:35 2011
config:

NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
volz ONLINE 0 0 0
raidz1 ONLINE 0 0 0
ada1p2 ONLINE 0 0 0
ada2p2 ONLINE 0 0 0
ada3p2 ONLINE 0 0 0
ada4p2 ONLINE 0 0 0 3.61M resilvered

errors: No known data errors

(it looks better on my phone screen).

My plan failed. Even with that preformated swap i still lost the 2G on each drive. Now the problem that I had with this was that while putting data back on the NAS overnight one of my drive got lost. Don't know how it happened and i'm keeping my eyes on it to see if it will happen again. The thing is though that if a drive dies 2G of swap die with it and while a raidz1 would survive it, the system won't if it stored data on that particular swap area. Mine froze at reboot.

I have an older 80G drive in there that I wish I could use for swap. Hopefully this option will be available in the future.