Newbie with fresh installation and things are not working properly

[mrangelo]

Hi guys,

A newbie here. In short:
1-Do I was supposed to go directly with TrueNAS? or FreeNAS?
2-How many USB external drives TrueNAS Support?

I've been using an HP box with an i7, 32GB and only 2 internal drives and an external USB3 Hard Drive enclosure with 4 drives for maybe 3 years with just CentOS, a couple of shares and Plex, everything was working smooth.

Today I finally decided to make the jump but things are not quite working. Maybe the first mistake I made (and please correct me) is that instead of going to FreeNAS I went directly with TrueNAS thinking "well, I will have to change anyways if they are abandoning FreeNAS" but now I dont even found a TrueNAS Help section in the forum.

Anyways, first issue, I've created a user account for myself so I dont have to be using root but no matter what the account doesn't work, changed the password 3 times and still saying wrong password. Is there someothing more I am supposed to activate? still using the root account.

Second issue, TrueNAS detects and I was able to create polls with the 2 internal hard drives perfectly fine but the external enclosure has been a headache, only recognizes 1 drive of 4. It was recognizing 2 but now stopped doing it. I extremely doubt is a hardware issue because as stated before everything was working perfectly on CentOS, plus 2 of the drives are 3 months old, they are 12tb and 8tb. I even took one of the drives and format it to NTFS with my PC to see is that wakes up the drive but nop. Really makes me think if TrueNAS is capable of manage 4+ external drives by USB3. I am not trying any fancy partition, just strip drives (I have backups and redundancy is not a big deal for me) Maybe I should go back to FreeNAS and start everything from scratch?

I will appreciate any advice.

 

[mrangelo]

UPDATE:

I went downstairs to re-seat the drives again for the 4th time and noticed in the console that TrueNAS is in fact detecting the hard drives, it shows the model serial number, etc. Only for one drive is saying: "device /dev/da2 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors (and in the second line) Offline Uncorrectable sectors", so apparently now all of the sudden one drive "is bad" but there is not an option to fix it? also, what happens with the other 2? From 4 drives is showing in the area to create the polls only 2 drives.

I am also getting this error in the notification area:
CRITICAL
Multipath multipath/disk1 connection is not optimal. Please check disk cables.
2020-11-09 19:50:48 (America/Los_Angeles)Dismiss

of course, is a fresh installation so I did not activate Multipath, I dont even know where that is.

 

[ChrisRJ]

Forget the external USB enclosure. It will never work (reliably). FreeNAS (or more precisely FreeBSD in this case) needs direct access to the disks. Even a RAID controller, which is certainly more "direct" than USB, would not work.

 

[mrangelo]

Forget the external USB enclosure. It will never work (reliably). FreeNAS (or more precisely FreeBSD in this case) needs direct access to the disks. Even a RAID controller, which is certainly more "direct" than USB, would not work.

thanks, thats why I figured, well, shopping now for a new machine with a ton of SATA connectors.

 

[mrangelo]

Did anybody has an idea about the issue of have to login as root only? Just tried again, even created a second account with the password "basic", tried to login and keeps saying wrong password, I even checked the password on both fields when create the account (clicking the little eye) and the password is right, but wont let me login with anything else than root.

 

[Redcoat]

but wont let me login with anything else than root.

If you are speaking about logging in to the GUI, that is the design behavior - login by the root account and password only.

This has been covered multiple times here in the forum - Search is your friend.

 

[Redcoat]

machine with a ton of SATA connectors.

or use an HBA

 

[pschatz100]

With absolutely no description of any of your hardware, it is not possible to comment on the issues you brought up. But my first guess is that you are using hardware that is not compatible with FreeNAS and ZFS. The possible fact that it runs CentOS doesn't mean much. FreeBSD (upon which FreeNAS is based) is not Linux.

 

[mrangelo]

With absolutely no description of any of your hardware, it is not possible to comment on the issues you brought up. But my first guess is that you are using hardware that is not compatible with FreeNAS and ZFS. The possible fact that it runs CentOS doesn't mean much. FreeBSD (upon which FreeNAS is based) is not Linux.

Every day I learn something new, over the years I thought FreeBSD was a Linux distro and look at that, is not even Linux. thanks!

 

[rvassar]

Every day I learn something new, over the years I thought FreeBSD was a Linux distro and look at that, is not even Linux. thanks!

FreeBSD is "real UNIX(tm)", descending from AT&T UNIX version 7 via Berkeley. It's a long story, with lots of lawyers involved, but Wikipedia has a nice short summary here:

Unix wars - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

I'll offer my 2 cents:
Don't use USB for storage. It's OK to boot off USB in many cases, but it's not a reliable storage bus. I think FreeNAS used to recommend USB boot pools, but many of us had so much trouble with it, we gave up.