Solid for a few years, then suddenly failed to reboot.

[Wiltony]

Version: 8.3.1 running on a Dell Optiplex 330 from USB. Two 3 TB drives running mirrored.
Intel Pentium Dual CPU E2180 @ 2.0 GHz
2GB Memory

I'm a newb and know very little unix, but got it going a year or so ago using your guides and great gui interface and it's been solid every since.

Rebooted last night and it won't come up. Getting some errors I don't understand. Nothing special in particular happened before reboot. Was running fine, as always. We just reboot occasionally so miniDLNA will reindex new media we add. The only slightly unusual thing that happened this time is that someone was watching a movie off it at the time it was rebooted. As expected, obviously, it disconnected them. But then it never came back up.

It gets past the boot menu. I've tried Safe Mode and it didn't seem to make any difference. Networking doesn't come up so I can't access the gui or anything via the browser, so I had to re-attach a monitor and keyboard.

I attached a picture of the screen it hangs on, but the last error line is

File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/posixpath.py", line 260 in expanduser userhome = pwd.getpwuid(os.getuid()).pw_dir
KeyError: 'getpwuid(): uid not found: 0'

What kind of additional information can I provide?

I appreciate your guidance!

Wiltony

 

[enemy85]

Hw specs?

 

[Wiltony]

Edited with CPU and Memory specs

 

[gpsguy]

Try reinstalling FreeNAS 8.3.1 on a new 4GB+ flash drive. You can download old versions from here: http://download.freenas.org/

Hopefully, you'll be able to auto import the old volume.

If you have a backup of your configuration file, restore it to the new flash drive. Otherwise, you'll have to reconfigure your server from scratch.

 

[enemy85]

Were u using UFS or ZFS? Because 2gb are a bit low...

 

[Wiltony]

Thanks, I was considering something like this. I do have a backup of the config file. Should I consider upgrading to 9.3 since I might be reconfiguring everything anyway?

 

[enemy85]

With that amount of memory 9.3 won't work.

 

[pschatz100]

I had an old system of similar vintage that worked great for a long time. I eventually upgraded FreeNAS when I decided to update hardware.

You are really at a point where the hardware is going to become increasingly difficult to maintain. You would be well served to update to some newer hardware and reuse your disks. You didn't say anything about the file system or how they are mirrored: depending on how they are configured, you can probably import the file system without losing data.

If you want to keep the old system, then you can install 8.3.2 x86 version and import your saved configuration. Assuming there is no major hardware problem, you ought to be OK. I would suggest that you do not go any newer than 8.3.2 on that hardware.

 

[Wiltony]

Okay, installed 8.3.1 on a new usb stick, restored my config file, and I'm up and running again. No idea what happened, but thanks all for the advice and suggestions.

 

[pschatz100]

Great to hear you're back up and running. USB sticks fail and you would see the problems when you reboot - so it makes sense. Good reason to keep backups!!