SuperMicro FreeNAS server

[apolonio]

I found this server at a recycle store for about $175
I cant seem to identify the case but here is a picture

• It had a Supermicro Motherboard in it
  https://www.amazon.com/Supermicro-X9SRL-F-Motherboard-Graphics-X9SRL-F-B/dp/B00DTINJ12
  
• CPU is Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2609 0 @ 2.40GHz
  https://www.amazon.com/Intel-Quad-Core-E5-2609-Processor-BX80621E52609/dp/B007H29EDS
  
• RAM is 6 modules of 4GB PC3-8500R DDR3-1066MHz DIMM ECC Registered RAM for a total of 32GB
• Hoping to get RAIDZ6 (or whatever it is called) using four 4TB SATA III 7200RPM disks
  https://www.amazon.com/HGST-Deskstar-3-5-Inch-Internal-0S03664/dp/B00HHAJRU0
  
• Here is the backplane
  https://www.amazon.com/Supermicro-CSE-SAS-733TQ-Server-4-port-backplane/dp/B005C2NZHQ
  
• I have a single "scratch" drive that is 6TB
  https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Desktop-3-5-Inch-Internal-STBD6000100/dp/B00JBJ34WC/
• Boot flash drives will be a pair 32GB Samsung flash drives that are mirrored
  https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-BAR-Plus-32GB-Champagne/dp/B07BPHML28/
  
• After I get it all together I will let it burn in and note how much power it is using via Kill-A-Watt device. Based on that I will get a UPS sized to give maybe 10 minutes of run time before it begins its shutdown process.

Hoping this server will have a lifespan of 5 years which my current server is reaching now.
This is for a home based business, our plans and documentation will reside on this NAS,
Environment is a mix of Windows users, Linux Servers, and ESXi hosts.
I will want a share that can service both NFS and AD users
Hoping mail archives will reside on this host in users home directories (dovecot in a jail maybe)
Other services I am looking at is DHCP, DNS, Rsync, BIND

But in the end, I want a NAS that will protect my data and let me know when things are beginning to fail.

Getting ready for bed so please excuse the typos.

 

[Ericloewe]

Please always post pictures directly to the forum by copy/pasting them into your messages. The link you included does not seem to work.

Boot flash drives will be a pair 32GB Samsung flash drives that are mirrored

You'd be far better off with real SSDs.

CPU is Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2609 0 @ 2.40GHz

Seems slowish, but it'll do at least for a start.

 

[kdragon75]

DHCP, DNS, Rsync, BIND

Get a separate box for these services. Perhaps running pfSense? Also don't forget backups of anything important

 

[Adrian]

Get a separate box for these services. Perhaps running pfSense? Also don't forget backups of anything important

For a couple of decades I ran DHCP and DNS for my home network on FreeBSD machines.
Then my current FreeBSD box died.
I switched to using my existing pfSense firewall.
So much easier!

 

[jgreco]

For a couple of decades I ran DHCP and DNS for my home network on FreeBSD machines.
Then my current FreeBSD box died.
I switched to using my existing pfSense firewall.
So much easier!

... so you switched to running those services on ANOTHER FreeBSD machine.

The one thing I'd note is that when you start running a lot of crap on a single platform, that's great right up until something happens and you lose the machine, or an update renders it inoperable, etc. This is why I'm just not all that fond of running lots of crap on a platform where running those things is added as a "value-add" afterthought, which definitely includes firewalls (including pfSense, Sophos, etc), NAS units (including FreeNAS, QNAP, Synology, etc), etc. I have a bad habit of building these services as actual independent VM's and by doing so on a real hypervisor this tends to work out very well as each service can be updated independently, without fear that an upgrade of the underlying platform will somehow go awry.

In response to the original poster, I will note that the X9SRL is a ~2012 era board for Sandy and Ivy, and as such it probably has its best years behind it now. The 2609 is a pretty crummy CPU but should be okay for basic fileservice. You do have the option to upgrade the CPU and RAM on this if ever needed. E5-2670's were going for as low as ~$70 a year or two ago and occasionally can be found that cheaply. Used DDR3 RAM is substantially less expensive than DDR4. As long as the board itself holds out, you'll be fine. We've had very good luck with the longevity of Supermicro boards here, and five years is certainly possible, maybe even likely, but be aware that at the end of this, it'll have about a decade of use on the odometer. The upside is that if it were to fail, finding a suitable replacement/upgrade is pretty easy.

 

[kdragon75]

The one thing I'd note is that when you start running a lot of crap on a single platform, that's great right up until something happens and you lose the machine, or an update renders it inoperable, etc. This is why I'm just not all that fond of running lots of crap on a platform where running those things is added as a "value-add" afterthought, which definitely includes firewalls (including pfSense, Sophos, etc), NAS units (including FreeNAS, QNAP, Synology, etc), etc. I have a bad habit of building these services as actual independent VM's and by doing so on a real hypervisor this tends to work out very well as each service can be updated independently, without fear that an upgrade of the underlying platform will somehow go awry.

I completely agree with this. Unfortunately, due to limited (acceptable) power consumption, I follow this practice to a much lesser degree. I keep all of my basic network services on my pfSense box, storage on another with a few non essential jails, and VMs on my vSphere cluster. The latter of the three is lab only and get shut down when not in use to keep the power bill (and heat) down.
I do cringe when people are running FreeNAS as a guest with PCI passthrough in production and still have jails... No HA, no FT, no vMotion. Just one giant failure point...

 

[jgreco]

I do cringe when people are running FreeNAS as a guest with PCI passthrough in production and still have jails... No HA, no FT, no vMotion. Just one giant failure point...

Hahahahaha

We live in this interesting era where there is now a wealth of embedded devices available, many of which can run FreeBSD, others of which run Linux. As an example, look at Ubiquiti's EdgeRouter-X. It's a $50 platform, and at that price you get a SoC and a system with a 5-port ethernet switch, so you could run one as your gateway NAT and incoming VPN server, and another for doing DHCP and DNS, etc. Or the variety of Raspberry Pi style devices, some of which run FreeBSD without issue... I still prefer doing a lot of these as VM's, but it's largely because it provides a lot of flexibility for upgrades, shuffling stuff around, etc. It's funny that the infrastructure servers we ran in the '90's in a whole row of racks now chugs along nicely on a few 1U hypervisors. But the old guy in me still really likes the idea of independent devices.

 

[apolonio]

Please always post pictures directly to the forum by copy/pasting them into your messages. The link you included does not seem to work.


You'd be far better off with real SSDs.

Seems slowish, but it'll do at least for a start.

Sorry about that here is the picture

 

[apolonio]

Please always post pictures directly to the forum by copy/pasting them into your messages. The link you included does not seem to work.


You'd be far better off with real SSDs.

Seems slowish, but it'll do at least for a start.

Thanks for the response, I have no issue using an SSD, but from my research on freenas, seems like a came across posts mentioning using USB flash drives and mirroring, even a thread talking about the best flash drives to use, and some stuff about how configs are stored on the other volumes. Which is why I went to the Flash drives, which is not unusual for me since I boot my ESXi hosts using Flash drives.

 

[Ericloewe]

Unfortunately, USB flash drives are pretty horrible. Three and a half years of booting from ZFS have made that clear. They work, for many values of work, but are slow and unreliable. With 30-40 buck new SSDs, it's a no-brainer given enough SATA connectivity.

 

[apolonio]

I completely agree with this. Unfortunately, due to limited (acceptable) power consumption, I follow this practice to a much lesser degree. I keep all of my basic network services on my pfSense box, storage on another with a few non essential jails, and VMs on my vSphere cluster. The latter of the three is lab only and get shut down when not in use to keep the power bill (and heat) down.
I do cringe when people are running FreeNAS as a guest with PCI passthrough in production and still have jails... No HA, no FT, no vMotion. Just one giant failure point...

Your situation seems similar to mine. I am trying to reduce my physical box count, but the NAS is one of the systems I planned to be physical. I do have sitting on the bench another physical box with 5 1G Ethernet links that will server as my pfSense box with a virtual one as a standby.

I am considering putting a small linux VM on iSCSI or NFS that will reside on the FreeNAS box but will run on one of the ESXi hosts. But I am still sorting all that out.

 

[rvassar]

I've had rather bad luck with USB thumb drives, with several failures in a short span of time. I suspect the problem was the platform's USB 2.0 HCI, as the drives tested OK post failure. Some people seem to have good luck with USB, other's seem to have problems.

In the end, I gave up and got a SAS HBA, and moved to a more reliable (but unfortunately quite old) platform booting off a $30 SSD.

 

[kdragon75]

Thanks for the response, I have no issue using an SSD, but from my research on freenas, seems like a came across posts mentioning using USB flash drives and mirroring, even a thread talking about the best flash drives to use, and some stuff about how configs are stored on the other volumes. Which is why I went to the Flash drives, which is not unusual for me since I boot my ESXi hosts using Flash drives.

The difference is that ESXi loads the full system into RAM and performs little to no writes back to the flash drive. Yes teh config gets synced but even then, its FAR less than Freenas.

 

[jgreco]

Yes teh config gets synced but even then, its FAR less than Freenas.

ESXi tries to avoid writing updates where nothing has changed.

FreeNAS used to be based on NanoBSD. This was a minimalist appliance version of FreeBSD that did a moderately okay job of avoiding trite writes. Unfortunately, it appears that developing in this environment was too onerous and spartan, plus they wanted the resiliency of ZFS for the boot pool, so now we get a heavyweight FreeBSD.

Unfortunately, it's really difficult to write things that actually implement this sort of system. Back in the 1990's, I did a lot of work professionally on embedded systems, and when FreeBSD rolled around, I created a FreeBSD-on-a-floppy that later became the basis for PicoBSD, which was a stripped down FreeBSD that could be used for certain types of tasks like routers or other devices. It takes a LOT of engineering time to create a decent usable subset of a modern OS such as FreeBSD, and that doesn't even necessarily get you run-from-RAM or minimalist-write capabilities. VMware rolled their own thing and has been maintaining it ever since, but it is more difficult for a project like FreeNAS that is trying to build a solution based on something that isn't really their own thing. BTDT.

Overall, I'd say that for a pure NAS, it's unfortunate to need a better quality of boot device, but at least FreeNAS has worked pretty hard to add a lot of value in the form of a comprehensive environment and featureset beyond just a pure NAS>

 

[apolonio]

There were some patriot 60G SSD for sale at Frys Electronics for about $18 USD, I picked up a couple. My inside voice was telling me "don't do it, get something more reliable", I still got them anyway, I am going to load up CentOS 7 and FreeNAS, to kick the tires etc. I want to also see how recovery off a failed boot drive works. Will go in to production when I get a more reliable SSD and the right sized UPS. Thanks for all your help.

 

[rvassar]

There were some patriot 60G SSD for sale at Frys Electronics for about $18 USD, I picked up a couple. My inside voice was telling me "don't do it, get something more reliable", I still got them anyway, I am going to load up CentOS 7 and FreeNAS, to kick the tires etc. I want to also see how recovery off a failed boot drive works. Will go in to production when I get a more reliable SSD and the right sized UPS. Thanks for all your help.

View attachment 25108

I picked one of those up today as well, couldn't resist the price. I have several Patriot SSD's, including a previous generation of the 60Gb model that has hosted Linux Mint on a small laptop for almost 5 years.

But at those prices... Just mirror them.

 

[jgreco]

I'm hoping we've reached that point where flash prices start to fall again like in 2015.

 

[Chris Moore]

Sorry about that here is the picture View attachment 25058

Looks like a really good deal to me. I wish there were shops like that around where I live.

 

[rvassar]

Looks like a really good deal to me. I wish there were shops like that around where I live.

They'll ship to you. They run a "weekly deals" Ad that's usually worth surfing thru.

http://www.frys.com

https://www.frys.com/product/9425721?site=sa:adpages page:P160 date:080518

 

[Chris Moore]

They'll ship to you.

I am in, "Land Mass between New Orleans and Mobile," so they might not... I guess I could give it a try. I have been to sites that didn't resolve our zip code as if the address doesn't exist.