System unresponsive after drive failure

[Chris Moore]

I'm running 11.1-U5 and a stripe of two 6 disk raidz2.

A drive failure should not cause the problem you had with the system crashing. This is the second time I have heard of that sort of problem in the last couple days. You might want to file a bug report because they thought they had this fixed.

 

[u238]

What number did you go with? Do you know the system must reboot for the new value to be active?

I reduced it 1GB from the original value of 15,590,100,296 bytes to 14516457472 bytes. I thought that adding it with the sysctl option would make the change immediately without a reboot.

 

[Chris Moore]

I reduced it 1GB from the original value of 15,590,100,296 bytes to 14516457472 bytes. I thought that adding it with the sysctl option would make the change immediately without a reboot.

It might, but if it isn't recorded in the GUI, the setting probably won't survive a reboot.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I537 using Tapatalk

 

[u238]

It might, but if it isn't recorded in the GUI, the setting probably won't survive a reboot.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I537 using Tapatalk

I should have been more clear. I added it via the GUI and selected the sysctl dropdown.

 

[kdragon75]

If you have an odd number of drives, that odd drive is not used. If you later add another drive, even in a separate pool, it will grab the new partition and add it to the unused partition to create another mirror for system swap.

Well that seems a little willy-nilly.

 

[Chris Moore]

Well that seems a little willy-nilly.

It has caused a problem for one of the forum members I helped. They had a 5 drive RAIDz1 pool (if I recall correctly) and wanted to be able to add (and remove) another drive to the system as a single drive pool for making backups that would be taken offsite. When they created the single drive pool, it created a swap partition and added that to the odd numbered (unused) partition already in the system, creating a swap mirror. This was a problem for them when they wanted to remove the drive to take the backup offsite. There is a work around, and it would only affect someone that has less than 10 data drives and wanted to be able to easily add and remove drives without disrupting their swap mirrors. The work around is, after the main pool is created, set the swap partition size to 0 (zero) which prevents the system from even creating a swap partition at all on additional drives that are added to the system. Thereafter the additional drives gets no swap partition and the system does not have anything to add to the lonely odd number swap partition. Problem solved.

 

[Chris Moore]

I should have been more clear. I added it via the GUI and selected the sysctl dropdown.

Adding it from the GUI is the correct thing to do, but those directives in the "Tunables" menu are only applied at boot time so it is recorded in the configuration database, but it will not be executed until the system is rebooted. No rush, sometime when it is convenient.

 

[u238]

Adding it from the GUI is the correct thing to do, but those directives in the "Tunables" menu are only applied at boot time so it is recorded in the configuration database, but it will not be executed until the system is rebooted. No rush, sometime when it is convenient.

I see. I'll give it a reboot.

 

[u238]

Well, it looks like my swap is growing slightly, even after reducing the ARC size.

Anyway, I wish there was a way to get to the bottom of the actual problem. How would I go about submitting a bug report?

 

[Chris Moore]

Well, it looks like my swap is growing slightly, even after reducing the ARC size.

Anyway, I wish there was a way to get to the bottom of the actual problem. How would I go about submitting a bug report?

You need to create an account:
https://redmine.ixsystems.com/projects/freenas

Then submit a ticket from inside FreeNAS.
http://doc.freenas.org/11/system.html#support

 

[u238]

Thanks for all your help. Hopefully this will be resolved in the future. For now, I'm using the page in script found on this forum as a band-aid.

 

[Chris Moore]

Thanks for all your help. Hopefully this will be resolved in the future. For now, I'm using the page in script found on this forum as a band-aid.

Since they changed the architecture of the swap, the last time I tried that page-in script, it crashed my NAS instantly. I wouldn't suggest that. It was written for the older version of FreeNAS that still had single disk swap instead of mirrored swap.

 

[u238]

Since they changed the architecture of the swap, the last time I tried that page-in script, it crashed my NAS instantly. I wouldn't suggest that. It was written for the older version of FreeNAS that still had single disk swap instead of mirrored swap.

Yikes. Thanks for the heads up. I ran the script and it seemed ok, but there wasn't any swap in use at the time. I might set up a second freenas machine on spare hardware and try it out that way.