Tossed into the deep end with FreeNAS, full pool, AD issues

[SuperNoobAdmin]

Oh god I don't blame the storage solution at all. I hear nothing but amazing things about TrueNAS.
I was tossed in well beyond my depth, and this was the result. This is my fault.

So let's pretend I need this thing to function like...three days ago. It sounds like a lot of these options take time.
I work in a hospital, and restoring the ability to back up to this is critical. It's not our only backup server - so we HAVE backups elsewhere. However we need the redundancy badly.

Would option 3 work the fastest? My previous sysadmin even said to nuke and pave - I just wanted to explore other options.
How hard is it to just kill it with cleansing nuclear fire and set it back up?

 

[danb35]

If its a metadata only cache

I don't believe that's possible under 11.2, unless I'm mistaken.

 

[NugentS]

Yeah - the only quick option is 3.

But aren't you just gonna fill it up again? Just pushing the issue down the road a bit - possibly by a day or 2 depending on how Veeam works

The main question is do you need the backups (data) on this box? Be very careful saying no to that question - if these backups are redundant then maybe Veeam will just copy all the data back again and you will be in the same situation again very quickly. Talk to the Veeam admin (if that isn't you)

If NOT then delete the pool, set up the pool again, try and reattach to the domain and go from there. (you could just delete the data - but thats likley to take a very long time and depends on how its accessed)
Or
Do a complete rebuild with 12.0-U5.1 and get all the modern goodness and a clean slate

BTW if you do do a rebuild I would use Z2 for MUCH better resiliency and not bother with the spare - just make sure you have a cold spare somewhere. [IMHO hot spares make little (not zero) sense with HDDs - you put wear on them as they spin all the time so wear out when you need em] but YMMV.

How old are the drives - if they are 4+ years old it maybe the right time to throw the HDD's out and use new bigger drives - so you would get more space. With Z1 (current) the stress on the pool have to resilver in the event of a drive loss can kill another drive with the consequential loss of the entire pool. Z2 would be much better with Z3 better still (but not to the same amount)

Too many options.



Given the size of this device, and the likely required size I think, should you get to the replacement point, you should talk to ixsystems for a suitably sized and specified box with plenty of capacity.

 

[NugentS]

and given what @danb35 just said - if you do delete the pool (and keep the existing OS), do not use a cache drive - its probably just slowing things down. Do not use dedupe and do leave compression on
If you build new with v12 then there is a point to the cache drive as a metadata only drive - you don't have enough memory for a 1TB L2ARC

 

[SuperNoobAdmin]

Yeah - the only quick option is 3.

But aren't you just gonna fill it up again? Just pushing the issue down the road a bit - possibly by a day or 2 depending on how Veeam works

The main question is do you need the backups (data) on this box? Be very careful saying no to that question - if these backups are redundant then maybe Veeam will just copy all the data back again and you will be in the same situation again very quickly. Talk to the Veeam admin (if that isn't you)

So, hah...okay so the Veeam admin is me. I'm...everything. The problem is I don't know how it was set up before. To the best of my knowledge things must have been auto-deleted after a certain amount of time. I don't know how to DO that because again, chucked in the office and told to get a grip.

I think my real option is to shop out my resume and get out before I burn the place down. With that in mind, I think I found a contractor that is willing to come in and help - because I need it really bad.

 

[NugentS]

Don't give up - learn everything you can from the contractor - and write it all down. Learn how its setup, the why's and the how's.

Good Luck and feel free to drop back in here if you have any questions.