Trouble in River City

[Mike Zahorik]

I do not keep the freeNAS running 24 hours a day. I turn it off at night and somedays it is never turned on. So what happens if a scheduled test is missed? Is it just missed and I have to wait for the next one? Mike

 

[Mike Zahorik]

I kinda feel like one of the grand kids asking a lot of questions in rapid fire fashion, but where is the config file and how do I copy it?
So far, I had a little trouble mapping the FreeNAS to a drive letter on one of the Vista machines. The XP machine did it right away. Next I have to try the WIndows 3.11 and the Windows 98 machines. Mike

 

[Ericloewe]

Next I have to try the WIndows 3.11 and the Windows 98 machines.

I'm not sure Windows 98 is still supported, but I know for sure that Windows 3.1 is no longer supported by Samba.

 

[Stux]

Can you post a zpool status

Just want to ensure your new pool is setup right before you get too far into establishing it

PS: 2TB is approx 1.82TiB

 

[Stux]

Unfortunately one of the sticks must be bad. I can only see 6gb and not 8gb. I tried moving it around but no change. I plugged in one of the old 1gb sticks and now I have 7gb

You could try one stick at a time to verify both work as 4GB sticks.

Might be worth checking for a BIOS update too.

 

[diedrichg]

OK, that one's looking a lot better--no issues I see other than the high load cycle count (which is also high with the other one, but that one has bigger problems).

Meh. 14.8K, that's called "mature". Maybe the first drive is just in a midlife crisis.

P.S. I love reading these kinds of threads; an inexperienced user has a problem that turns out to be a major problem. In swoop the genius veterans with answers and suggestions galore. The user gets the advice they need, they follow through with the plan, and the data is saved! Makes for a great miniseries! Reminds me of the thread back in ¿2014? where the OP had a business server and something happened to the pool and critical business data couldn't be accessed. They had to send the drives away to a forensics recovery service. It all ended well - albeit about $1,700 lighter in the bank if I remember correctly.

 

[Mike Zahorik]

Eric, I have connections to both Windows 98 and the Windows 3.11. They worked in the past and they work again.
Stux, tried the zpool status and it does say mirror-0. I'm sending back the memory stick. It fails in two different machines.
Still have a few more machines to remap the drives, but it all looks good. I'm still wondering about missed tests, but...... Thanks a million for all the help. Mike

 

[danb35]

I'm still wondering about missed tests,

If the machine isn't on, the test won't run.

 

[Stux]

If the machine isn't on, the test won't run.

Also the tests take time to run, and they abort on power loss (the SMART ones at least)

You should schedule a maintenance day once a month or so where the FreeNAS is powered up for a day and runs its long and scrub tests.

 

[danb35]

Or, really, leave the server turned on.

 

[JJT211]

^^ Yea seriously, it probably only cost a buck or two extra a month to just leave it on 24/7

 

[diedrichg]

...and as you can see, powering down the disks doesn't guarantee prolonging their life.

Edit: I found the other drama story I mentioned earlier. It was two years ago. https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/35011/

 

[Mike Zahorik]

Well.... I'm not going to run the computers all the time, but today I scheduled a short SMART test and let the machine alone. How do I tell if the test ran and what are the results? Mike

 

[danb35]

Well, if the test resulted in a failure, the system should alert you. To confirm that the test run, go to the shell and type smartctl -a /dev/ada3 (or whatever the new disk is). Toward the bottom of the report, you should see something like this:

Code:

SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1
Num  Test_Description	Status				  Remaining  LifeTime(hours)  LBA_of_first_error
# 1  Short offline	   Completed without error	   00%	  6407		 -
# 2  Short offline	   Completed without error	   00%	  6383		 -
# 3  Short offline	   Completed without error	   00%	  6359		 -
# 4  Short offline	   Completed without error	   00%	  6335		 -

 

[Mike Zahorik]

Say that works nice, I'll have to keep that so I can check now and then. Both disks passed without errors. There was quite a lot of information also displayed. You mentioned that should a test fail I'd be notified, is that what the email address is for? You also mentioned a SMART long test, I set up the long test to start in 10 minutes. What is the difference between the two. DO I check with the same shell command? Mike

 

[danb35]

You mentioned that should a test fail I'd be notified, is that what the email address is for?

Yes.

What is the difference between the two.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.#Self-tests

DO I check with the same shell command?

Yes. There's probably a different flag to smartctl that would show just the self-test results, but I don't know off the top of my head what it is.

 

[Mike Zahorik]

Thanks for the Wiki source. I was having trouble with the 8.3 document. This helps a lot. Mike Thanks

 

[danb35]

Yes. There's probably a different flag to smartctl that would show just the self-test results, but I don't know off the top of my head what it is.

Leave it to the manpage. If you want just the self-test log, you can do smartctl -l selftest /dev/ada3 (again, using whichever device you want).

 

[Stux]

Say that works nice, I'll have to keep that so I can check now and then. Both disks passed without errors. There was quite a lot of information also displayed. You mentioned that should a test fail I'd be notified, is that what the email address is for? You also mentioned a SMART long test, I set up the long test to start in 10 minutes. What is the difference between the two. DO I check with the same shell command? Mike

You might want to consider setting up some of @Bidule0hm's report scripts.

https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...d-identification-and-backup-the-config.27365/

That way you can get your smart reports etc emailed to you