Upgrade/Issues

[aDigitalPhantom]

I have asked questions, which for the most part have not been answered. Instead you're telling me I need to test hardware that has been proven working, and reliable as long as it's not running FreeNAS.

This is clearly not a request for help thread. Look back at all his posts and not once did he ask a question or request help, he's just here to complain.

More insults. I'm sure you wouldn't like it if I were to call you she/her/woman/etc. Do not expect me to like you calling me he/him/man/etc. I could be rude in pointing out that I have asked questions that haven't had an attempt made to answer them. Instead of answers I have just had people telling me I'm stupid, and I don't have a clue what I am doing. Maybe if many of the posters didn't go straight to those insults/attacks things would have gone better. If you want someone to be nice with replies, don't insult/attack them. All it did was put me on the defensive.

This is absurd. You have mysterious issues that nobody else has, yet refuse to listen when told that certain components common to your builds might be at fault.

You have not been insulted by anyone. The worst accusation made is that your hardware is less than ideal - which is an objective fact that you refuse to seriously consider.

If you prefer to treat your hardware like an infallible sacred cow, that's your choice. Don't expect any magic software updates to fix your problems, though.

Just because I'm the only one that has said anything doesn't mean I'm the only one with issues. While he worked at the computer store I go there was someone that worked there that used FreeNAS, and had a lot of the same issues with multiple sets of hardware. Most people will just switch to a different free OS that will do the same job rather than report issues, or ask questions.

It doesn't work that way. Just because you don't think something is insulting doesn't mean the person you're saying it to won't think it's insulting.

In what situation is it less than ideal? I keep saying that it depends on the situation as to what is needed. The situation here doesn't need more. If I were building a 50TB+ NAS for a high usage high demand environment than yes it would need a better CPU, and ECC RAM would be needed.

Here it's for convenience only, and has almost no use. Things have changed since it was built. Now it's not even convenient. I could use a small case I have here to hold the drives from the NAS, and connect them to my gaming PC after I retrieve the data.


I'm not saying there is nothing wrong with the hardware. I'm saying it's extremely unlikely that's it's the hardware, and I'm not going to tear apart multiple systems that have proven they are reliable as long as they are not running FreeNAS. I need more to go on than just blaming my hardware.

My last post wasn't very constructive, so I'll try to be more so. @aDigitalPhantom

• Dodgy power supplies are a frequent source of instability--in this forum alone, you can find dozens of examples of this being the case.
• Dodgy RAM is also a frequent cause of instability.
• The fact that your PSU puts out rated voltage under load does not mean it's compliant with the other relevant electrical specs (and your reference to thread pitch and hole spacing frankly makes you look like an argumentative jackass rather than someone who's actually interested in solving problems).

Given the first and second points, it's very likely that the source of your problems is with your hardware. We can probably help narrow it down, but not if your immediate response to every suggestion is "no, it can't be that."

I know that's why I test power supplies when I have any questions if they might be the problem.

I haven't had problems with RAM being the problem when it's correctly installed. Just putting it in a motherboard, and letting the auto detection do the rest isn't very reliable. I worked one system that a friend had that when it auto detected the RAM it had the wrong speed/timings that were too high/tight which caused stability problems. After I told it to use the speed/timing printed on the RAM there were no problems.

It's called sarcasm. I know it doesn't work well in text which is why I made it look a bit different. I can't quote the ATX specifications, and I know there are other things besides voltage. However saying hardware is bad, or not reliable based solely on age isn't accurate. If that were as accurate of a test as many think it is than the 1Kw SeaSonic PSU I had could have been in no way the reason the PC wouldn't turn on with that PSU installed. It had only been used for about 10 minutes. During those 10 minutes of use it caused system instability, and failed. Age doesn't automatically mean something will cause problems.

I'm not saying it's not the hardware. I'm saying it's very unlikely the hardware, and before I go digging into systems I need more to go on than just someone saying things like FreeBAD is stable, and FreeNAS is reliable so it must be your hardware. Automatically blaming the hardware and telling me I need to use hardware that while it would be great for a high demand system doesn't help when it comes to systems like mine that have almost no use that hardware isn't needed. If the config/system didn't get coruppted, and it was working correctly I wouldn't need to try and get the data from it. While it could be a bit more convenient to keep it as a NAS there is no need to do that. It's just for long term data storage, not daily use. I was the only one using for for a while before the OS crashed.

I haven't decided what I'm going to do with it yet, and right now I don't have time to read the change logs or search bug reports. That's why I asked some of the questions. I thought maybe someone might have a suggestion with out needing to look for an answer. Not because I need help trouble shooting or repairing hardware. All this has really done is make me less willing to deal with anything FreeNAS related. I don't normally share my work because it's normally not worth it, and because of the attitude in this thread I doubt it will be here. While they're no where near finished/useable, and on hold until I have the time to read the needed documentation. I will be scrapping all projects that that involve FreeNAS, and no I will not be sharing the code that is there for them.

 

[joeschmuck]

@aDigitalPhantom

Could you do me a favor and give me the benefit of the doubt and see if we can help you.

You have already posted your system specs which is good.

You seem to be having a system stability issue and we strongly recommend that some specific testing be accomplished in order to try and rule the components out as part of the problem. Why do we rule out the hardware first you ask? Becasue in general the FreeNAS software is stable. So I'm requesting that you do the following on your system with all the hard drives connected and such so you have the normal power load while testing...

1) Memtest86 run for 3 days non-stop, yes that is a long time but RAM issues can take a while to pop up, some folks will run Memtest86 for a solid week.
2) CPU Stress Test for 1 hour, like Prime 95.

If the MemTest86 fails that doesn't mean it's a RAM failure, it could be the power supply or the motherboard, or the CPU. If if fails then you need to record the address of the failure and move your RAM sicks around and run the test again. If the address changes to another bank then it's the RAM stick, if it's the same location then it's something else. If you get random address failures then it could be the power supply, or that would be the first thing I replaced for testing.

If these pass without a single hucup then odds are your hardware is stable

I don't recall what your bootable device is, if it's a USB Flash drive then I'd replace it with a single good quality USB Flash drive or better yet a small cheap SSD. Since your location is "Classified" I can't tell if you live in the US of A to take advantage of the holiday specials, but if you are here then Monday you likely could find a SSD for $30 or less. You just need one.

1) With a new boot device perform a clean install using FreeNAS 11.0-U4 if you don't mind. Do not upgrade the pool feature flags, just uncheck the message in the Alert Warning light. This will allow you to return to FreeNAS 9 if you prefer.
2) Import your pool.
3) I would not recommend importing your configuration file, it could be corrupt, but rather reconfiguring your system as needed. This only has to last a few weeks until you have some confidence that the system is stable.

You said you have a jail or maybe you have multiple jails, but running FreeNAS without the jails running is ideal right now. I think you said in a previous posting that you had an issue with a jail, maybe I read that wrong. Anyway troubleshooting is a divide and conqor thing so lets test how this works with bare FreeNAS. If you need to have a jail running then I'd recommend that you rebuild it under FreeNAS 11.0-U4 from sratch and create a new jails datastore. If you used "jails" before then use "jail" this time. It is quite possible for the software under the jails to be corrupt but I would ask you to destroy it unless we had some sort of proof.

If the system becomes unstable then do your best to collect any data you can and provide it here so we can give you some proper advice. Even a photo of the failure uploaded here could help. There are log files under "/var/log" so look at those as well, maybe something got recorded.

Good Luck

 

[danb35]

Do not expect me to like you calling me he/him/man/etc.

So what should we call you? "It"? It's been standard English usage for centuries to use male pronouns to refer to persons of unknown gender, and as yet you haven't indicated your gender--though you're making exactly the same assumption of @Jailer that you believe @Jailer is making of you. But it's only insulting when @Jailer does it? Or are you intending to be insulting?

I have asked questions, which for the most part have not been answered.

You've asked exactly one question: "Has anything been done to correct this?" I answered you: "no."

 

[Ericloewe]

Just because I'm the only one that has said anything doesn't mean I'm the only one with issues.

As of a few months ago, the forum got something like 7500 visitors a day, half of which interact with more than one page.

I've been doing this for three and something years now and you expect me to believe that nobody but you bothered to complain that FreeNAS mysteriously corrupted itself every few months, regardless of boot medium? The odds are not favorable to your statement.

It doesn't work that way. Just because you don't think something is insulting doesn't mean the person you're saying it to won't think it's insulting.

Part of living in a society is giving people some benefit of the doubt. Nobody in this thread addressed you in a disrespectful or offensive manner. If you're complaining about the choice of gender pronouns some have used, you should consider stating your preference - I'm sure most people who notice will address you according to your preference, within reason.

In what situation is it less than ideal?

Running FreeNAS (or any server, really).

I'm not saying there is nothing wrong with the hardware. I'm saying it's extremely unlikely that's it's the hardware, and I'm not going to tear apart multiple systems that have proven they are reliable as long as they are not running FreeNAS. I need more to go on than just blaming my hardware.

Hardware fails. All the time. I don't believe in magical hardware and neither should you.

I haven't had problems with RAM being the problem when it's correctly installed.

Again, without ECC, you cannot make that statement unless you've done nothing but run memtest all the time.

and right now I don't have time to read the change logs or search bug reports.

I'll save you the time: Nothing has been done because this is not a problem that exists for the vast majority of users. Since the software is the same (at least one of the many versions is bound to have been downloaded correctly), what is different is the hardware.

 

[joeschmuck]

Folks, lets settle down as this thread is becoming unproductive. Lets see if @aDigitalPhantom responds to my posting and if it's unfavorable then we just lock this thread. Everyone gave good advice up front but then it started taking a nose dive on both sides.

Hey, Cyber Monday is right around the corner, kind of like Christmas morning if you are looking to buy something.

 

[Chris Moore]

I have asked questions, which for the most part have not been answered. Instead you're telling me I need to test hardware that has been proven working, and reliable as long as it's not running FreeNAS.

If all you are going to do is berate me, accuse me of things, and not actually offer any help close the thread. I'm not going to argue with you, and I don't need to put up with these insults, and accusations. I know how file storage works, and I don't need to prove it to you.

Sorry, I am late to the party here, but it would appear to me that you came in blaming FreeNAS for your problem when you have very old and potentially defective hardware that may be at fault. The kind of problems you are describing are not common. I have only been running FreeNAS since 2011, but the only time I ever saw problems like yours in my systems or any other system was when the boot media was defective.
Since you don't have ECC memory, you have no way of knowing if it is bad or not.
You shouldn't come complaining about things not working when you are not even listening to the suggestions of others.

It's not like I'm short on drive space. I have 6.5TB usable in my gaming PC, well 10GB short of 6.5TB. If you include the 6TB from the current raid configuration in file server, and the drives that are not in use there is abour 25-30TB of storage.

Telling us how much storage you have is not productive at all, you certainly are not impressing anyone.
Many of the regulars here manage storage for work as well as at home. I have two FreeNAS systems at home with more than 12TB in each and I am one that has less storage than others. At work I manage many servers and just one o them (as an example) has a 60 drive array with over 300TB of storage available and (as I said) that is just one of the servers I manage.
The information about your gaming rig is also not relevant.

 

[aDigitalPhantom]

@aDigitalPhantom

Could you do me a favor and give me the benefit of the doubt and see if we can help you.

You have already posted your system specs which is good.

You seem to be having a system stability issue and we strongly recommend that some specific testing be accomplished in order to try and rule the components out as part of the problem. Why do we rule out the hardware first you ask? Becasue in general the FreeNAS software is stable. So I'm requesting that you do the following on your system with all the hard drives connected and such so you have the normal power load while testing...

1) Memtest86 run for 3 days non-stop, yes that is a long time but RAM issues can take a while to pop up, some folks will run Memtest86 for a solid week.
2) CPU Stress Test for 1 hour, like Prime 95.

If the MemTest86 fails that doesn't mean it's a RAM failure, it could be the power supply or the motherboard, or the CPU. If if fails then you need to record the address of the failure and move your RAM sicks around and run the test again. If the address changes to another bank then it's the RAM stick, if it's the same location then it's something else. If you get random address failures then it could be the power supply, or that would be the first thing I replaced for testing.

If these pass without a single hucup then odds are your hardware is stable

I don't recall what your bootable device is, if it's a USB Flash drive then I'd replace it with a single good quality USB Flash drive or better yet a small cheap SSD. Since your location is "Classified" I can't tell if you live in the US of A to take advantage of the holiday specials, but if you are here then Monday you likely could find a SSD for $30 or less. You just need one.

1) With a new boot device perform a clean install using FreeNAS 11.0-U4 if you don't mind. Do not upgrade the pool feature flags, just uncheck the message in the Alert Warning light. This will allow you to return to FreeNAS 9 if you prefer.
2) Import your pool.
3) I would not recommend importing your configuration file, it could be corrupt, but rather reconfiguring your system as needed. This only has to last a few weeks until you have some confidence that the system is stable.

You said you have a jail or maybe you have multiple jails, but running FreeNAS without the jails running is ideal right now. I think you said in a previous posting that you had an issue with a jail, maybe I read that wrong. Anyway troubleshooting is a divide and conqor thing so lets test how this works with bare FreeNAS. If you need to have a jail running then I'd recommend that you rebuild it under FreeNAS 11.0-U4 from sratch and create a new jails datastore. If you used "jails" before then use "jail" this time. It is quite possible for the software under the jails to be corrupt but I would ask you to destroy it unless we had some sort of proof.

If the system becomes unstable then do your best to collect any data you can and provide it here so we can give you some proper advice. Even a photo of the failure uploaded here could help. There are log files under "/var/log" so look at those as well, maybe something got recorded.

Good Luck

It would have been nice if the others could have posted a helpful reply like this.

Right now I can't run anything that needs a monitor connected for longer than an hour or two. I don't have a spare monitor right now, money to buy new hardware, and very little free time.

If I knew it would be considered a requirement to use a 6+ core CPU, and absurd amounts of RAM I would have kept the old hardware when I upgraded my gaming PC a few months ago instead of giving it to a friend. Then again from what I've seen here I doubt that ASUS P9X79 LE, Intel i7-4930k (6-core), and 64GB DDR3 combo would be good enough for FreeNAS.

Right now it's a small 3.5" SATA HDD. In the past I used USB Flash drives, 2.5" SATA HDDs, and for a while a 2GB CF card with a IDE adapter. I use classified as my location because of things that have happened before, and I'm not going to make it easy for anything to happen again. I will not say anymore on that subject, and this isn't the place for it.

I can do that. I do not remember what the jail error was other than it was OS, and config related. WS2012 now runs what this would have.

Most of the time there is no monitor, or keyboard connected. It sits in a enclosed vented server rack I made with two other servers.

 

[Ericloewe]

If I knew it would be considered a requirement to use a 6+ core CPU, and absurd amounts of RAM

Stop spreading lies, huh?

 

[garm]

Right now I can't run anything that needs a monitor connected for longer than an hour or two.

Im pretty sure you can hook up a monitor, start memtest and then disconnect it again for the duration you want to run it

Then again from what I've seen here I doubt that ASUS P9X79 LE, Intel i7-4930k (6-core), and 64GB DDR3 combo would be good enough for FreeNAS.

Naw I wouldn’t run FreeNAS in prod with that rig.. bloated gaming motherboard, the wrong CPU and no ECC memory

When I build FreeNAS I expect the data to live for 60+ years

 

[Chris Moore]

Right now I can't run anything that needs a monitor connected for longer than an hour or two. I don't have a spare monitor right now, money to buy new hardware, and very little free time.

If you don't have the capacity to do any troubleshooting or the money to buy any replacement hardware, you are setting yourself up for failure. I hope the situation improves for you.

If I knew it would be considered a requirement to use a 6+ core CPU, and absurd amounts of RAM I would have kept the old hardware when I upgraded my gaming PC a few months ago instead of giving it to a friend. Then again from what I've seen here I doubt that ASUS P9X79 LE, Intel i7-4930k (6-core), and 64GB DDR3 combo would be good enough for FreeNAS.

It is not the number of cores or quantity of RAM that would be at issue. We never suggest using gaming hardware for a server because gaming boards usually are not well suited to the purpose. Different purposes call for different hardware.
A server system board, even with an i3 CPU, and ECC memory powered by a quality power supply would be superior to any gaming rig ever made and a perfectly adequate FreeNAS server can be built for under $300 if you make wise hardware choices, and not counting the cost of drives.
You really should take the time to look at the Hardware Recommendations that @Ericloewe created for the community. It is very good.

Right now it's a small 3.5" SATA HDD. In the past I used USB Flash drives, 2.5" SATA HDDs

I am guessing that you are talking about your boot drive. Drives go bad. That is a fact of life and it is the reason we store our data on arrays of disks instead of relying on a single disk and my bet would be that your boot drive is defective in some way. In FreeNAS, the boot drive can be mirrored for the sake of reliability and when you replace it and reinstall, you should consider using a pair of drives. The FreeNAS installer supports selecting multiple drives for the boot pool at installation. I use a pair of 40GB laptop drives that I bought new (old stock) for about $10 each. I tested them when they arrived and they had zero hours of power on time. Those drives have been running for over a year and a half with no errors at all.
You should also setup some monitoring scripts to keep an eye on the health of your NAS. Here is a link to the collection of scripts the forum has:
https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...for-freenas-scripts-including-disk-burnin.28/

 

[Chris Moore]

I use classified as my location because of things that have happened before, and I'm not going to make it easy for anything to happen again. I will not say anymore on that subject, and this isn't the place for it.

PS. That is just being paranoid. For example my own information lists my actual name, age and state. Don't be afraid.

 

[joeschmuck]

Right now I can't run anything that needs a monitor connected for longer than an hour or two. I don't have a spare monitor right now, money to buy new hardware, and very little free time.

As previously suggested, place a monitor on the system and kick off the test. I'd periodically connect a monitor to check the status but if it's still running after 1 day then you can leave the monitor off until you have 3 days of consecutive testing.

If I knew it would be considered a requirement to use a 6+ core CPU, and absurd amounts of RAM I would have kept the old hardware when I upgraded my gaming PC a few months ago instead of giving it to a friend. Then again from what I've seen here I doubt that ASUS P9X79 LE, Intel i7-4930k (6-core), and 64GB DDR3 combo would be good enough for FreeNAS.

Not sure where you heard that, it certainly isn't in our recommended hardware requirements. You are recommended to have a two core/thread CPU and 8GB RAM.

You could use the ASUS motherboard and RAM but you take some risk not using a system which uses ECC RAM, but you are not the only one in this category.

and for a while a 2GB CF card with a IDE adapter.

You can get away with a CF card but do not go down the path of SD card. Using the HDD for now is okay as well but I'm sure yo will want to swap it out for something else later down the road.

 

[wblock]

ecause a power supply that tests good under load using a tested accurate multimeter is definitely bad....

This right here is a problem. 2006 was one of the peak years of the capacitor plague. The problems caused by a bad capacitor (ripple, mostly) are not visible with a multimeter and require a totally different level of tool, an oscilloscope. The problems are random and seem to match the description. I would also point out that in my experience, Asus motherboards seem to be more problematic than some brands.

If we can be polite on both sides of this thread, it can continue. If not, it will be closed.

 

[joeschmuck]

bad capacitor

I was thinking the same thing yesterday myself. It's very possible and even probable but until the lad runs the testing for a reasonable amount of time, we won't know.

an oscilloscope

May be a bit too advanced for most of our users. I'm no stranger, in fact I used one a few months ago to track down some manchester encoded timing issue, that was not an easy task to say the least. Just a bit more involved than looking a ripple voltage. Hum, I wonder if o'scopes are on sale for Cyber Monday, there are some very nice digital scopes out there. Not that I need one but it would be nice to have in my workshop.

 

[Ericloewe]

Hum, I wonder if o'scopes are on sale for Cyber Monday

Probably, the entry-level digital scope market is ablaze with all the competition.

 

[joeschmuck]

By OP request this thread is closed.