CelticDubstep
Cadet
- Joined
- May 16, 2020
- Messages
- 7
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3 (rev. 4.0)
CPU: AMD FX-8350
RAM: 4x 4GB Crucial Callistix Tactical 1600MHz 8-8-8-24
SSD: 2x 256GB Samsung Pro's (going to use them in a boot pool should one fail)
HDD: 8x Hitachi HGST 8TB 7200RPM 3.5" 12Gb SAS HUH728080AL4200 4KN
HDD Controller: LSI 6Gbps SAS HBA LSI 9211-8i (Unconfigured IR Mode. FreeNAS is able to read SMART Data, Make, Model, Serial, etc)
NIC: Intel Pro/1000 PT Quad Port/Onboard Realtek GbE
Note: I have a bunch of SSD's laying around... perhaps I should use one for cache?
This is a long post so please bare with me here. I'm long past due for a file server at home as I have various random drives laying around all over the place with data that either have no backups, or is duplicated on multiple drives. It's a mess and has been for well over 20 years now. A little about myself... I've been in IT for the better part of 15+ years now and I am currently the sole IT person at my company which is an engineering firm. I manage two office locations and 5 physical servers and 2 Synology (one RackStation and one DiskStation). All the physical servers are using hardware RAID controllers with cache, battery backup, etc. This is pretty much how I've always done things throughout my IT career managing servers.
Synology has been the only NAS experience I've had which has left a very bad taste in my mouth and what once served as our file servers at the two offices, now serve as a place to store backups. Users started to intermittently get errors in the middle of working on engineering projects such as "The handle is invalid", "Location is not available", "P:\ is not accessible", and "The system cannot open the file" which often time caused them to lose, at times, hours worth of work depending on the last time they saved their work. The issue was a nightmare to track down since it was very intermittent and I spent weeks working with Synology support (which is terrible) as well as troubleshooting myself before I finally discovered the issue. I was eventually finally able to pull Wireshark logs from a users workstation when the issue happened and match that with the logs from Samba on the Synology and in short... Wireshark logged a response from the Synology "STATUS_TOO_MANY_OPENED_FILES" and "STATUS_INVALID_CLASS_INFO". Meanwhile at the same time, the Samba logs showed the following:
../source3/smbd/open.c:785: [2019/12/04 16:06:42.803727, all 0, pid=6931] fd_open
Too many open files, unable to open more! smbd's max open files = 16424
../source3/passdb/pdb_smbpasswd.c:272: [2019/12/04 16:06:44.006566, passdb 0, pid=6931] startsmbfilepwent
startsmbfilepwent_internal: unable to open file /etc/samba/private/smbpasswd. Error was: Too many open files
../source3/passdb/pdb_smbpasswd.c:1333: [2019/12/04 16:06:44.006634, passdb 0, pid=6931] smbpasswd_getsampwnam
Unable to open passdb database.
Due to how locked down the Synology ecosystem is, it wasn't possible to increase that limit and at the end, they simply said we were out of luck and needed to find another solution. Ultimately in the end, I purchased Windows Server 2019 (to replace Server 2012 R2) for our server, as well as upgraded it from 32 GB Ram to 128 GB Ram and I also purchased 4 8 TB SAS drives and put them in RAID 10 and haven't had a single problem since.
This has made me cautious of solutions such as FreeNAS and Unraid, but I've heard nothing but great things, especially FreeNAS due to the ZFS file system. There were also many features of the Synology I loved, such as the snapshots (so much better than shadow copies), and apps you could get such as cloudsync to sync with various cloud providers.
For my home setup, at the moment, I'm strongly considering FreeNAS with a RAIDZ2 or RAIDZ3 setup. My biggest concern is that if my hardware fails, how difficult is it to get my data off these drives since they are in a ZFS RAID configuration? My other concern is that I've read you should have 1 GB ram per 1 TB of storage and my server will only have 16 GB. Now, I do have two "lab" i7-4790 systems, each running 32 GB Ram that I could "swap" out so the FreeNAS box will have more RAM, but I'd really prefer not to do that. My FreeNAS Box will be strictly for storage and nothing more (except cloudsync maybe). My Plex Server will run on the i7-4790 system and simply pull the files from FreeNAS to transcode.
I also have 8 2 TB drives laying around (and 8 300GB 15K RPM SAS drives, but we won't go there) that I thought about using as a 2nd FreeNAS box, but don't see much of a purpose in that?
Also, before anyone asks... I can't do anything with the i7-4790 systems. They are 100% proprietary other than the CPU, RAM, and Hard Drives. Everything else (PSU, Motherboard, Case, etc) are completely useless, and I don't have any spare motherboards for 4th gen CPU's.
Thanks in advance for any feedback.
CPU: AMD FX-8350
RAM: 4x 4GB Crucial Callistix Tactical 1600MHz 8-8-8-24
SSD: 2x 256GB Samsung Pro's (going to use them in a boot pool should one fail)
HDD: 8x Hitachi HGST 8TB 7200RPM 3.5" 12Gb SAS HUH728080AL4200 4KN
HDD Controller: LSI 6Gbps SAS HBA LSI 9211-8i (Unconfigured IR Mode. FreeNAS is able to read SMART Data, Make, Model, Serial, etc)
NIC: Intel Pro/1000 PT Quad Port/Onboard Realtek GbE
Note: I have a bunch of SSD's laying around... perhaps I should use one for cache?
This is a long post so please bare with me here. I'm long past due for a file server at home as I have various random drives laying around all over the place with data that either have no backups, or is duplicated on multiple drives. It's a mess and has been for well over 20 years now. A little about myself... I've been in IT for the better part of 15+ years now and I am currently the sole IT person at my company which is an engineering firm. I manage two office locations and 5 physical servers and 2 Synology (one RackStation and one DiskStation). All the physical servers are using hardware RAID controllers with cache, battery backup, etc. This is pretty much how I've always done things throughout my IT career managing servers.
Synology has been the only NAS experience I've had which has left a very bad taste in my mouth and what once served as our file servers at the two offices, now serve as a place to store backups. Users started to intermittently get errors in the middle of working on engineering projects such as "The handle is invalid", "Location is not available", "P:\ is not accessible", and "The system cannot open the file" which often time caused them to lose, at times, hours worth of work depending on the last time they saved their work. The issue was a nightmare to track down since it was very intermittent and I spent weeks working with Synology support (which is terrible) as well as troubleshooting myself before I finally discovered the issue. I was eventually finally able to pull Wireshark logs from a users workstation when the issue happened and match that with the logs from Samba on the Synology and in short... Wireshark logged a response from the Synology "STATUS_TOO_MANY_OPENED_FILES" and "STATUS_INVALID_CLASS_INFO". Meanwhile at the same time, the Samba logs showed the following:
../source3/smbd/open.c:785: [2019/12/04 16:06:42.803727, all 0, pid=6931] fd_open
Too many open files, unable to open more! smbd's max open files = 16424
../source3/passdb/pdb_smbpasswd.c:272: [2019/12/04 16:06:44.006566, passdb 0, pid=6931] startsmbfilepwent
startsmbfilepwent_internal: unable to open file /etc/samba/private/smbpasswd. Error was: Too many open files
../source3/passdb/pdb_smbpasswd.c:1333: [2019/12/04 16:06:44.006634, passdb 0, pid=6931] smbpasswd_getsampwnam
Unable to open passdb database.
Due to how locked down the Synology ecosystem is, it wasn't possible to increase that limit and at the end, they simply said we were out of luck and needed to find another solution. Ultimately in the end, I purchased Windows Server 2019 (to replace Server 2012 R2) for our server, as well as upgraded it from 32 GB Ram to 128 GB Ram and I also purchased 4 8 TB SAS drives and put them in RAID 10 and haven't had a single problem since.
This has made me cautious of solutions such as FreeNAS and Unraid, but I've heard nothing but great things, especially FreeNAS due to the ZFS file system. There were also many features of the Synology I loved, such as the snapshots (so much better than shadow copies), and apps you could get such as cloudsync to sync with various cloud providers.
For my home setup, at the moment, I'm strongly considering FreeNAS with a RAIDZ2 or RAIDZ3 setup. My biggest concern is that if my hardware fails, how difficult is it to get my data off these drives since they are in a ZFS RAID configuration? My other concern is that I've read you should have 1 GB ram per 1 TB of storage and my server will only have 16 GB. Now, I do have two "lab" i7-4790 systems, each running 32 GB Ram that I could "swap" out so the FreeNAS box will have more RAM, but I'd really prefer not to do that. My FreeNAS Box will be strictly for storage and nothing more (except cloudsync maybe). My Plex Server will run on the i7-4790 system and simply pull the files from FreeNAS to transcode.
I also have 8 2 TB drives laying around (and 8 300GB 15K RPM SAS drives, but we won't go there) that I thought about using as a 2nd FreeNAS box, but don't see much of a purpose in that?
Also, before anyone asks... I can't do anything with the i7-4790 systems. They are 100% proprietary other than the CPU, RAM, and Hard Drives. Everything else (PSU, Motherboard, Case, etc) are completely useless, and I don't have any spare motherboards for 4th gen CPU's.
Thanks in advance for any feedback.