11.2 - Who has installed?

jgreco

Resident Grinch
Joined
May 29, 2011
Messages
18,681
I'll do you one better... with multipath disks, there is even another level of abstraction required....

View Volumes -> Volume Status -> View Multipaths -> View Disks

I've been asking for a single hot link from the volume status screen that would pull up all the disk information. Still not there yet.

Cheers,
Matt

I defer to this better problem statement. :smile:

Sometimes it seems to me that the people doing the design have never spent a day doing data center work. That hammer lands heavily in iSCSI and pool management areas of the system. It's something that creates a bit of a liability in terms of making mistakes, and a mistake that kills redundancy would be bad.
 

jgreco

Resident Grinch
Joined
May 29, 2011
Messages
18,681
Haha, I was using the legacy GUI and submitted a certificate change. I typically run web services on an alternative port. So it was amusing to see it try to redirect, but it mangled

https://<server>:<port>/legacy/

into

https://<server>/legacy/:<port>
 

KrisBee

Wizard
Joined
Mar 20, 2017
Messages
1,288
My conclusion after reading it all: HP ProLiant Gen8 Microserver does NOT have a boot problem, some of their owners create that problem.
The HP server BIOS boots without problems from HD's, usb 2.0 sticks, micro-sdhc cards, etc. But if you try booting it from some other media, you get problems with the BTX Loader.

I did test it on my own Proliant Gen8 Microserver by updating from 11.1-U6 to 11.2-RELEASE. Here are the results:
#1: Removed ( as a precaution) all four HD's, replaced the micro-sd card with a spare, and booted from an USB 2.0 stick on the front USB port with 11.2-RELEASE.iso on it: Installation of 11.2 went smoothly without any problem, and took about 4 minutes.
#2: Encouraged by this good result, I replaced the 4 HD's from my Zpool, removed the spare microSD and replaced it with the 11.1-U6 one, and booted again from the USB stick with 11.2-RELEASE. And (of course) kept my fingers crossed. I selected the upgrade option, allowed the installer to touch my microSD card and waited for the result. At the crucial moment, when it rebooted, I saw in a flash the BTX Loader, but the installation continued. When it tried to import my Zpool, it went quiet for some 5 minutes...... and then it finished the installation quickly. It rebooted automatically, and there it was: 11.2 in it's full glory. After testing things, everything was OK, even after a manual reboot.

By the way, I had connected a display, a keyboard and a mouse to the server to follow the update process and get it started. But once started, don't interrupt the update process. It's asking for trouble!

Nice to know it's a false report. Thanks for taking time to post. Did you try to install with virtual media via HP ilo?
 

KrisBee

Wizard
Joined
Mar 20, 2017
Messages
1,288
It seam as if you didn't read the Bug report that the post is refering to.
There has never been a problem updating or booting with usb media or micro-sd.
It is about the 5th sata port and using it to boot from ssd/hdd.

It was me who mis-read report. Booting HP gen8 microserver from odd sata ( 5th sata port) has always needed a workaround, but it may not work for all OS. For example a grub bootloader on an internal usb stick which boots the kernel of the OS on the device connected to 5th sata port. So can grub chain load the FreeNAs bootloader?
 

Ericloewe

Server Wrangler
Moderator
Joined
Feb 15, 2014
Messages
20,176
Is UEFI an option? rEFInd can boot any UEFI bootloader.
 

rvassar

Guru
Joined
May 2, 2018
Messages
971
Another 11.1-U6 to 11.2-Release upgrade here. Supermicro X9SCL / i3-2120, booting off mirrored Patriot Flare SSD's. No real issues, all my shares & targets are functional. Bonus: It solved my MySQL Jail problem.

Still getting used to the new UI.
 

SweetAndLow

Sweet'NASty
Joined
Nov 6, 2013
Messages
6,421
Ok I'm going to provide a data point. I just upgraded from 9.10.2-U6 straight to 11.2. Upgrade rebooted 2x, once to migrate config and second time to actually boot. My jails that are from freenas 9.3 and freenas 9.10 are all up and running. My LACP is working, smb is working, emails are working, ups service did not autostart but starts just fine, ssh is running and smart tests seem to have migrated correctly. HDD temp chart seems to be working also. I also did this upgrade with my 2 usb sticks that are mirrored and about 5 years old. I fully expected them to not survive this upgrade but they did.

for the most part I am 100% amazed that i could do such a big jump with my upgrade. I'll keep an eye on things over the next 24h and report back if anything changes.

It's kind of strange that cpu temps graph does not work, maybe it doesn't work for anybody? I have a supermicro x10 and e5-1620 system. Very standard freenas build.
 

Dan Tudora

Patron
Joined
Jul 6, 2017
Messages
276
It was me who mis-read report. Booting HP gen8 microserver from odd sata ( 5th sata port) has always needed a workaround, but it may not work for all OS. For example a grub bootloader on an internal usb stick which boots the kernel of the OS on the device connected to 5th sata port. So can grub chain load the FreeNAs bootloader?

hello
grub on microSD internal or usb stick

main grub.cfg

set timeout=10
set default=0

menuentry "FreeNAS" --class freebsd --class bsd --class os{
insmod bsd
insmod zfs
insmod chain
insmod part_gpt
echo Chainloading hd5 ...
set root=(hd5)
chainloader +1
}
work with a smoll SSD on 5th sata port
 

RootBeer

Cadet
Joined
Mar 27, 2018
Messages
5
It seam as if you didn't read the Bug report that the post is refering to.
There has never been a problem updating or booting with usb media or micro-sd.
It is about the 5th sata port and using it to boot from ssd/hdd.

In fact I did read the Bug report three (3!) times in succession. For me it was a very confusing discussion. Quite often someone said he had major boot problems, but did not mention his configuration and/or how he had booted. Somebody else had major problems with booting from an usb stick, and after a while found the problem was with the stick. Anyway, I had not the impression from the Bug report that it was all about booting from 5th sata port as you just said.
If you really are familiar with the HP ProLiant Gen8 microserver, you just know you can't boot from the fifth sata port. Which by the way was extensively discussed on the internet. So it's not a bug in Freenas 11.2. I am occasionally running my microserver with RedHat RHEL7, that is installed on a HD connected to the 5th sata port. I just put an usb stick with GRUB on it in one of the front usb ports of my server. That port has priority over the microSD card, so it boots RHEL7 and FreeNAS is not touched at all. To do so, was also extensively discussed on the internet.
 

Phill23

Dabbler
Joined
Feb 9, 2017
Messages
30
Did the upgrade this morning with no problems (11.1-U6 --> 11.2-RELEASE).
HP MicroServer Gen8 with ssd booting on 5th sata.
 

Constantin

Vampire Pig
Joined
May 19, 2017
Messages
1,828
Here we are, a few days later and my system became non-responsive. The network interfaces had to be nuked and the unit rebooted several times until normal operations resumed.

Also strange: the console screen no longer fits on my monitor. Before and during the FreeNAS ASCII logo stage, all is well (various messages scrolling by during the boot process). After the FreeNAS boot screen, the first two characters are always missing. This is a 1600x1200 screen that has been happily emulating the 640x480 the Avoton was providing. I'll open a separate thread for that.
 
D

dlavigne

Guest
I have not seen any posts from anyone updating from 9.10.2-U6. Any good/bad news stories anyone?
My setup is pretty vanilla, but just interested to see if anyone else is finally taking the plunge out of 9.10.2 into the brave new world.
I'll eventually get around to a test myself, but will take some serious time to back everything up.
It's a prod machine and I need to be cautious, especially with the not-quite-insignificant amount of failures I'm reading in this thread and others.

You should definitely update to 11.0 first (verify config is OK), then update to 11.1 (verify config is still OK), then update to 11.2. 9.10 is nearly 3 years worth of updates and we've already had a report of one failure.
 
D

dlavigne

Guest
Yeah, I don't know why it is that web developers are trying to make everything look like a minimalistic cell phone UI these days. That's nice if you are Apple and you're actually fine with not exposing complexities to the end user at all, but FreeNAS isn't that, and all the complexity is just hidden in ways that aren't really that obvious.

Of course, the old GUI was tragic in that way as well. As an example, I'm doing an in-place upgrade of a 11 drive Z3 pool, one drive at a time. In the old GUI, I have to navigate to "View Disks" to see the size and serial on disks. But I have no clue which disk is the disk that's no longer in the pool.

View attachment 27026
So then I have to go to Storage -> Volumes and click on the pool, then click on Volume Status. That last little bit I only know how to find because of years of familiarity with FreeNAS... the average user ain't going to find it easily. So then it shows me the component devices by FreeBSD /dev name. I can then play "hunt for the missing number":
View attachment 27027

Ok, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, ahh it's 11 that's now missing. Well this is merely tedious on a 12 drive array but would be pretty aggravating on a 96.

I appreciate that the pool has been added to the disks list in the new GUI, a nice step in the right direction, but it would be nice to see some vast improvements in the volume status (now pool status) page.

View attachment 27028

I mean, come on, either decide on partitions or disks. The volume status page refers to partitions ("p2") but does administrative actions on disks. And when it displays things like this, why is it offering to replace disk da10, clearly a 4TB disk, with da1 or da2, which are both in the dozens of GB size range? That can never work, it's dumb to offer it. Plus it would be nice to maybe list the size and serial numbers.

Replacing disk da10, 4TB, 656XYZABC

da11, 8TB, 1STABCXYZ

This would be very useful to those of us here in the trenches.

This is a known issue with the Angular framework as it's default components are meant for mobile use. We'll start to see layout improvements in 11.3 and beyond due to 2 things: a bump in the Angular version and more use of custom components.
 
D

dlavigne

Guest
I defer to this better problem statement. :)

Sometimes it seems to me that the people doing the design have never spent a day doing data center work. That hammer lands heavily in iSCSI and pool management areas of the system. It's something that creates a bit of a liability in terms of making mistakes, and a mistake that kills redundancy would be bad.

You'll definitely see this improve in 11.3 and beyond. 11.2 purposefully kept the horrible legacy UI workflow (to prevent POLA). Over the next few releases we'll be introducing improved workflows systematically, not all at once (again, to reduce POLA for long-term users and, frankly, because it takes time to redesign things well).
 

cods69

Explorer
Joined
Sep 11, 2016
Messages
50
You should definitely update to 11.0 first (verify config is OK), then update to 11.1 (verify config is still OK), then update to 11.2. 9.10 is nearly 3 years worth of updates and we've already had a report of one failure.
Great to know, thank you.
For the sake of my paranoia, would the best path to take be:
Save config
- Manual update to FreeNAS-11.0-U4-manual-update.tar
- Check and save another config
- Manual update to FreeNAS-11.1-U6-manual-update.tar
- Check and save another config
- Update via normal train method
...?

One other thing - Are there any 'gotchas' on these prior releases regarding pool upgrades, or SMART issues with FreeNAS on USB?
Just want to be prepared as these were some reasons I balked at upgrading over the years.
 
Last edited:

KrisBee

Wizard
Joined
Mar 20, 2017
Messages
1,288
Did the upgrade this morning with no problems (11.1-U6 --> 11.2-RELEASE).
HP MicroServer Gen8 with ssd booting on 5th sata.

But how is your B120I set-up? AHCI only, or is SSD in RAID0 Logical Drive 01 ?
 

ThreeDee

Guru
Joined
Jun 13, 2013
Messages
698
Couldn't do the upgrade from 11.1-U6 .. I grabbed a different USB drive and did a clean install and reloaded my saved config .. working now.. YAY!
I'll drive this around for a bit and if no issues, I'll do a clean install on my PNY 64gb drive and see what happens
 

trentk10

Explorer
Joined
Jan 7, 2017
Messages
69
Upgraded from 11.1 U6 to 11.2. Process took 25 minutes or so.

Everything seems to be working as it was before. I have been running roughly an hour or so at this point.

Thanks, and nice job on the upgrade.
 
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