Boot volume at capacity + Error: unable to open database file on 9.10

[Akshunhiro]

Hi all,

I have a weird issue on my FreeNAS box which has only been in use a couple of months.

I saw alerts last time I logged in to say my 16GB USB boot drive was basically at capacity so I went in and cleared all the old environments leaving the current 9.10.1-U2 install but capacity hasn't changed even after a reboot.

That was a couple of days ago and I've since ignored it but noticed today that the FTP service wasn't available so I logged in and altered the amount of connections, disabled anonymous login and dropped the timeout. This is when I got the message "Error: unable to open database file". The boot volume itself appears fine and system rebooted without issue so I'm doubting it's a corrupt flash drive (it's as old as the box itself).

Being a CLI noob, where should I be looking for large files/logs? I'm not sure why nearly all of the 16GB is gone. I've even moved the system-dataset pool to another volume. Is there somewhere obvious I should look for all the missing space? I'm sure it's not being used as swap, that's used by physical memory, right?

 

[Ericloewe]

I've even moved the system-dataset pool to another volume.

That doesn't sound good at all. The .system dataset is placed in the first data pool by default, so it sounds like you might have moved it to the boot pool, which is just a USB drive.

Make sure the .system dataset is not in freenas-boot.

 

[Akshunhiro]

Initially, it was on freenas-boot (was there by default) and I read that's not the best idea so moved it to ada0.

 

[Akshunhiro]

I just did a scrub on the boot volume and it's still being reported as healthy...

 

[Ericloewe]

Initially, it was on freenas-boot (was there by default) and I read that's not the best idea so moved it to ada0.

I wonder how the hell that happened.

I just did a scrub on the boot volume and it's still being reported as healthy...

That doesn't take "too full to work properly" into account.

 

[Akshunhiro]

I wonder how the hell that happened.

I believe that was the norm on a previous version.

That doesn't take "too full to work properly" into account.

Yeah, I know :( I just wanted to try rule out faulty media. I may just do a re-install.

Also, with the dataset naming, I've got one dataset for each drive (just two drives). Is there any problem with naming it 'data'? Currently it's /mnt/data/NAS and all my media is there. The other drive is for my security cameras and I just have FTP set to store captures there. It's path is /mnt/Backup/Surveillance

 

[Ericloewe]

I believe that was the norm on a previous version.

Not as far as anyone bothered to announce. It's the default for TrueNAS, but TrueNAS hardware has proper boot pools.

Also, with the dataset naming, I've got one dataset for each drive (just two drives). Is there any problem with naming it 'data'? Currently it's /mnt/data/NAS and all my media is there. The other drive is for my security cameras and I just have FTP set to store captures there. It's path is /mnt/Backup/Surveillance

I see several problems with those sentences:

• data is a bad name for anything - though it should be relatively free of conflicts, it's still prone to causing confusion.
• Pool/Dataset confusion. Cyberjock's guide, linked in my sig, is the solution to that one
• The implication that you're using two separate pools, each a single drive - which is a very poor setup from a reliability/data security point of view

 

[Akshunhiro]

Awesome, thanks for that. I'll definitely checkout the guide once I get home from work.

I had tried to look into it and was definitely confused by the pool/dataset configuration. I was initially just going to use the one WD 3TB Red for everything but figured there's no harm in keeping the WD 500GB Blue that came with the box as a backup for video captures.

Hopefully I can redo everything properly without losing the 1.2TB of Media :P