SOLVED Can Someone Interpret This For Me?

[solarisguy]

Just testing, and 9.2.1.3 was fairly OK.

All the credit belongs to joeschmuck, I just jumped the bandwagon :)

 

[joeschmuck]

I recommended 9.2.1.3 because in the later versions there were some people having CIFS issues and the complaints on 9.2.1.3 were minimal in this area. And I've been using it without any issues, but my system is fairly simple too. I run MiniDLNA and Plex plugins and that is it. No replication type stuff. I'm certain I will upgrade to 9.2.1.6 in a few months but not before then because it wouldn't give me any benefit at the moment.

EDIT: Also, if someone is troubleshooting a problem, I want to have reasonable confidence that we are on the same page as much as possible. And if you have 4GB of RAM, you should be running 8.2.x, in my opinion. 9.x can be flaky on some systems with 4GB RAM or less.

 

[panz]

Me too: lot of problems with CIFS/Samba for v. 9.2.1.6 and still stuck with server shutdown by #5293 bug :(

 

[anodos]

Same here: the only gotcha on 9.2.1.3 was #4728. Letting others be the guinea pigs on newer versions (till I get some hardware that's not in production - that I can use for testing).

 

[NiceTry]

The move to 9.2.1.3 did not solve the weird behavior.

I've noticed a ZFS dataset management quirk possibly having to do with permissions (or it's another fluke...). I deleted the miniDLNA plugin that also removed the associated jail but left a jail dataset in the volumes list. I then tried to delete the jail dataset. It was almost deleted but a "jail" entry stayed in the volume list without its subordinate information. I changed permissions to allow everything from anybody and tried again. The dataset deletion was successful and it was removed from the list.

I don't know if this has anything to do with my problem but without the jail dataset, the server performance is back to normal.

I'm now gathering options to get an 8GB mobo setup. As an aside, can I run the 32-bit version on my Core 2 Duo E4600 and would I avoid memory issues at the expense of performance or reliability?

 

[joeschmuck]

To be honest, I doubt the 32 bit version will run well, not when using ZFS. The 32 bit was really meant for people who do not have 64 bit CPUs. I'd stick with the 64 bit, it's tested much more. But you can try it, it shouldn't hurt. The other option is to roll back to the 8.x series of FreeNAS or just wait for 9.2.1.6-Release comes out and cross your fingers it works.

So let me ask you something... When you moved to 9.2.1.3, did you perform a clean install and reconfigure from scratch? No upgrades or restoring saved configuration files?

Speaking about the RAM, I hope you are looking into a new system because if you plan to use ZFS, for the safety of your data you need ECC RAM and all the proper hardware which supports it.

 

[NiceTry]

To be honest, I doubt the 32 bit version will run well, not when using ZFS. The 32 bit was really meant for people who do not have 64 bit CPUs. I'd stick with the 64 bit, it's tested much more. But you can try it, it shouldn't hurt. The other option is to roll back to the 8.x series of FreeNAS or just wait for 9.2.1.6-Release comes out and cross your fingers it works.

So let me ask you something... When you moved to 9.2.1.3, did you perform a clean install and reconfigure from scratch? No upgrades or restoring saved configuration files?

Speaking about the RAM, I hope you are looking into a new system because if you plan to use ZFS, for the safety of your data you need ECC RAM and all the proper hardware which supports it.

Burned the 9.2.1.3 image to USB stick and booted from it. Reconfigured all selections from scratch (not all that tedious). The only legacy thing I used was to auto-import my ZFS volumes. All else was reconstructed manually. Also, as part of the 9.2.1.5 clean install, I reformatted the drives and rebuilt the ZFS from scratch. The 9.2.1.3 version auto-imported that newly rebuilt ZFS.

Yes, new system. The plan is a new motherboard but I'm not finding much available in ECC supported boards. Maybe I'm not looking in the right places. Would you recommend your hardware configuration?

 

[joeschmuck]

I would and have recommended my hardware and a few people do have it and working fine (do a search of the forums for "m5a78l", should be a few folks out there.) The only downside for me is I don't have IPMI which gives a true server machine remote access over Ethernet. I keep my FreeNAS machine in my basement, nice and cool there, but I don't have a keyboard or monitor hooked up to it. It would be nice to have IPMI so I could do everything in my computer room remotely. IPMI has nothing to do with the GUI, it's basically a KVM over Ethernet. It's not a deal breaker but I'm jealous at the guys who do have IPMI.

My system is cost effective as well. If you do purchase an AMD cpu, stick with the FX series, do not use the APU series as I've heard many fail to run FreeBSD 9 very well. My FX-4300 is overkill but it was priced right (now $109.00 at NewEgg) and comes with an outstanding boxed CPU cooler that is so quiet. I think the RAM was the single largest cost for my system, and I'm not counting the hard drives of course.

There are other great systems as well, Supermicro makes a few and some very different. If you know exactly what you want to do with your system, that would help figure out what components to purchase. If you will never be transcoding video (Plex) then you can get a supermicro board that is small, has it's own CPU built in, and is low power and cost effective. If you are going to encrypt your hard drives then you want a CPU that has AES built in. There are a few things to think about. The FX-4300 is very capable of all this and more.

Good luck.

 

[pschatz100]

joeschmuck's advice is well taken: think about what you want to do...

While this sounds obvious, it's amazing how many people start building a system before thinking through the important issues. The first decision: what functionality are you looking for? File serving? With or without encryption? Transcoding media files? File serving requires far less CPU power than transcoding media.

How much disk capacity and how many physical disks do you expect to use? Obviously, this will depend upon your RAID strategy. It pays to have a plan before you start buying hardware - if for no other reason than to make certain your motherboard has enough SATA connections and your case has enough room for the disks. DON'T USE OLD JUNK DRIVES. This creates headaches down the road.

Related to this is "How large a system do you want". By this, I mean physical size (dimensions.) Physical size doesn't get talked about a lot on these forums, but I think it should be considered. There are lots of folks out there who build a NAS using a mini ITX motherboard in a small good looking case, and then complain they can't add enough memory or internal hard disk.

For many years, I ran FreeNAS on an ancient AMD 939 class CPU as a file server and it worked great. I started serving media files using mini-DLNA and it still worked well enough. Then, I decided to add the ability to transcode media files for mobile devices... no go on the old system. Time to upgrade. One comment about my old system: I updated the disks from time to time, and ran that system for 7 years without incident. Do not rely on old disks as they have a tendency to fail at the most inopportune time.

joeschmuck's setup is a great example of an AMD based system. Personally, I wanted to try an Intel based system as the CPU's are more power efficient. Now, I'm running a Supermicro X9SCL-F motherboard, Core i3-3240 CPU, 8GB ECC ram, 2-2TB disks in a mirrored array. Due to budget constraints, I started with 8GB ram and 2-2TB disks which is enough for the capacity I currently require. I will grow this as budget allows. The Core i3 is a bit overkill for my purpose, but I got a good deal on it. A Pentium for a media server would have been just fine (a Celeron would be sufficient for a file server and they run very cool.)

My opinion about hardware: Buy good hardware. If budget is an issue, then start small and have a plan to grow your system as budget allows. Do not compromise the quality of the components you purchase. I see no problem using previous generation components, which can often be found at discount prices. Remember, a NAS does not need to have the fastest CPU or memory - but it needs to be reliable.

And yes, IPMI is cool.

 

[NiceTry]

joeschmuck's advice is well taken: think about what you want to do...

Thanks, pschatz. Good discussion and good advice.

I'm definitely going for the hardware update to get the required 8GB. I again confirmed that something associated with jails is interfering with file service. Since I do not have the minimum 8GB RAM, I can't really complain too much.

Joeschmuck's motherboard choice in a nice selection. 6 SATA ports (3 Gbit), 32 GB RAM capacity, USB3 for backup, on-board video, ECC capable, reasonable price ($49US after rebates on Newegg). I've been an Intel guy for so long, going to AMD is a little creepy for me but I'll get over it. I may look into a lesser AM3+ FX processor though.

I agree with your assertion about getting good hardware. I've never been sorry for doing so.

 

[joeschmuck]

I also think Intel and Supermicro are great choices but sometimes budget does play a factor. I can't stress enough about using a high quality power supply either. And make sure you configure the ECC RAM (not configured by default on the MB) to the Good setting is fine. Run MemTest for a few days if you can, it will give you confidence in your system.

As for using the USB connection for a backup device, that can be done (I have at one time for a USB hard drive, NTFS format) but it may not be the best. I'm not sure what type of device you plan to use or if you have already been doing this in the past either. And this has nothing to do with the MB, it's FreeNAS.

Buy the FX processor that costs the least. As for power draw, it only draws power when it's doing something, and mine doesn't do much 99.82% of the time. It's not very power hungry in this type of a system.

 

[NiceTry]

I ordered the ASUS board from Newegg. New FX-4130's are going for about $65 on eBay. I'll lose maybe 5% performance from an FX-4300. I don't think I'll notice. I have a high quality PS in my current unit. I'm tracking a 16GB (2x8GB) ECC unbuffered memory set on eBay.

Where is the ECC configured? In the BIOS setup?

Someday, either when I have to or in a couple years, I'll replace my 4 - 1TB drives with Red 2TB drives.

I sure hope this fixes the jail problem for me.

 

[joeschmuck]

Curious how the E-Bay CPU will arrive. Is it used, is it a tray CPU or Boxed CPU with heatsink. I was reading one listing and it said both it was a boxed CPU with fan and just following that it stated it was a tray cpu without a fan. I hope you get a new boxed CPU with the fan.

Yes, the ECC setup is in the BIOS. And I hope this fixes your jail setup as well.

 

[NiceTry]

I ordered a new tray cpu. I think I saw the listing you are talking about, though. I didn't get that one.

There is a Fry's not too far from me. I'll get a fan and heatsink there.

Stuff should start arriving late next week.

 

[joeschmuck]

Yea, we don't have a Fry's where I live. They are nice to have around. I kind of miss living in Washington and California. Never lived in Oregon, traveled through it quite a bit.

 

[NiceTry]

Update update:

CPU, 8GB memory, heatsink in hand. Awaiting arrival of motherboard.

 

[joeschmuck]

To bad you don't have it before the long weekend, but then again it won't distract you from a good celebration either.

 

[NiceTry]

Update:

Mobo arrived and I swapped it out for the old one. Incredibly easy. I plugged in the drives into the same sequence of SATA ports, plugged in the USB drive, configured the BIOS for ECC and let 'er rip. It worked. 8GB ram.

I cleared the previous autotune derived tunables and deselected autotune from the advanced settings, re-enabled autotune to generate new tunables.

Installed miniDLNA.

Test of transfer rate of the 11GB test file with jail installed showed the expected up and down rates starting with a high of 90MB/s then bouncing around 40-80MB/s. The average after about 5GB transferred was about 60MB/s. Not sure how to explain the ups and downs on an otherwise quiescent system. Can the lz4 compression account for that? The good news is that it did not slow down to near zero as was the previous symptom. I might try assembling a 25GB monster file and try that.

Another quirk: my DLNA device lost contact with miniDLNA sometime overnight and I had to re-establish connection with miniDLNA. This is not a new symptom but I thought the 4GB of memory may have had something to do with it. Now that I'm at 8GB it is still a problem. I've reduced the "Discover Interval" to 120 seconds from the default 895 or so in hopes that the default number might have caused a timeout at the device (stab in the dark). The same device held contact with my alternative DLNA server for a week (since installation) so I don't think the device is randomly tripping.

Can multiple instances of miniDLNA be in place and running simultaneously? I tried setting up two miniDLNA plug-in installs; one for music, one for videos, each with a different Friendly name. The instances had different IPs and otherwise seemed to be okay. Although both servers' names flashed through as out there, the result was that only one of them would be listed as actually available for the device. When I've had miniDLNA AND the alternative DLNA server online, the device saw both of them as selectable. I've gone back to a single instance with both video and music. Any thoughts on this?

 

[joeschmuck]

I'll take your questions backwards...

Yes, you can run multiple instances of MiniDLNA but you must change the friendly name as well. But you shouldn't need to run more than one.
Sharing files in the same directory will typically fail as well when sharing with jails.

Your DLNA dropping off, this sometimes happens if you don't have static IPs for FreeNAS, or a device sleeps. Search to forums and you are likely to see a few more instances of this.

Transfer speeds: What hardware are you running and FreeNAS software? I assume this is CIFS transfer but you should define all the parameters and how you are testing, and you RAID configuration as it matters. Also you network connectivity counts, you should test it with a direct connection to a good computer if you want to get the best throughput data. I don't trust jails either for benchmarking and troubleshooting throughput. A single file with a size of 5GB should be fine to test with, not need for anything bigger. Change the name of the file each time before transferring it to prevent caching speed errors. They look nice but they are not real.

You will also want to see what the internal speed of your pool is using a few dd commands. I have a posting somewhere here about the difference between a Realtek NIC and Intel NIC, locate that and do the first dd test and then you will know that answer. Or you could just search on benchmarks and see what pops up.

 

[NiceTry]

I'll take your questions backwards...

Yes, you can run multiple instances of MiniDLNA but you must change the friendly name as well. But you shouldn't need to run more than one.
Sharing files in the same directory will typically fail as well when sharing with jails.

Your DLNA dropping off, this sometimes happens if you don't have static IPs for FreeNAS, or a device sleeps. Search to forums and you are likely to see a few more instances of this.

Transfer speeds: What hardware are you running and FreeNAS software? I assume this is CIFS transfer but you should define all the parameters and how you are testing, and you RAID configuration as it matters. Also you network connectivity counts, you should test it with a direct connection to a good computer if you want to get the best throughput data. I don't trust jails either for benchmarking and troubleshooting throughput. A single file with a size of 5GB should be fine to test with, not need for anything bigger. Change the name of the file each time before transferring it to prevent caching speed errors. They look nice but they are not real.

You will also want to see what the internal speed of your pool is using a few dd commands. I have a posting somewhere here about the difference between a Realtek NIC and Intel NIC, locate that and do the first dd test and then you will know that answer. Or you could just search on benchmarks and see what pops up.

I did have different friendly names for the instances; "ServerA-Video and ServerA-Tunes." The reason for trying two is for convenience. I was trying to shorten the DLNA devices' navigation tree by cutting out one layer in the path. My DLNA device is a WD TVLive. It has separate tabs for music and video and can assign a different server for each.

What did you mean by "Sharing files in the same directory will typically fail as well when sharing with jails." My miniDLNA jail storage is pointing to a FreeNAS dataset that has a folder for movies and another folder for music. When I tried the two jails, I had one referencing the movies and the other referencing the music folders. The destination for the storage was /media/Video and /media/Tunes in the respective jails. Is that a valid setup? I only have AFP shares in FreeNAS, no CIFS. The jails reference folders in one of those shares. Is any of this germane to your statement?

IP's for the jail is static. It just occurred to me that I noticed a reassignment of a MAC address in the log. "192.168.1.94 moved from 02:79:2c:00:0c:0a to e0:3f:49:b0:c1:b3 on epair0b" was the message. That message appeared several times with the same addresses cited. Could be another red herring clue? FYI, 192.168.1.94 is the FreeNAS static IP. 192.168.1.35 is the IP for the jail.

I'm now running the same motherboard as you, ASUS M5A78L-M/USB3, Realtek onboard NIC, with an FX-4130 processor. FreeNAS 9.2.1.5. AFP transfer, RAIDZ1 of 4-1TB drives, wired 1Gb ethernet through router (I'll try direct connect). Interestingly, the read rate is noticeably steadier.

Internal transfer rate from the dd test was 1.56GB/s. The transfer test I ran was writing and timing an 11GB file to FreeNAS under AFP. I have a diagnostic on my computer that reports and plots transfer rates plus, I just used the measured time to transfer the file to get an average. I'm happy with 60MB/s with peaks to 100MB/s. Shouldn't I be? It's just the variability of 40-100MB/s that I'm curious about. Using the dd test, my computers' internal transfer rate is 108MB/s.