Connecting SMB Share on macOS Catalina crashes freeNAS

ChrisReeve

Explorer
Joined
Feb 21, 2019
Messages
91
Hi

I run a ESXi 6.7 server with several VMs, including freeNAS. It has worked flawlessly for about a month, but today I installed macOS Catalina 15.2 on a new VM (same physical machine), and are experiencing a weird bug.

I am able to connect to freeNAS via SMB, but after trying to access files/folders (not exactly sure what triggers this), my freeNAS VM unexpectedly powers off. This is repeatable, and only happens when I connect a SMB share to macOS.

Any idea what is causing this? Any idea for how to troubleshoot? Any specific things I should look for in logs?
 

seanm

Guru
Joined
Jun 11, 2018
Messages
570
Your problem is different, but you might want to read about other Catalina problems:

No network client, even a malicious one, should be able to make your FreeNAS power off, so this is either a FreeNAS bug or a ESXi bug.

What version of FreeNAS? Are you running the newest ESXi?
 

ChrisReeve

Explorer
Joined
Feb 21, 2019
Messages
91
I was way too fast on this, sorry.

I was running ESXi 6.7 Update 3 with freeNAS 11.3 RC2. In addition, I run several other VMs (two Windows 10, one Ubuntu 18.04), in addition to a new macOS 10.15 Catalina.

My issues started after both upgrading to freeNAS11.3 RC2, and creating a macOS 10.15 Catalina (which isn't officially supported in ESXi 6.7 Update 3 as far as I can see). My freeNAS VM shuts down regardless of the Catalina VM (I removed it completely), and I was able to do some quick troubleshooting, to see that freeNAS stays online, until I start hitting it fairly "hard" from my main desktop. I did a rescan of some torrents, while downloading at 40-50 MB/s. Total throughput was several Gbps over SMB. For some reason, this crashes freeNAS. Unfortunately I dont have any logs (except for ESXi logs, but unsure if any of those are of interest, let me know and I will upload them here), since I did the following to mitigate the problem:

1. Deleted freeNAS, and made a new VM from scratch, rolling back to 11.2U7. I also followed the freeNAS guide, which for some reason recommends selecting freeBSD 12 as base OS, instead of freeBSD 11. Regardless, I followed the guide, imported my pool, and added my settings and users manualy (i.e. not from a config file, my setup is pretty simple, a few extra users, some tunables and some other stuff, everything else is handled by other VMs).

I also went back to running macOS 10.14 Mojave as a VM, since it is the newest version supported by ESXi as far as I can see (again, I don't think this has anything at all to do with the problem).

It appears this has fixed the problem. Have been running stable since last night, doing the same tasks that forced a crash within 20 minutes yesterday. Will report back if anything changes.

Edit: One thing I forgot to mention is that to run macOS in ESXi, I need to run a unlocker script. I'm not sure, but this could be a contributing factor. But again, no errors after rolling back to a fresh freeNAS 11.2U7, and macOS Mojave instead of Catalina.
 
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