FreeNAS 9.3 box WebUI not accessible, Plex down, can ping

[hungarianhc]

Hi All,

I'm wondering if you can help me out with this issue that I'm working on solving. This has happened a few times... I have a FreeNAS box at home. It's the standard Raid-Z2 w/ ECC RAM, C2750, etc etc. Enterprise grade stuff w/ lots of uptime.

On the flipside, I have a FreeNAS box that I've built for my parents who live a few hundred miles away. It is used exclusively as a Plex Media Server, and it gets updated media from my machine via SyncThing. It does NOT have ECC RAM, and it has only a single 5TB drive. My logic has always been that since it's doing a one-way sync, the data is just a replica of good data that I have, etc, don't need drive redundancy or ECC. Can just replace the data or the drives in case of failure.

Now that being said, I'm having some stability issues with the box, and I can't quite understand why. It's using FreeNAS 9.3 (most recent updates, save for those that were released this week) on a SanDisk 8GB USB flash drive. It has 8GB of RAM. It's a Core 2 Quad Q9505 CPU. Once every few weeks, the system "crashes" ~ and by crashes, I mean that I can still VPN onto their network and ping the box, but I can no longer access the Web UI, and the Plex server is down. If I get one of them to go in there and press the button to restart the box, we're good to go.

Last night in a fit of frustration I just about pulled the trigger on a whole new computer, but then I thought better of myself... I'd love to get to the bottom of this. I figure there is some piece of failing hardware in there causing this issue, but I'm having difficulty getting to the root of the issue. I would appreciate any help you can offer in troubleshooting!

Right now, the box is currently in its "hung" state. I can't SSH into the box, but there's a chance I didn't enable it... so... that can't be verified, but my brother is visiting my parents, and I can get him to restart the box so I can VPN back to the network and mess with it.

Thanks in advance for any help / advice you can offer on this.

 

[danb35]

For operation as a Plex server, 8 GB RAM and a Core 2 chip are pretty lightweight (I've had Plex use all 32 GB of RAM, all my swap space, and reboot the server, though that hasn't happened in some time now), but I wouldn't expect that should cause things to die as you're seeing. Once the web GUI is back up, confirm that SSH is enabled. If it's enabled, and the machine won't respond to that, it's crashed pretty hard. If it wasn't enabled, once it is, you should be able to SSH in to the box and get a better idea what's going on.

 

[hungarianhc]

For operation as a Plex server, 8 GB RAM and a Core 2 chip are pretty lightweight (I've had Plex use all 32 GB of RAM, all my swap space, and reboot the server, though that hasn't happened in some time now), but I wouldn't expect that should cause things to die as you're seeing.

It's a Core 2 Quad, and Plex recommends Core 2 Duo or better. But like you mentioned, I don't think that would cause the machine to die like this. If it was some kind of low memory issue, I'm happy to double up and go to 16GB. That would be an easy problem to solve. I'd just like to theoretically pinpoint what the issue is, rather than just start adding RAM, a better CPU, motherboard replacement, etc, if the issue is something like a faulty flash drive haha.

Once the web GUI is back up, confirm that SSH is enabled. If it's enabled, and the machine won't respond to that, it's crashed pretty hard. If it wasn't enabled, once it is, you should be able to SSH in to the box and get a better idea what's going on.

If I restart it, will the logs shed some info? I'll restart it now.

 

[hungarianhc]

Okay I had my brother restart the machine. Everything is back and alive, and things look normal. Let me know if there are some specific logs I should look at for clues...

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

If it was some kind of low memory issue, I'm happy to double up and go to 16GB.

Keep in mind that the 8GB minimum requirement is for FreeNAS without any plugins. Plex is a memory hog, as mentioned above. I would think doubling up to 16GB is well worth a try.

 

[SweetAndLow]

Check /var/log/messages and maybe give us the debug file.

 

[hungarianhc]

Keep in mind that the 8GB minimum requirement is for FreeNAS without any plugins. Plex is a memory hog, as mentioned above. I would think doubling up to 16GB is well worth a try.

You make a valid point. I'm more than happy to move to 16GB, but I'll be disappointed if I pay the money for 8GB of additional RAM, only to then find out that isn't the issue and then maybe I need to replace something else... and maybe the new replacement takes different RAM! :)

Check /var/log/messages and maybe give us the debug file.

Thanks for offering to take a look, SweetAndLow. I uploaded those two log files. Find them below.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

I'll be disappointed if I pay the money for 8GB of additional RAM, only to then find out that isn't the issue

Understood, but the only way to diagnose something like this is to eliminate one possible problem at a time, and this is so obvious and so easy.

 

[hungarianhc]

Understood, but the only way to diagnose something like this is to eliminate one possible problem at a time, and this is so obvious and so easy.

Isn't the way to diagnose this stuff by looking at logs? In any case, I ordered 8GB more memory...

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

Isn't the way to diagnose this stuff by looking at logs?

Logs are part of the process, but it's still a step by step process and one-thing-at-a-time, and problems don't always reveal themselves in logs.

In this case it's more about, let's take care of the obvious potential cause that's super easy to remedy, and then move on if the problem remains.

 

[SweetAndLow]

Aug 24 02:17:57 freenas (ada0:ata1:0:0:0): CAM status: ATA Status Error


looks like you might have some bad sata cables. I would fix some of the hardware issues you are seeing first before you get serious about this setup. Are you running smart tests? You should have gotten an email if something is wrong.

 

[hungarianhc]

Aug 24 02:17:57 freenas (ada0:ata1:0:0:0): CAM status: ATA Status Error
looks like you might have some bad sata cables. I would fix some of the hardware issues you are seeing first before you get serious about this setup. Are you running smart tests? You should have gotten an email if something is wrong.

Thank you for checking. I'm going to be upgrading the RAM to 16GB and replacing the sata cables next time I go visit them down in LA. Hopefully that helps stabilize things a bit. Thanks!