SOLVED FreeNAS incommunicado and many errors

[Glorious1]

I've been using FreeNAS on this machine for 5 years with only one major problem. This one is scary.

This morning I could not reach the machine by SSH nor through the WebGUI. IPMI did work. It said the machine was powered on. No alerts or errors logged. But the output of a fan script stopped about 1 am (when pool scrub was supposed to start). Orderly shutdown failed. I did immediate shutdown, then restarted.

It went through some kind of boot loop where the FreeNAS screen came on twice. Then it proceeded with booting. This was on the screen a long time:

Code:

zfs: freenas-boot/ROOT/11.2-U3[]...

Then this repeated many times:

Code:

Error: attempt to write a read-only database

Eventually it started, but was in the same broken state as before. I did see at some point the two USB thumb boot drives were registered, didn't see anything bad there. I can only interact through IPMI.

Help!

 

[Glorious1]

Update: I managed to reinstall the OS on the SanDisk thumb drive mirrors and it booted normally. I guess I should replace the thumb drives. I wonder if I can replace them one at a time and have them silver each other or whatever?

 

[dlavigne]

You're better off just doing a fresh install to the two new USB drives--that's a lot less wear than a resilver.

 

[Glorious1]

Thanks, that's good advice