David Dyer-Bennet
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- Joined
- Jul 13, 2013
- Messages
- 286
The server I'm configuring is for amateur video (production) storage; we want maximum space, optimizing for that rather than performance (current projects will reside on the workstations primarily, this is more archival). We want some redundancy to protect us from disk failures. We will of course back up to other systems, servers, cloud, offsite, or whatever seems good at the time (the obvious first destination is a second server just like the first one, which we'll need to do when we get the first server working). We'll be using ZFS, since I'm a big fan (have been running a Solaris-based ZFS server at home since 2006).
The motherboard (Asus M5A78L-M/USB3) has 6 SATA controllers, and our case conveniently mounts 6 drives. We've populated it with 6 x 4TB drives, and I'm currently planning to make a single RAIDZ vdev from them when I get that far, giving us roughly 20TB usable. (Might possibly wimp out and go RAIDZ2, that's obviously safer, and I'm sure a 4TB disk does take quite a while to resilver. But that's not the issue I want to discuss right now.) (So, note that I'm a complete and total noob to FreeNAS and also FreeBSD, but fairly familiar with ZFS administration on Solaris.)
Goal: use all the SATA ports in the box for data disks.
I've downloaded FreeNAS-9.2.1.3-RELEASE-x64.img.xz, uncompressed it with 7zip on a Windows box, and then copied the .img file to the USB drive with win32DiskImager as per the instructions in the manual. It's a 16GB thumb drive, that should be safely more than needed.
I can then insert that USB drive in the server box and boot it. It finds the USB drive, and boots from it, and I see FreeBSD stuff happening, see it find the disk drives, etc. 2.4 says "You then boot into
that device to load the FreeNAS® operating system", but that's not what happens when I try.
First I see a Boot selection with a very short timeout. I think it's maybe partitions on the flash drive? F1, F2, and F5 are the clearly visible options as it goes by. Then there are a bunch of boot log lines, and another short menu with a short timeout that seems to be about booting multiuser vs single user and a couple of other choices. Then it gets to mountroot, waits a while, and gives me a "mountroot>" prompt with some choices. The "?" command says it shows the possible boot devices, and what it gives me is the six disk drives, ada5-ada0; but no hint of the USB key as an option.
In the user manual 1.3.3 seems to say pretty distinctly that what I think I'm trying to do, have my system boot off a USB device, is the preferred mode of operation. But it seems likely I'm not doing it quite right.
How am I supposed to do this? Manual reference is fine, if it's already there and I've just missed it somehow. (I don't have either an optical drive in the server, or a spare SATA port to connect one to even temporarily.)
The motherboard (Asus M5A78L-M/USB3) has 6 SATA controllers, and our case conveniently mounts 6 drives. We've populated it with 6 x 4TB drives, and I'm currently planning to make a single RAIDZ vdev from them when I get that far, giving us roughly 20TB usable. (Might possibly wimp out and go RAIDZ2, that's obviously safer, and I'm sure a 4TB disk does take quite a while to resilver. But that's not the issue I want to discuss right now.) (So, note that I'm a complete and total noob to FreeNAS and also FreeBSD, but fairly familiar with ZFS administration on Solaris.)
Goal: use all the SATA ports in the box for data disks.
I've downloaded FreeNAS-9.2.1.3-RELEASE-x64.img.xz, uncompressed it with 7zip on a Windows box, and then copied the .img file to the USB drive with win32DiskImager as per the instructions in the manual. It's a 16GB thumb drive, that should be safely more than needed.
I can then insert that USB drive in the server box and boot it. It finds the USB drive, and boots from it, and I see FreeBSD stuff happening, see it find the disk drives, etc. 2.4 says "You then boot into
that device to load the FreeNAS® operating system", but that's not what happens when I try.
First I see a Boot selection with a very short timeout. I think it's maybe partitions on the flash drive? F1, F2, and F5 are the clearly visible options as it goes by. Then there are a bunch of boot log lines, and another short menu with a short timeout that seems to be about booting multiuser vs single user and a couple of other choices. Then it gets to mountroot, waits a while, and gives me a "mountroot>" prompt with some choices. The "?" command says it shows the possible boot devices, and what it gives me is the six disk drives, ada5-ada0; but no hint of the USB key as an option.
In the user manual 1.3.3 seems to say pretty distinctly that what I think I'm trying to do, have my system boot off a USB device, is the preferred mode of operation. But it seems likely I'm not doing it quite right.
How am I supposed to do this? Manual reference is fine, if it's already there and I've just missed it somehow. (I don't have either an optical drive in the server, or a spare SATA port to connect one to even temporarily.)