Large Folder Transfer Attempt To CIFS Share On ZFS Volume

[BobCochran]

Hi,

Yesterday I tried to transfer several large folders containing mostly photos in raw format to a CIFS share on a ZFS volume. This is running under FreeNAS 8.0.3-p1. See my signature for the system details. The smaller folders to transfer were from 29 Gb to a few Mb each. These all transferred okay. There is one large folder of 810 Gb in size. Every 20 minutes to 2 hours, the transfer would stop with a message "network connection timeout". The FreeNAS box locks up. My question is why is this happening and how do I fix it?

The setup is like this: a 1 Tb Hitachi hard drive is in an external hard drive enclosure which is connected to a Fedora 14 (Linux) laptop by USB cable. The hard drive was pulled from a machine running Microsoft Windows XP which is now out of service. So the drive is really an NTFS volume. The laptop is connected to a Dell PowerEdge 2714 network switch over wired connection since I didn't want to challenge the wireless interface to transfer nearly 1 terabyte in photos. The transfer is to a similar 1 Tb hard drive which is set up as a ZFS volume which contains a CIFS share. The share is named "picturesetc" and is configured for anonymous access. There were over 41,000 files in the largest folder on the Hitachi drive to transfer, all of them photos in raw format. Each file is around 24 Mb in size.

At several intervals, what seemed like every hour or so, the FreeNAS box would freeze up and the transfer would stop. Fedora 14 would issue a message to me, "There was a problem transferring [folder and file name] to [picturesetc share on the FreeNAS box]". If I clicked the "Details" arrow, it would expand the message to say "network connection timeout". It would offer to skip the file or skip all. The FreeNAS box would be frozen -- no response to keyboard input at the console. No network connection is possible through the web GUI. I had no choice but to hold the power button down till the machine stopped, then power up again. Once the box powered up and I could see the console menu, I could restart the folder transfer by clicking the "skip" button the Fedora 14 dialogue box offers me. This happened 6 times or more over a period of about 15 hours. The transfer is still going on as I write this.

I tried to tail /var/log/messages from the console. The tail output seemed normal. However afpd would print error messages to the console that do not seem to appear in /var/log/messages.

The only odd message was about the afpd daemon. I am also running the afp service on this box. It would print an error message to the console that it could not contact a server. I need to write down the exact error message and report it here. In /var/log/messages afpd prints that it is advertising on 192.168.1.200:548.

I wondered if afpd was causing problems with my attempts to transfer this large folder, so I turned off the afp service in the FreeNAS web gui. This did not help, the FreeNAS box continues to freeze up and require reboots.

For comparison, I have a second FreeNAS box set up for a different friend, but the hardware available to me at his site consisted of a more limited Dell Vostro desktop machine with 4 Gb of memory. I set up the same 8.0.3-p1 version of FreeNAS on this. I decided to turn the 640 Gb hard drive on this machine into s UFS volume, and then I backed up his Windows 7 computer to this volume using Microsoft Backup. This caused a transfer of 188 Gb to the UFS volume without a hitch. The transfer went very well and there were no reported freeze ups or errors. The FreeNAS box has been quietly accepting daily backups from Windows 7 without a squeak for 2 weeks now.

So I wonder if my attempt to transfer the 810 Gb folder is a ZFS-related problem.

Any ideas how I might be able to stabilize the FreeNAS box so it can accept large folder and files transfers?

Thanks

Bob

 

[BobCochran]

I began researching old posts and noticed a thread on AHCI timeout errors. The OP fixed it by replacing the hard drive and another forum user stated his similar problems were resolved by replacing his motherboard. A third user also got AHCI timeouts and fixed them by replacing an SATA cable. I checked my FreeNAS system and there are no AHCI timeouts, however there is one ACPI error:

ACPI Error: [PCI0] Namespace lookup failure, AE_NOT_FOUND (20101013/dswload-772)

Bob

 

[b1ghen]

Hi,

I'm sorry but I can't be of any assistance with your problem, but might I suggest that you change your fontsize and color to something a little more readable? It's really hard to read, at least for me, especially if it's a lot of text like in this post.

 

[BobCochran]

What font changes would you like? I think blue text on a white background is pretty readable, but you may find black text better. Here is a sample.

Since the Forum allows me to pick a font size and color that works well for me, I want to avoid the tiny default font size because that for me is hard to read. Blue text also helps give me some uniqueness with my posts.

I know many people are accustomed to extremely tiny font sizes, and feel it is somehow wrong if someone uses a font that is larger than the default font. I don't want to be trapped by the default choices for the forum software.

If you find my posts hard to read, you can create a cascading style sheet for your browser that forces text to display in a size and color you are happy with. I think that is a good choice to make because what is hard for you to read might be okay for someone else, and no one person can satisfy the posting wishes of every other user on the forum. Since your browser will allow you to customize what you see on your screen, why not explore that?

Bob

 

[louisk]

I began researching old posts and noticed a thread on AHCI timeout errors. The OP fixed it by replacing the hard drive and another forum user stated his similar problems were resolved by replacing his motherboard. A third user also got AHCI timeouts and fixed them by replacing an SATA cable. I checked my FreeNAS system and there are no AHCI timeouts, however there is one ACPI error:

ACPI Error: [PCI0] Namespace lookup failure, AE_NOT_FOUND (20101013/dswload-772)

Bob

Looking at your signature, I notice that you have 1 spindle for your photos, and 1 spindle for time machine. Do you realize this means there is no redundancy for this data, and if the spindle fails, you lose all the data?

I would suggest that you do something like this:
5x2T RAIDZ in a pool
4T Dataset for NFS export
1T Dataset for TimeMachine AFP
1T Dataset for Photos
(This should leave 3-4T available for other storage, or you can adjust the values above, on the fly even)

If the data is important, I would buy a 6th 2T spindle and keep it physically near the box so swapping a failed spindle is quick and you don't run the risk of having 2 failures and losing data (perhaps from waiting for a spindle to be shipped, it gets backordered, etc..)

 

[BobCochran]

Hi Louis!

Thanks for your suggestion. The data is indeed of value and I do have plans to make use of RAIDZ in the way you are suggesting. In fact I have not really thought of creating ZFS datasets before, I will look into doing those.

To implement your suggestions I have to overcome some hardware challenges first. To begin with, I have no more available SATA connectors on the MSI motherboard. I'm going to have to get an SAS controller of some sort. I also keep wondering if I ought to replace the board entirely. Maybe FreeNAS would work better on a board which is not billed by the vendor as a gaming motherboard.

I do think network storage is the solution I want for two friends, so I will do my best to learn all I can about FreeNAS and implement it in a sensible way.

Bob

 

[ProtoSD]

Bob, sorry this is off topic, but I have to agree with the request to decrease your font size. I understand the default is difficult for you to read, but your large font size makes it hard for others to read. Two suggestions, maybe you could do as you suggested and create a CSS for youself OR use the CTRL+ / CTRL- feature of most browsers to zoom in. My eyes arent' what they used to be either, but instead of increasing the font like you, I use the CTRL+ / CTRL- which changes everything consisitently.

Thanks!

 

[xbmcg]

Hello Bob,
Your Motherboard is more than enough powerfull and 16G DDR3 RAM too. Performance bottlenecks are very unlikely in case of processor and memory.
You have 5 SATA3 channel, that are pretty fast if you use SATA3 HDD's. I wonder where you plug in the other disks, there is just one eSATA for an enclosure,
but you have 8 drives connected - any USB-Drives? Maybe this is your bottleneck?

And yes, you can increase the default font for your browser, to read comfortably all stuff in the forum, because I am pretty sure, the other members will not increase their font size.... ;-)

 

[louisk]

Hi Louis!

Thanks for your suggestion. The data is indeed of value and I do have plans to make use of RAIDZ in the way you are suggesting. In fact I have not really thought of creating ZFS datasets before, I will look into doing those.

To implement your suggestions I have to overcome some hardware challenges first. To begin with, I have no more available SATA connectors on the MSI motherboard. I'm going to have to get an SAS controller of some sort. I also keep wondering if I ought to replace the board entirely. Maybe FreeNAS would work better on a board which is not billed by the vendor as a gaming motherboard.

I do think network storage is the solution I want for two friends, so I will do my best to learn all I can about FreeNAS and implement it in a sensible way.

Bob

Most of the SATA cards with a reasonable number of ports end up being RAID controllers. While there is nothing inherently wrong with using a RAID controller, they tend to be more expensive, and if you want to use ZFS, you need to make sure that they support pass-through mode (the alternative is to create a RAID0 for every disk, and this is somewhat annoying).

You might look at SuperMicro boards. They have both server and workstation form factor. http://www.supermicro.com/products/nfo/superworkstation.cfm

 

[b1ghen]

What font changes would you like? I think blue text on a white background is pretty readable, but you may find black text better. Here is a sample.

Since the Forum allows me to pick a font size and color that works well for me, I want to avoid the tiny default font size because that for me is hard to read. Blue text also helps give me some uniqueness with my posts.

I know many people are accustomed to extremely tiny font sizes, and feel it is somehow wrong if someone uses a font that is larger than the default font. I don't want to be trapped by the default choices for the forum software.

If you find my posts hard to read, you can create a cascading style sheet for your browser that forces text to display in a size and color you are happy with. I think that is a good choice to make because what is hard for you to read might be okay for someone else, and no one person can satisfy the posting wishes of every other user on the forum. Since your browser will allow you to customize what you see on your screen, why not explore that?

Bob

Thanks, just changing it to black made a world of difference to me at least, it is far more readable now. It always looks different depending on the screen, resolution and user preferences of course. What is easier for me isn't necessarily easier for you.