Multiple network issues

[nirach]

Hi guys.

I've had Freenas running fine for a good few months now, probably the best part of a year.

Recently, though, it's been dropping off the network with no warning, in the middle of streaming an avi file typically.

As it stands, I'm running it on a Gigabyte Dq6 with 8gb of RAM, three 2 port SATA cards, and ten 1tb drives in a ZFS pool.

I believe there's an issue with the power supply, but I cannot believe that it's keeping the machine up and running, yet managing to knock the network out.

When FreeNAS does report an error, it's "PHY Write failed", but that's only reported one out of five times it goes down. It goes down, on average, once every two or three hours. It's a very basic setup, literally the network ports are configured (Static on one, DHCP (MAC assigned from the router) on the other two) and the admin account has a password. CIFS shares are enabled with anonymous access, although that has (The most recent reboot) stopped allowing me to write to the share.

At this stage, I'm thinking of backing the data up (Not something I want to do, considering there's 5.2tb on there) and moving to WHS - But I don't know much about FreeNAS/BSD, so I figured I'd ask the people who do use it if they had seen it before - Apparently google hasn't!

Anyone seen FreeNAS (Both 8.0.2 and the 8.3 beta) drop the network without error messages before?

 

[Peter Bowler]

a few things.

NEVER doubt what a pooched PSU will and won't do.
It's one of the hardest things to pin down. Especially with that much Hardware.

also, you'd better stop thinking about it and backup, otherwise you'll be back here tomorrow asking about how to recover from ***XX failure. Raid is not backup, thought I don't even see Raid in your specs.
make sure your Network isn't causing the issue.
and lastly, freeNAS only logs what you tell it to, the default log settings are just that, default.

 

[nirach]

I'm quite aware that RAID isn't a backup - Although it is a RAID5 pool.

I've tried different routers, switches, cables, and cards in the NAS box - I'm reasonably confident it's not the network that's at fault.

When ****** hits I'll be buying new hardware, the DQ6 behind it all is a good four years old now.

Just had an interesting one, though. Left the NAS alone for an hour after reinstalling the FreeNAS OS, and resetting everything up, came back to it having frozen - wouldn't respond over the network, nor to local keystrokes.

Starting to think it's hardware based, and that I'm going to have to throw money at it.. Ahwell. Can't hurt to go to 16gb of RAM, after what I was reading on ZFS.

 

[Peter Bowler]

hmm,
so you don't mind losing all your data?

switching NICs, cables and switches doesn't exclude the Network from being the issue. it excludes the network Hardware from being the issue. there still could be other devices on your network that are causing disruptions.

I would swap out the PSU if it were my Data