Shares no longer available

[James M DeLuca]

After being used for a year or more, this afternoon my FreeNAS CIFS shares are no longer available. All of our workstations are Windows 7. I have adjusted every setting on FreeNas that I could and still nothing. We are running FreeNAS-8.3.0-RELEASE-p1-x64 (r12825). I can still browser into the server to change configurations. I can ping the server. I cannot access any of the shares. I have tried \\ip address\share name, \\FreeNas serverName\share name, and I also did a network discovery from a Windows 7 machine and a server and the server was not found. I cannot lose this, all of our teachers and student files are on this. All the volumes permission are set to Owner (user) as root, Owner (group) my AD username and all nine check boxed selected. Any and all help would be appreciated.

 

[cyberjock]

For starters, you really gave us nothing to go on. No error messages, no hardware specs, nothing. Please add some more info because we can't help you with the small amount of information provided.

Have you tried a reboot?

 

[James M DeLuca]

Not sure this is a hardware issue. We have desktops and laptops from different vendors. All the workstations are Windows 7 Pro. The one server we tried it on was Windows 2008 R2. One error message is Windows cannot access and it list the share name. Details shows error 0x8004005. On the chance the server is listed in the Network listing, if we click on the icon for the FreeNas server it states it cannot be found on the network. However I can ping the FreeNAS server IP address and I can browser into the FreeNas server to look at shares and volumes. We have attempted a reboot of FreeNAS and a complete shutdown, pull the USB drive with the OS on it and then re-insert the USB drive and power back on. Nothing has worked.

 

[cyberjock]

Sorry, but you're here asking for help. It's not your decision to say "not sure this is a hardware issue". Do you know how many hardware issues first manifest themselves as software errors?

Please, leave me to tell you if its a hardware issue or not.

I'll wait in hope that you post your server specs this time...

 

[James M DeLuca]

Intel(R) Core(TM) i3 CPU 550 @ 3.20GHz 500 GB Hard drive, Intel(R) 82578DM Gigabit Network Connection. FreeNas server can be seen by Packet Trap pt360 tool suite. It can be found by it's MAC address and obviously IP address.

 

[Yatti420]

James do you not have a backup - just in case?

 

[cyberjock]

Ok.. How much RAM? What brand of motherboard?

Please don't make me pull teeth. I'll rapidly lose interest in helping you.

 

[James M DeLuca]

4 GB RAM. It is an Intel Motherboard, but at this time I do not have the exact board number

 

[James M DeLuca]

James do you not have a backup - just in case?

We do have snapshots of some of the shares/volumes. Not all. Use of the device has expanded beyond our initial plan.

 

[cyberjock]

Ok, so you've probably determined I'm a total jerk. Here's exactly why I asked those questions:

4GB of RAM is less than the minimum for FreeNAS to reliably operate regardless of performance. Please upgrade to 8GB and see if the issue remains.

I read your post and I got this nagging feeling that you didn't meet the minimum requirements for FreeNAS. I see the same general complains day-in and day-out. So I saw your problem and was fairly sure that you already weren't meeting the minimum requirements.

If your system can't handle 8GB of RAM, then you need to look at going to UFS or going to a different file server OS.

There's no easy way to prove more RAM can help, but considering the number of people that see problems similar to yours immediately "go away" when they upgrade to 8GB of RAM, I don't see much value in me spending time trying to troubleshoot a problem that is created because the minimum specifications weren't followed.

That CPU is fine(relatively speaking.. non-ECC RAM is dangerous with ZFS and it'll take your backups, if you have any with it). But your RAM is much too low.

 

[James M DeLuca]

I will certainly try more RAM first thing Monday morning. I believe the system can handle 8GB, if not more.

 

[cyberjock]

The CPU should be able to handle 16GB per the Intel ARK.

 

[James M DeLuca]

Add more RAM, only had enough on hand to bring the machine up to 12GB. Still not able to view server when I do a network discovery. I can access the files via FTP. This is a step in the right direction, I believe. At the root level the permissions for my volume is set as follows:
Owner (users) root
Owner (group) my AD username
Mode: All nine check boxes are checked.
Type of ACL is Windows.
Set permissions recursive is unchecked

Windows (CIFS) Shares are all are setup basically the same with Browse network checked and allow guest access checked.

CIFS settings are
Authentication Model - Anonymous
Guest account - guest
Check boxes filled for Local Master, Time Server for Domain, Large RW Support, Send files wiith sendfile(2), EA Support, Support DOS file Attribute, Allow Empty Password, Unix Extensions, Enable AIO, Zeroconf share discovery, and hostnames lookups.
Minimum AIO read size and Write size are set to 4096.

I am not sure what other information you may need.