Skylake Caveats

[RemyZ]

It should be FreeNAS GUI only but when you add jails like Plex things gets a bit more complicated.

You can't add drives to an existing vdev but you can add vdevs to an existing pool. Please read Cyberjock's ZFS guide (link is in my signature) ;)

Thanks for the link. I paid close attention to the Keynotes of the pdf. With that being said I will prolly go with RaidZ2 and start ordering more HDD's. I know the limit is up to 11 drives that can be added to a single vdev within a zpool. I have loaded FreeNas in a VM on my other ESXi server which is a Type 1 Hypervisor .I will play around with this until I build my separate FreeNas system which should be next week or so. Till then I need to burn in my brain that single disk vdevs are very very bad. A Good backup solution is mandatory for me at least. Will prolly end up reading this guide 10 or 20x before I feel comfortable moving my ESXi FreeNas playground to production...

 

[religiouslyconfused]

Also, ASRock Rack has a new Skylake C236 motherboard with M.2 that can either be PCIe or SATA. Though if you do use M.2, it will either replace SATA0 or a PCIe slot if you choose to do that.

http://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=E3C236D4U

You can get it in mATX, ATX, or ITX configurations. Just letting everybody know about this.

 

[Raiz]

ASRock Rack has a new Skylake C236 motherboard with M.2

Nice! Looks like they're stepping up their game to complete with Supermicro a bit more. 8 SATA ports is nice. This board seems like it would compete with the X11SSH-F. I wonder what the price will be.

 

[religiouslyconfused]

ITX only has 6 SATA ports, while the uATX version has 8. I think the price should be competitive with Supermicro, but that is if you can find one as no store sells it. I wonder if it has even gone on sale? I too am interested in this board or the X11SSH-F, or even a Haswell-E board as those are not that much more than Skylake.

 

[Ericloewe]

ASRock Rack was a bit late to the Haswell party. Their really interesting design, the voodoo-shrunk X10SL7-F, was a relatively late launch.

I'm fairly disappointed by the lack of interesting Skylake models.

 

[Raiz]

As far as I can tell, you're not going to gain a ton by going to an X11 board if you already have a functional X9 or X10 board.

The differences appear to be: M.2 port, slightly faster processors, a bit of power savings, slightly faster RAM, SuperDOM ports, and a couple high end models have 10GBe ports.

 

[thepixelgeek]

I'm not really ripping any blu-rays. Are you planning on putting a blu-ray drive into your NAS to rip files?

Plex is working great after a bunch of fiddling with it. I had to learn how FreeNAS works from scratch. Building a home NAS has not been the easiest of journeys, especially since I've never touched linux in my life. I now have it working with the Amazon Fire TVs I have on every TV in the house as well as my cell phone. Next I'll work on setting up owncloud as well a learn a bit more about permissions, and figure out how to access the server away from home.

I'll be on that journey real soon!

Can you share insights? Or at the very least, links to info you found to be successful.

The whole port forwarding, networking, thing gets my head spinning. I've tried to access Plex outside already, and haven't had any luck yet. Adding a new NAS to the mix probably will doubled the complexity. Currently running Plex server and three Amazon Tv sticks.

 

[Raiz]

Forwarding ports was really pretty easy with my router. I just googled it and it took like 5 minutes to figure out.

The harder part was pointing the FreeNAS plugins and programs to the correct folders. Like, it still makes zero sense to me to have a destination folder set as "media" and have files actually be in another folder. I don't get why it works, but it works.
Also, many of the guides you find are from older versions of FreeNAS. Even versions that are 9.2 sometimes don't work as settings seem to have changed. There is nothing more frustrating than going through an hour long guide only to have it not work at the end. Many of the guides are meant for people who already know linux, and even the ones that say they're for noobies still often have assumptions that can leave a new person confused.

IMO, this is the biggest hurdle to having FreeNAS more widely adopted. There is no way my mom could figure this out.

 

[RemyZ]

I'll be on that journey real soon!

Can you share insights? Or at the very least, links to info you found to be successful.

The whole port forwarding, networking, thing gets my head spinning. I've tried to access Plex outside already, and haven't had any luck yet. Adding a new NAS to the mix probably will doubled the complexity. Currently running Plex server and three Amazon Tv sticks.

Port Forwarding, Link Aggregation (LACP), Jumbo Frames, Dynamic DNS, DHCP, IPMI & default routes is all the networking needed to setup a Freenas. These are the only topics I see mentioned on this forum from time to time. All of these topics are heavily documented here, youtube or other online articles. Jumbo Frames isn't really needed with the throughput of today's gear. For port forwarding just navigate to the menu in the your router and there should be a dedicated section for port forwarding. There is plenty of documentation in regards to port forwarding as well. Dynamic DNS is just a means to connect to your system from the outside via url instead of remembering the public ip address which is subject to change from time to time via your ISP.DHCP just hands you an ip address instead of configuring it.IPMI is a server protocol that has KVM capabilities and lets you manage your headless system. The hard part for me at least is assembling the server with server components and getting familiar with FreeBSD, IPMI. Also solving other gremlins but not hard at all when giving some effort. Unfortunately, this stuff isn't for your average guy who has never built a pc before and know how to read between the lines when following directions. I find it hard to justify a FreeNas system versus pc with extra storage difference to people.

Guides:
Port Forwarding 101

 

[RemyZ]

Forwarding ports was really pretty easy with my router. I just googled it and it took like 5 minutes to figure out.

The harder part was pointing the FreeNAS plugins and programs to the correct folders. Like, it still makes zero sense to me to have a destination folder set as "media" and have files actually be in another folder. I don't get why it works, but it works.
Also, many of the guides you find are from older versions of FreeNAS. Even versions that are 9.2 sometimes don't work as settings seem to have changed. There is nothing more frustrating than going through an hour long guide only to have it not work at the end. Many of the guides are meant for people who already know linux, and even the ones that say they're for noobies still often have assumptions that can leave a new person confused.

IMO, this is the biggest hurdle to having FreeNAS more widely adopted. There is no way my mom could figure this out.

Your exactly right ran into some IPMI issues and most of the articles were written in a certain way. I was able to figure it out but alot of this stuff is built on assumption. Makes sense since if you've gotten to this point you would have to know a little. Try to read articles in the mindset that some information may be left out which is most of the time considered self explanatory. Perfect example articles will mention that you need to create a bootable drive. That is it and no other info is given. To me this is self explanatory I just fire up my favorite program call Rufus but to other people this may not be so easy. There are plenty of other examples that I cant recall off the top.

 

[swit012]

I am pleased to report that XHCI is now apparently working in 9.10. I haven't tried it yet but I am impressed at the hard work of the developers to make this right.

https://bugs.freenas.org/issues/12400#note-5

Edit: This means that booting from USB should now work again.

 

[diskdiddler]

Hi, All

Just a public service announcement for those of you interested in building a FreeNAS box using the latest Skylake architecture. Intel have made 2 decisions with the new architecture that are hostile to getting FreeNAS running as people expect to be able to.

Firstly, next gen boards include the new I219-V & I219-LM Gigabit Ethernet Chipset. My understanding is the "LM" are the server equivalent of the "V" consumer models.

FreeBSD has no drivers for this new chipset.

I have logged a feature request for supporting the new chipset, which is waiting on a new release of FreeBSD:
https://bugs.freenas.org/issues/12399

For now, you're going to have to buy an additional NIC.

The second problem is that skylake completely removes legacy EHCI support. What this means is that you will not be able to boot up off a USB Stick, period. This is not about plugging the stick into the black port rather than the blue port, even the "backwards-compatible" ports will be controlled through XHCI:
http://wccftech.com/intel-skylake-remove-support-usb-based-windows-7-installation-platform-specs/

This means that GRUB 2 will not be able to recognise the USB, even though your BIOS will be able to run GRUB at the outset.

I have logged this as a feature request as well
https://bugs.freenas.org/issues/12400

In the meantime you'll want some kind of internal drive for your operating system, if you're using Skylake (e.g. a SATA DOM).

The USB issue has now been marked as fixed by Jordan Hubbard, very recently
Can I confirm this is fixed for FreeNAS 9 or 10 only? The writing in the log, seems to indicate it might be supported in 9?

As for the NIC, this too has recently been closed, although it seems less ambiguous and I THINK this is only fixed in 10?
Can anyone confirm? It's a shame to leave FreeNAS9 in the dirt, with 10 not in a ready state.

I am pleased to report that XHCI is now apparently working in 9.10. I haven't tried it yet but I am impressed at the hard work of the developers to make this right.

https://bugs.freenas.org/issues/12400#note-5

Edit: This means that booting from USB should now work again.

Does anything different need to be done, to get this working though?

 

[diskdiddler]

and would I be right in thinking, if I purchased this motherboard.
http://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=C236 WSI#Specifications
I would be ok for USB support (shortly) with v9 of FreeNAS but need to add a PCI-e network card that's supported under FreeBSD9 / FreeNAS9? (ideally a very common one)
I only need 1GBit

 

[religiouslyconfused]

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/freenas-9-10-release-now-available.42223/

 

[Ericloewe]

The release of FreeNAS 9.10 makes this thread obsolete. No recommended boards are using the Intel I219-V or I219-LM NICs and xHCI is very well-supported in 9.10.