Spare parts build... and intro

[errmatt]

Hey guys and gals,
Thought I'd drop in and say hi. I've been playing with FreeNAS on and off over the past few months and have cobbled together a machine from spare parts that seems to work pretty good after some experimenting. It's not enterprise by any means, but for what I am doing, it meets my needs. I'm still experimenting and have yet to transfer all my data onto the NAS for permanent storage, but I have copies of it that I have been working with from the NAS so far with good results.

Specs:
Corsair 200R ATX case
Asus P5B Deluxe - six onboard Sata II ports
Core 2 Duo at 3.0 ghz
8 Gigs PC2 5300
Six Seagate ST31000528AS 1tb drives in RaidZ2
Kingspec 8gig "USB Disk on Module" - plugs directly into a USB header on the motherboard, pretty slick way to do it instead of having a thumb drive hanging off the back USB ports, I found it on ebay.

Planned future upgrades before I decide to rely on it for my data storage: New board/CPU that support ECC memory, and as much ECC memory as I can afford/stuff on said board. Slowly replace drives with SATA III capable since new board will probably support it.

I'm running the latest FreeNAS 9.2.1.5-RELEASE and have it joined to my Server 2012 AD and have things finally working in a sane way (cross fingers). I'm far from a noob in the Windows and Linux worlds, but had only experimented a little with FreeBSD years ago prior to this. So far just lurking around this forum and consulting the documentation has gotten me almost all the way set up the way I want. I'm still struggling with getting my UPS working properly, but that's a topic for another post.

Anyway, sorry for the novel (I tend to do that). Figured I'd introduce myself before I go and post about my UPS troubles in the help and support forum. Hi!

 

[Ericloewe]

Before you use that hardware for anything important, please read the hardware recommendations sticky and the ECC sticky, as well as Cyberjock's guide.

And welcome!

 

[errmatt]

Yes, I've read all of those and I'm aware of the ECC stuff and as I said, I plan on upgrading before I rely on it for important data storage.

I actually got my UPS working last night on my own. I'm not sure what I did.... I could not get nut to connect to it no matter what I did, day before yesterday, left it all day yesterday and last night when I tried to start the UPS service without any config changes (so I could copy and paste the console output into a "HELP! UPS not working" post here, it fired right up. Don't know what changed, but it's working now.

Now I just need to sort out why it sent me 50 emails last night saying 'ups - NOCOMM' and then this:

Code:

lakes.snowbound.local kernel log messages:
> ugen3.2: <Tripp Lite> at usbus3 (disconnected)
> uhid0: at uhub3, port 1, addr 2 (disconnected)
> uhub_reattach_port: port 1 reset failed, error=USB_ERR_TIMEOUT
> uhub_reattach_port: device problem (USB_ERR_TIMEOUT), disabling port 1
> uhub_reattach_port: port 1 reset failed, error=USB_ERR_TIMEOUT
> uhub_reattach_port: device problem (USB_ERR_TIMEOUT), disabling port 1
> uhub_reattach_port: port 1 reset failed, error=USB_ERR_TIMEOUT
> uhub_reattach_port: device problem (USB_ERR_TIMEOUT), disabling port 1
> uhub_reattach_port: port 1 reset failed, error=USB_ERR_TIMEOUT
> uhub_reattach_port: device problem (USB_ERR_TIMEOUT), disabling port 1
> uhub_reattach_port: port 1 reset failed, error=USB_ERR_TIMEOUT
> uhub_reattach_port: device problem (USB_ERR_TIMEOUT), disabling port 1
> uhub_explore: port error, giving up port 1
 
-- End of security output --

I think I saw some stuff about changing the polling interval or timeout window for the UPS, so tonight when I get home from work I'll investigate further.

 

[errmatt]

Also, a word of warning that I've learned so far, however meager it may be.... for anyone else who is reading and building their own system... follow what the experienced people here on this forum are saying about hardware! I was experimenting with some smaller drives that were 6Gbps in my system and wanted to get a controller to run them since my onboard ports are only 3Gbps. I ordered a cheap "PCI express Sata controller" by Silicon Image (Marvell chipset of some sort, I can't remember now which particular one), against better advice here and elsewhere, and had nothing but problems with it. Frequent "CAM_TIMEOUT" messages in the console, drives that were good and had no failed SMART tests would drop out of the array under intense writes and leave it in DEGRADED status, writes and reads would stall for long periods, etc. I pulled that card right out and haven't touched it since. I should have listened and got the M1015 like all the posts said. ;)

 

[Ericloewe]

Also, a word of warning that I've learned so far, however meager it may be.... for anyone else who is reading and building their own system... follow what the experienced people here on this forum are saying about hardware! I was experimenting with some smaller drives that were 6Gbps in my system and wanted to get a controller to run them since my onboard ports are only 3Gbps. I ordered a cheap "PCI express Sata controller" by Silicon Image (Marvell chipset of some sort, I can't remember now which particular one), against better advice here and elsewhere, and had nothing but problems with it. Frequent "CAM_TIMEOUT" messages in the console, drives that were good and had no failed SMART tests would drop out of the array under intense writes and leave it in DEGRADED status, writes and reads would stall for long periods, etc. I pulled that card right out and haven't touched it since. I should have listened and got the M1015 like all the posts said. ;)

For mechanical drives, you don't even need anything beyond SATA 3Gb/s, as most don't even saturate 1,5Gb/s.