Where can I see the type of my RAID?

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heinz lindemann

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Hi all,
I started to use freeNAS one week ago and I am learning currently....
What I tried is the following:
-Install 9.1.1
-Set up volume using the board IDE controller and old IDE drives
-Create user and share
-Run backup from w7-PC to freeNAS

It worked great, so I switched from experimental to the targeted setup:
-Install 3ware RAID controller 8000 series
-Install 2 WD Greens of 1TB each (supposed to run as raid1)

What I see is storages turned from ada0 to twed0 (with capa of 1tb) but I cannot see which drives freenas recognizes. I would have expected the information
"Volume A on controller 3ware with wd1 and wd2running raid1"

At this point in time I miss the confrmation that it runs raid1!!!

Can you help me?
Regards, hl
 

cyberjock

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Well, FreeBSD doesn't always give answers like you hope. For example, you aren't going to see things like"Volume A on controller 3ware with wd1 and wd2running raid1". Instead you'll see information that you interpret and understand to prove you are on a mirror. Technically there is no such thing as RAID1 on ZFS, its just referred to as "mirrors".

You're going to have to take some time to learn things and get familiar with the FreeNAS WebGUI. If you don't want to take the time to learn some of these things you might want to take a look at whatever OS you normally use. Don't take this lightly either. Plenty of people wanted FreeNAS and ZFS but weren't going to do their homework either. Thanks to their ignorance they also lost their data. Don't be a statistic.

The best advice I can give is experiment and play around. Don't go trusting it with your data until you are confident that your data really is safe.
 

heinz lindemann

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Hi,
thanks.
It is not a matter of trust...
It is dealing with learning sth completely new. I am willing to do so....

Coming back to the reported problem: It is hard but I have to say I made a beginner's mistake. When I put the hdds in to the PC I had to use a power cord adaptor (from molex to sata cable) and I just forgot connect one end to the hdd, so I could see only one working....

Now I can see twed0 and twed1 and this is supposed to be the raid1-mirror. Alright, done....

Let's talk about another issue:
Besides the above mentioned set up (raid controller card with two hdds) I have added another 1tb drive DIRECTLY to the board controller. The plan is:
-to store sensitive/important files on the raid-share
-to store the files which are not needed every day on the seperated sata-share

So, there are two shares in the freenas pc. As I could not make the initial user to manage both shares (looking to it from w7 pc) fly, I have created now two dedicated users for each volumes = shares.

I can see two shares in w7. Using the net use command, I am trying to connect to those. What ever I tried I can create new folders on raid-share only but I cannot create folders on the sata-share (it says "You have no authorization to carry out the activity", translated from german).

At this point in time I cannot judge whether this is an w7 issue or freenas issue?

Does anybody have an idea?
HL
 

cyberjock

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First, I want to apologize. I meant to include the zpool status command as the best way you can verify all is well. I was intending to provide that command with a link to a google search of how to break it all down. Other websites can explain it better than I could. All I did in my first post was tell you to do your homework, and your thread was basically "I'm trying to do my homework and I'm stuck on this question". Not too useful.

I'm not sure what twed0 and twed1 is. Normally hard drives are adaX or daX. twedX is new to me. Not sure I've ever seen it in the forum either. (Are you using a hardware RAID??? See below for more discussion on this) /shrug

I'm not 100% sure of your share issue, but I can give you some advice that many people aren't aware of. In Windows, you can only use one user per server. When you provide credentials to any share on a given server, you are stuck with that user until you logout/reboot or run the net use * /delete. Note that this will delete all connections to all servers. The net use command will tell you what connections you will lose. You can also take my command and if you google it I'm sure you can figure out how to delete just the connections you want if deleting all connections to all servers isn't a good idea. If I'm not making sense, here's an example:

If I map //freenas/share1 and put in my username(cyberjock) and password and connect, then try to map //freenas/share2 Windows will automatically use my previous username "cyberjock". If "cyberjock" isn't supposed to have write permissions but you wanted to use the username "fred" it won't work. You'll have to delete the connection as I mentioned above....or use the workaround. If you map to the local IP(such as 192.168.1.10/share2) then you can input a username/password again. But, that's all you get. You can't map a 3rd user any other way unless you have more IPs to map.

Just an FYI that Linux doesn't have this limitation. So if you are very lost and know linux enough to do network mapping on linux you can make sure everything server-side is/isn't working and then try it on Windows. Just a little tip as I had some issues trying to get FreeNAS permissions right at first and I needed a way to rule out Windows as the cause of my grief(it was for my situation). To be honest, despite being a total noob in linux, if you read how to mount shares from the command line in linux, a VM of linux is really helpful as it seems to be a "go/no-go" versus Window's cryptic responses when stuff doesn't work. I was left scratching my head as to if the message was a local or remote issue where Linux makes things very obvious and has none of the Windows limitations.

If you know all of this, then I don't have any other recommendations to help you. :( Permissions are something that kick many people's butt here. A quick for search of this forum will find all the plights of past newbies that have been owned by it. Troubleshooting them over forums is fairly difficult because you have to compare user/group permissions to the file/folder and subdirectories as well as the users in the groups. It can suddenly be overwhelming to look at in a forum setting.

One other comment. ZFS technically doesn't have "RAID1". It has "mirrors" The difference is that RAID1 has only 2 copies where ZFSs mirrors could be 10 disks of mirrors. Generally here we call it mirrors or RAID1 as appropriate. Since you used "RAID1" I'm going to mention that ZFS shouldn't be mixed with hardware RAID. By "hardware RAID" I mean they should be unconfigured by your 3ware controller. If you are running them in JBOD mode then all is okay and you can ignore this warning(this is a common mistake and I'm trying to save you pain later if you have made this mistake). Also, if you are running the disk as individual RAIDs and then using ZFS to mirror them, that's also a bad idea. If you are running them on a hardware RAID with UFS, you are okay too. It's just that ZFS should never be mixed with hardware RAID at all. ZFS is intended to replace hardware RAID. Running both is like having 1 car with 2 drivers. You might or might not get to your destination, it might or might not be fast, and it might fail you at any time. You should also verify you can read SMART data from the disks as well as run SMART tests. If the serial numbers for your disk are not showing up in the GUI that can also be a bad sign.

Hope I'm more helpful this time. :)
 

heinz lindemann

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Hi,
I appreciate the discussion and your patience....
Let me describe the whole story briefly. I am going to replace two NAS devices (2 bay-Dlink and 1 bay-Fujitsu Siemens) and the new candidate was a Synology device...
By chance I discovered FreeNAS and thought it is too complex. But as you know everybody has older PC components and nobody knows what to do with them, right?
Why do I tell this? Well, the purpose of the "experiment" is to have a reliable NAS device (first prio), as well as feeling a little proud for the work you did on your own in a completely new area. The (main) intension is NOT to get a Linux expert or a BSD expert. BUT of course one must understand the logic that you are using....

Therefore I partially agree with your statements...

Let's come back to the topic.
twed0 and twed1: during the boot process the 3m raid controller is found as twe0. Once installed and started you can see the two harddisks twe0 and twe1 and the type "mirror" is available. If you select thist particular option freenas makes 1tb capacity out of 2x1tb. You say "mirror", I say RAID....We are meaning the same.

Current setup:
Using zfs volume manager, two volumes "sata" and "raid" created (mounted as "/mnt/sata" and "/mnt/raid")
Services CIFS activated
Share s"sata" and "raid" created (recognized in w7 as \\freenas\sata and \\freenas\raid)
QUESTION: Why is it not possible to create one user "user/pw" and to assign it both shares?
I created two users "user-raid" and "user-sata" and assigned then to respective volumes.
The script that I use is

net use v: \\freenas\raid /user:user-raid password
net use w: \\192.168.1.22\sata /user:user-sata password

where as freenas is on 192.168.1.22....
Thank you for the workaround, it is excellent. I did not know how w7 behaves here. But unfortunately it does not fly on my side...
I will be trying to make it run...

HL
 

Brighter

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If I map //freenas/share1 and put in my username(cyberjock) and password and connect, then try to map //freenas/share2 Windows will automatically use my previous username "cyberjock". If "cyberjock" isn't supposed to have write permissions but you wanted to use the username "fred" it won't work. You'll have to delete the connection as I mentioned above....or use the workaround. If you map to the local IP(such as 192.168.1.10/share2) then you can input a username/password again. But, that's all you get. You can't map a 3rd user any other way unless you have more IPs to map.

Came across this on post, which I've found very helpful in clarifying the peculiarity of Windows not allowing more than one user concurrent user login to any given "server". Knowing that Windows doesn't actually recognise the hostname and IP as being the same server leads me to think that it is conceivably possible to include a 3rd (or 4th etc) user.

Two approaches come to mind, the first would be to amend the router hosts file to map a 2nd (or 3rd etc) hostname to the same local IP of the NAS. The second would be to amend the HOSTS file on the local PC to map another hostname to the same local IP.

For the first, that would depend on your router and with too many possibilities, I wouldn't address it.

For the second, amend the HOSTS file (C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts) by adding new hostnames, something like this:

192.168.1.10 freenas
192.168.1.10 freenasalias1
192.168.1.10 freenasalias2

and then subsequently connecting to the three "different" servers using with "net use"

net use x: \\freenas\folder1 /user:user1 password
net use y: \\freenas\folder2 /user:user2 password
net use z: \\freenas\folder3 /user:user3 password

and, in theory, we can then extend this to as many users as necessary... (I say in theory, because I haven't actually had a chance to test out my idea yet)
 

cyberjock

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I think you mean...

net use x: \\freenas\folder1 /user:user1 password
net use y: \\freenasalias1\folder2 /user:user2 password
net use z: \\freenasalias2\folder3 /user:user3 password

It doesn't work on the 2 machines I tested it on. Because the alias points back to the same address. In your case 192.168.1.10. The alias doesn't fool Windows. ;)
 

Brighter

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Dang. Then I guess I will have to try the first approach of amending the DNS on the router to see if that can fool windows.
 

Brighter

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Nov 8, 2013
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Haven't had a chance to fiddle with anything over the weekend, but a quick look at netstat shows that windows would happily point to the IP address exactly as in the case of amending the HOSTS file. So, it seems that this probably won't work. Apologies all for the wrong information.

N/B: In the unlikely event this actually works, I will revise this post. :(
 
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