«608 »
  • Post
  • Reply
Star War Sex Parrot
Oct 2, 2003



Muldoon

Wrong thread!

Star War Sex Parrot fucked around with this message at 00:58 on Oct 3, 2011

Vanilla
Feb 24, 2002

Hay guys what's going on in th

So been playing with my N36L Microserver for the last two days. Was quite a bitch to set up because I seem to have hit every problem around sticking cables.

I have:

Data: 6 x 2TB SATA
OS: 1 x Seagate 2.5" 320GB drive (small so I can hide it in the case)
Running Windows Home Server 2011 and going to put XBMC on the top.
ATI 5450
A dual port SATA hub to give me a few extra ports.
4GB RAM

Currently setting up software RAID 5. I'd rather take the risks with SW R5 over a R1 set up. It's just a movie/nas box after all. 6 x 2TB SATA gives me just over 9TB usable.

Damn Raid 5 takes a long time to sync up. Approaching 24 hours now and only 50% done!

jeeves
May 27, 2001

Deranged Psychopathic
Butler Extraordinaire


Did you put 2x2TB drives in that 5" bay? I heard that can cause some heat issues.

Vanilla
Feb 24, 2002

Hay guys what's going on in th

jeeves posted:

Did you put 2x2TB drives in that 5" bay? I heard that can cause some heat issues.

Yeah, 2 x 2TB drives in the top. Saw someone managed to get FOUR 3.5" drives in that space with some fancy work.

I heard also that the top drive can get hot but it's still within safe operation for the drive. It's just it's hotter than all the others.

Pic below

jeeves
May 27, 2001

Deranged Psychopathic
Butler Extraordinaire


If you plan on keeping the top off permanently than it will be okay. I hear it is only a problem if you put the case's top back together.

After about 4 months of use, I've been pretty disappointed in FreeNAS 8/ZFS. Can someone show me some guides on tweaking ZFS? I have CIFS shares set up, and on some day they work absolutely fine and on other days shit won't copy at all without tons of massive errors. Not to mention if I have a big copy job going to it, it will absolutely kill anything that is currently playing off of the drives via the network on the device.

This is unlike my little ASUS EEE Box Win2003 server that has been chugging along with only a fourth of the ram just fine for 4 years now, off of the same router and cabling. That fucker will play anything while copying anything while also having torrents running at the same time. Maybe it is the fact that it is only running off of one 2.5" drive versus the software raid of ZFS?

I think I'll just eventually pick up the next cheap 32-64gb SSD I find, and run a cord from the back eSATA port of my Microserver back into the device to use that as a system drive running 2008r2. Any qualms that I may have with Raid 5 seem to be easily fixed by just having a UPS, something that I didn't realize were so cheap now. Especially since I eventually intend on maybe using it as an HTPC since it is only ever on while we play things anyhow. The only thing keeping me from doing that right now is that I don't have any spare HDs to copy off the data from my 5x2TB raid when converting off of ZFS :[

jeeves fucked around with this message at 08:43 on Oct 3, 2011

adorai
Nov 2, 2002

10/27/04 Never forget

Grimey Drawer

jeeves posted:

After about 4 months of use, I've been pretty disappointed in FreeNAS 8/ZFS. Can someone show me some guides on tweaking ZFS? I have CIFS shares set up, and on some day they work absolutely fine and on other days shit won't copy at all without tons of massive errors. Not to mention if I have a big copy job going to it, it will absolutely kill anything that is currently playing off of the drives via the network on the device.
FreeBSD has historically had shitty cifs performance, which i suppose could contribute to data corruption during high cifs io. Why don't you just install openindiana? It works fantastically as both an iscsi SAN as well as NAS via NFS and cifs.

Josh Lyman
May 24, 2009





I have an old external enclosure that I was planning to use with a 3TB drive. It only supports SATA 1.0, but since it supports LBA48 addressing, there should be no problem with a 3TB drive, right?

aleph1
Apr 16, 2004



jeeves posted:

After about 4 months of use, I've been pretty disappointed in FreeNAS 8/ZFS. Can someone show me some guides on tweaking ZFS? I have CIFS shares set up, and on some day they work absolutely fine and on other days shit won't copy at all without tons of massive errors. Not to mention if I have a big copy job going to it, it will absolutely kill anything that is currently playing off of the drives via the network on the device.

This is unlike my little ASUS EEE Box Win2003 server that has been chugging along with only a fourth of the ram just fine for 4 years now, off of the same router and cabling. That fucker will play anything while copying anything while also having torrents running at the same time. Maybe it is the fact that it is only running off of one 2.5" drive versus the software raid of ZFS?

I'm running FreeBSD 8.2 off a slow 8GB USB flash drive on my MicroServer with 8GB of RAM and five WD 2TB Greens in a raidz1.

I get ~80MB/s read/write over SMB on a Gigabit network from both Windows 7 and Mac clients, which is pretty decent considering the lack of jumbo frame support, with the only changes being:

- fixing the ashift for my 4K sector drives, and

code:
socket options = IPTOS_LOWDELAY TCP_NODELAY SO_RCVBUF=262144 SO_SNDBUF=262144
in smb.conf.

Do you have ZFS compression/deduplication turned on?

Edit: I looked back at your previous posts; try iperf to figure out if it's your network (cables, switch) that's the issue. It's also possible that the problem lies with FreeNAS -- their developers don't strike me as particularly competent.

aleph1 fucked around with this message at 23:27 on Oct 3, 2011

jeeves
May 27, 2001

Deranged Psychopathic
Butler Extraordinaire


I am using 5x Samsung F4 2TB (HD204UI) drives in my ZFS pool-- I thought FreeNAS v8 wouldn't need advanced formatting sector alignment? I didn't align shit-- just let it build the pool.

Edit - Oh joy, when trying to run "zdb | grep ashift" via SSH to see what my sector size is, I get this response:
code:
cannot open '/boot/zfs/zpool.cache': No such file or directory

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.



Fun Shoe

I've got quite a heavy load on my CFD server at the moment. Due to slow disk access I'm only getting 25% to 66% load when I should have near 75%. I want to build a cost effective NAS that the hardware would cope with writing at full gigabit speed.



What hardware would cope with writing at gigabit speeds and have redundancy as well?

diremonk
Jun 17, 2008


Fallen Rib

I've got an odd request that maybe someone smarter than me can help me with.

I would like to move away from using my current NAS (iomega home 1TB) because it is starting to make a buzzing noise when left on for more than two or three days. While I would love to buy the microstation, I just can't at the moment. But I have a couple of older systems that I could use.

What I would like to do is backup my desktop and laptop, have a video archive, run SABNZBD, and if possible stream the videos to my laptop while I'm stuck at work or at school. I've been looking around and subsonic server seems to fit my needs. Anyone have experience with it?

The systems I would like to use are a Sempron or a Core2Duo. I'm leaning towards the Core2Duo just because it already has windows on it and has 4 SATA ports. If I go that route, should I keep windows xp on it, or go with linux distro that is tailored towards being a NAS?

Matt Zerella
Oct 7, 2002


diremonk posted:

I've got an odd request that maybe someone smarter than me can help me with.

I would like to move away from using my current NAS (iomega home 1TB) because it is starting to make a buzzing noise when left on for more than two or three days. While I would love to buy the microstation, I just can't at the moment. But I have a couple of older systems that I could use.

What I would like to do is backup my desktop and laptop, have a video archive, run SABNZBD, and if possible stream the videos to my laptop while I'm stuck at work or at school. I've been looking around and subsonic server seems to fit my needs. Anyone have experience with it?

The systems I would like to use are a Sempron or a Core2Duo. I'm leaning towards the Core2Duo just because it already has windows on it and has 4 SATA ports. If I go that route, should I keep windows xp on it, or go with linux distro that is tailored towards being a NAS?

If you're familiar with Linux/Samba, you can have a Debian/Ubuntu server up in an hour or two (depending on the size of your RAID array and type). There's really no need to go with a NAS tailored distro unless you want ZFS.

You can install Samba/SSH/Webmin during setup of Debian and be good to go pretty quickly and do all of your configuration through a web browser if you're uncomfortable going through the commandline.

sixide
Oct 25, 2004


I recently set up a 4 TB NAS with snapraid and mhddfs. Now that I've been using it for a few weeks, I can't say I have many complaints.

It's easy as fuck to manage and the system requirements are really damn low. The only downside is that I lack redundancy until I do a sync.

If you're like me and mostly offload large swaths of data once or twice per week, it's goddamn amazing.

Adding/removing drives is trivially easy. I suspect I'll add another 3 2TB drives 6 months down the road and go for 8 TB + two parity drives.

an actual cat irl
Aug 29, 2004



A question for those of you running HP Microservers with a fifth drive in the optical drive bay...

Which drive corresponds to which number? I currently have drives 0-4 showing up in FreeNAS, and I figure I should know which one is which, incase I need to swap a drive etc. Would I be right in saying that drive 0 is the one in the optical bay, and drives 1-4 are the four drive bays?

Puddin
Apr 9, 2004
Leave it to Brak

moron posted:

A question for those of you running HP Microservers with a fifth drive in the optical drive bay...

Which drive corresponds to which number? I currently have drives 0-4 showing up in FreeNAS, and I figure I should know which one is which, incase I need to swap a drive etc. Would I be right in saying that drive 0 is the one in the optical bay, and drives 1-4 are the four drive bays?

In freenas 7, drive 0 was the first drive of the 4 for me.

Purely cause I was messing around with one drive in the system.

Vanilla
Feb 24, 2002

Hay guys what's going on in th

I'd also like to know this about the microserver. Running WHS2011

I have:

4 x 2TB SATA drive in the slots
1 x 320GB drive connected to a dual port hub
1 x 2TB drive connected to the dual porn hub
1 x 2TB drive connected to the eSATA port (routed inside).

I tried looking in the bios and I tried pulling them (which resulted in all the numbers changing!)but have not been able to work out which drive corresponds to which.

I'm concerned that when I drive fails I wont be able to identify it to swap it out :/

IOwnCalculus
Apr 2, 2003





Vanilla posted:

1 x 2TB drive connected to the dual porn hub



I know in Linux I can just use 'smartctl -i /dev/sdX' and get an actual serial number off of whichever drive corresponds to sdX on a given boot. I'm sure you can somehow pull a S/N out of SMART in WHS and use that to reference against which drive is in which bay.

movax
Aug 30, 2008



Just FYI as I discovered today, if you run your Intel PCH in RAID mode, you might need a BIOS update for your mobo that includes the latest Option ROM for Intel RAID manager; otherwise it won't support > 2.2TB disks.

PopeOnARope
Jul 23, 2007

Hey! Quit touching my junk!


Vanilla posted:

I'd also like to know this about the microserver. Running WHS2011

I have:

4 x 2TB SATA drive in the slots
1 x 320GB drive connected to a dual port hub
1 x 2TB drive connected to the dual porn hub
1 x 2TB drive connected to the eSATA port (routed inside).

I tried looking in the bios and I tried pulling them (which resulted in all the numbers changing!)but have not been able to work out which drive corresponds to which.

I'm concerned that when I drive fails I wont be able to identify it to swap it out :/

Where the hell are you finding these hubs, porn and otherwise?

Factory Factory
Mar 19, 2010

This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.


PopeOnARope posted:

Where the hell are you finding these hubs, porn and otherwise?

It's a hub based on a port multiplier chip, which isn't universally supported by various root SATA controllers (Intel ones especially don't support port multipliers).

There are also porn multiplier chips, but those are hard to come by

sixide
Oct 25, 2004


Certain Intel chipsets do in fact support port multipliers. Thankfully, Intel provides full datasheets so you can actually check this.

McRib Sandwich
Aug 4, 2006
I am a McRib Sandwich

Anyone in here running ZFS with iSCSI? A while ago I was playing with different installs on my microserver (Nexenta, NCP+napp-it, Solaris, etc.). I did a lot of testing, got frustrated, and set it down for awhile.

Recently I've had a bit of time to take another crack at it, and I am now realizing that I'm seeing a *huge* discrepancy between transfer speeds under NCP+napp-it, depending on if I'm using iSCSI or AFP to my Mac. I have also had similarly lackluster iSCSI performance using NexentaStor as my platform instead of NCP. I'm hoping to get a couple data points from folks running similar setups, or maybe even some theories as to why iSCSI throughput is sucking.

Basically, over iSCSI I'm hearing bursts of drive activity when things are being written to disk. These are roughly periodic, semi-frequent, and they seem to completely stop up data transfer between the NAS and the computer when they occur. When there isn't drive noise, the transfer is indicated by the OS / application as progressing reasonably, though not as fast as AFP. Read performance seems to similarly suffer from dropouts.

Here's a graph of a read / write test I did to a thin-provisioned iSCSI LUN that illustrates copy speed and the jagged dropouts:

All tests used the free AJA System Test Utility for OS X
2.0GB Disk Read / Write test
Using huge video frames (2048x1556 10-bit RGB)




I also tested iSCSI performance with a 4k block volume LUN:




Now compare those with a couple transfers I did to an AFP share on the same box, with ZFS compression turned on for the share (turning it on or off didn't make much difference). Higher throughput, much more stable writes (where "stable" means not appearing to block I/O), and extremely consistent reads as compared with iSCSI:





I'm truly at a loss here. What could be causing iSCSI to behave so much worse than netatalk's AFP implementation? I'm wide open to any suggestions. I intentionally only have 1GB of RAM in the microserver right now, so as to minimize the amount of data the ZFS would be able to cache in ARC, therefore I do not believe caching to be a substantial factor in these tests.

If anyone else is running iSCSI and has data to share, that would be really great too.

Goon Matchmaker
Oct 23, 2003

I play too much EVE-Online

I was experiencing some crashing with my new NAS that I've since resolved. But when I was trying to get it stable I noticed that upon rebooting Linux would force a full resync of the array. After some Googling I found there's a neat feature disabled by default called a write-intent bitmap. You turn it on using mdadm like so:
code:
mdadm [array here, ex: /dev/md0] -Gb internal
and off like so:
code:
mdadm [array here, ex: /dev/md0] -Gb none
With write intent bitmaps on, linux writes out where it's going to perform writes to the array so that in the event of a crash or other catastrophe while writing data it only has to resync the areas around where it was writing at the time of the crash.

It can be toggled at any time while the array is online, offline, whatever. Supposedly it causes writes to take a nose dive but my informal testing shows that it actually increases performance. YMMV

Just a neat trick I thought I'd share.

Matt Zerella
Oct 7, 2002


I've been playing around with BTRFS on Ubuntu 11.10 in a VM, I have to say, I'm pretty impressed. Gave the machine 1 gig of ram, created a 4 drive RAID10 array copied over about 16 gigs worth of ISO files and the CPU/RAM usage was incredibly low.

Apparently it supports scrubbing and defrag now.

I do nightly backups to an external hard drive, and I've been getting pretty awful performance with FreeBSD over SMB/AFP lately. Looks like I might make the switch this weekend.

Irritated Goat
Mar 12, 2005

This post is pathetic.


I'm wanting to move from a simple just JBOD setup on one PC to an actual NAS. I'd like to have something nice and enclosed like a Drobo. It doesn't have to be anything special like able to run sabnzbd or anything, just do RAID and attach to my network really. Are there any nice barebones good starter NAS enclosures?

I'm dumb and didn't read the updated OP

crm
Oct 24, 2004



I just discovered that the FreeNAS guys abandoned the way they used to have stuff installed and I can no longer install extra services (sabnzbd, etc) on v8.

The v7 install I have can no longer pkg_add stuff because the FreeBSD 7.3 ftp repo appears to have disappeared.

What else is there that I can host all my stuff on?

One pre-requisite is that it can run all my little python / java server apps, and that it can read a UFS drive.

Any recommendations?

Longinus00
Dec 29, 2005
Ur-Quan

crm posted:

I just discovered that the FreeNAS guys abandoned the way they used to have stuff installed and I can no longer install extra services (sabnzbd, etc) on v8.

The v7 install I have can no longer pkg_add stuff because the FreeBSD 7.3 ftp repo appears to have disappeared.

What else is there that I can host all my stuff on?

One pre-requisite is that it can run all my little python / java server apps, and that it can read a UFS drive.

Any recommendations?

Unless you have other requirements you haven't told us about you can probably just install any old linux/unix distro and be good to go.

Matt Zerella
Oct 7, 2002


crm posted:

I just discovered that the FreeNAS guys abandoned the way they used to have stuff installed and I can no longer install extra services (sabnzbd, etc) on v8.

The v7 install I have can no longer pkg_add stuff because the FreeBSD 7.3 ftp repo appears to have disappeared.

What else is there that I can host all my stuff on?

One pre-requisite is that it can run all my little python / java server apps, and that it can read a UFS drive.

Any recommendations?

Why not just use vanilla FreeBSD? The ports collection will let you use just about anything, native ZFS. There's even a web based ZFS control panel called ZFS Guru that's pretty easy to install. It even has pkg_add if you don't want to use the ports directory tree.

EDIT: I figured out why I was getting such shitty SMB/AFP speeds. My router was on channel 6 and theres about 15 other APs on the same one. Switched to 11 and it's way better.

Nystral
Feb 6, 2002

Every man likes a pretty girl with him at a skeleton dance.

Lipstick Apathy

Looking to purchase a SAS external enclosure for when I need to read from web servers.

Long and short of it is two or three times a year I need to examine different raid arrays of SAS drives pulled from our colo'd servers. Will something like thiscoupled with a PERC 6E / H800 work? Anything better?

Star War Sex Parrot
Oct 2, 2003



Muldoon

Are the arrays that you're examining only comprised of 4 drives?

crm
Oct 24, 2004



Longinus00 posted:

Unless you have other requirements you haven't told us about you can probably just install any old linux/unix distro and be good to go.

Yeah, I just happen to like the web control thing

Longinus00
Dec 29, 2005
Ur-Quan

crm posted:

Yeah, I just happen to like the web control thing

Is webmin good enough?

http://www.webmin.com/

Looks like you can administer linux raid and lvm from it.
They have a demo up you can try, user: demo / password: demo

http://webmin-demo.virtualmin.com/

crm
Oct 24, 2004



Can those HP Micro Servers use 3TB drives?

They look... amazing.

Also, does the 4/5 sata spots include the one that comes with it?

McRib Sandwich
Aug 4, 2006
I am a McRib Sandwich

crm posted:

Can those HP Micro Servers use 3TB drives?

They look... amazing.

Also, does the 4/5 sata spots include the one that comes with it?

There is at least one report in the OP of the ProLiant thread on OCAU that indicates 3TB drive support -- pretty sure the server was running Windows in that instance. Seems to suggest that the integrated hardware / HBA can read the drives, at least.

edit: 4 SATA available in the drive sled configuration, and a fifth port on the motherboard that you can snake up to the 5.25" drive bay. SATA cable not included. Speaking from experience, you'll want a SATA cable with the lowest-profile connector possible. I tried using left- and right-angle cables but there isn't enough space between the motherboard and the drive bay chassis for this to work -- a low-profile straight ahead cable is your best bet, 18-24" should be good for most peripherals.

McRib Sandwich fucked around with this message at 01:25 on Oct 15, 2011

crm
Oct 24, 2004



So in theory I could run 1 drive up in that 5.25 slot with the OS and what not, then do a RAID 1 (or 5?) setup with 4 x 3TB drives?

Hmmm.

Galler
Jan 28, 2008



Not just in theory. I've done it and so have many others. Also if you can afford a raid card you can easily stick a laptop drive underneath the 5.25" bay and stick two 3.5" drives in the 5.25" bay and have 1 OS drive + 6 x #TB drives.

Also there's an internal USB slot so if the OS you want to run will run off a USB drive (freenas and others probably) you can do that too.


e: I love the fuck out my Microserver. I just wish I could afford a decent RAID/controller/JBOD/whatever card that would work in the server and in ESX. I sure as fuck don't need more storage space it's just that it would be fun to do it.

Galler fucked around with this message at 02:46 on Oct 15, 2011

Hok
Apr 3, 2003

Cog in the Machine

crm posted:

Can those HP Micro Servers use 3TB drives?

They look... amazing.

Also, does the 4/5 sata spots include the one that comes with it?

I've got 4 of em in mine, work fine.

There's 6 sata ports in total, 4 for the front drive slots, one for the cdrom and one esata.

The cdrom one is limited to IDE mode however, there's a hacked bios to bring it up to full speed.

I'm not sure on the esata port, never used mine.

BnT
Mar 10, 2006



Galler posted:

e: I love the fuck out my Microserver. I just wish I could afford a decent RAID/controller/JBOD/whatever card that would work in the server and in ESX. I sure as fuck don't need more storage space it's just that it would be fun to do it.

I'm very happy with my cheap raid card: IBM m1015, an 8-port SAS card which supports 3TB drives. I paid $70 for a used one on eBay. I flashed it back to an OEM LSI BIOS (see my previous post), and it's playing nice with ESXi and ZFS in passthrough. I'm not using the Microserver though, and not sure if you can get VT-d working on it.

Gorfob
Feb 10, 2007


BnT posted:

I'm very happy with my cheap raid card: IBM m1015, an 8-port SAS card which supports 3TB drives. I paid $70 for a used one on eBay. I flashed it back to an OEM LSI BIOS (see my previous post), and it's playing nice with ESXi and ZFS in passthrough. I'm not using the Microserver though, and not sure if you can get VT-d working on it.

This is what I'm after but they are holy christ expensive in Australia.

Longinus00
Dec 29, 2005
Ur-Quan

BnT posted:

I'm very happy with my cheap raid card: IBM m1015, an 8-port SAS card which supports 3TB drives. I paid $70 for a used one on eBay. I flashed it back to an OEM LSI BIOS (see my previous post), and it's playing nice with ESXi and ZFS in passthrough. I'm not using the Microserver though, and not sure if you can get VT-d working on it.

What always scares me about raid cards is needing to have a 2nd one with the same bios should the first one ever give up the ghost. In a company you should have spares laying around but at home...

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Post
  • Reply
«608 »