Alternative to freenas ?

No3ntry · 2 Feb 2012 at 13:48

I setup an old Athlon XP2500+ (underclocked) with 768mb ram system running freenas off a 2TB RAID 1 mirror.

The last couple of days it has become real flaky and it made me realise if it does go completely belly up I do not have enough Linux knowledge to recover my data and it is all stored on there, with important docs like accounts synced to my main rig on a daily basis, but things like music and films which take up such a tremendous amount of space I do not have backed up other than the RAID1 mirror.

So I had a quick look at WHS 2011 and discover my current system probably wouldn't run it. (don't think athlon XPs even support 64 bit do they ?)

Freenas is faily handy as it has a built in bit torrent client (transmission) and other bits and bobs that I don't currently use. I like the fact that it has a web interface (not the nicest looking but it's there) and I don't have to remote login to change settings etc.
So I was wondering what your thoughts were ?

I did think windows 2003 server edition that I have lying around spare might do the trick although not sure on system requirements for that one and space needed either. Then there is the issue of how I login and change settings etc.

To be fair to Freenas it has been faultless up to now, but the other night it just stopped responding to any remote commands and I run it completely headless so I had to hard reset it as it wouldn't shut down on it's own and carry it upstairs to see what was happening, sometimes it seems to fire up and shut down ok and other it doesnt.
The RAID mirror has been destroyed and after about an hour of "rebuilding it hadn't progressed past 0%) and now it seems to have given up completely not even displaying the disks correctly.

Sorry for the rambling thoughts but I want to get someone elses opinion on this matter.

thanks
James

wesley · 2 Feb 2012 at 13:55

Just been playing with openmediavault on vmware. Thought it was good. Give it a go

No3ntry · 2 Feb 2012 at 14:17

Just had a quick look on the website, it looks similar to freenas.
What are the system requirements ?

Also what is the benefit of running it on VMWare, I haven't used that before.

Thanks
James

inSilica · 2 Feb 2012 at 16:21

I have to say that freenas has never caused me any issues, though I did dump it for a vanilla FreeBSD and install all the packages I needed, mainly because freenas does too much of what I didn't need at the time and also because I have a print server setup now.

Have you tried running some diagnostics using Freenas? Have you tried upgrading freenas? I mean I used to run it headless from a USB stick. To upgrade I exported the configuration, wipe the USB stick, put new version on, restore configuration.

I hope it's not one of your hard disks flaking out on you...

No3ntry · 2 Feb 2012 at 16:43

see now this is my issue,

I am useless with linux, I can't run diagnostics using freenas because I don't know how to, I can just about make out that there is an issue with the HDDs using the log file, but most of the stuff in that list is gobbledy gook to me.

I am running version 7 still by the way.
If I understand correctly to upgrade to 8 I cannot use my existing RAID containers and would need to start again with them ?
Also i beleiev I tried 8 to start with but at the time I only had a 512kb memstick spare it wouldnt work whereas 7 seems or at least did to run fine on a 512 mem stick.

I will say though freenas only recognises 512 of the 768 installed ram.

I suppose I better pull one or both of the drives and run a diagnostic on it. I hope the warranty wasn't just a one year jobby, can't afford to be replacing 2Gb drives at todays prices

Cheers
James

SMN · 3 Feb 2012 at 07:25

Openfiler is an alternative you might want to look into?

philhoole · 4 Feb 2012 at 16:59

I just tried both Openfiler and Openmediavault and not had the best experience.

Firstly, Openfiler just won't install. It copies the install files to the HD and says "Time Remaining 0.0" and then just hangs. Tried it a couple of time but no luck. It installed fine to a VM in VMWare.

I will have a fiddle and see if I can trick it into installing later.

A bit better with Openmediavault. It appears to be fully working but the LAN transfer speeds are awful to the point where I can't really use it. Probably getting about 10% of the speed from this machine when I had Windows on it.

So not too positive at the moment - Might just stick WHS2011 on as I can't really be bothered with too much messing around

Essexraptor · 4 Feb 2012 at 20:00

No3ntry said:
see now this is my issue,

I am useless with linux, I can't run diagnostics using freenas because I don't know how to, I can just about make out that there is an issue with the HDDs using the log file, but most of the stuff in that list is gobbledy gook to me.

I am running version 7 still by the way.
If I understand correctly to upgrade to 8 I cannot use my existing RAID containers and would need to start again with them ?
Also i beleiev I tried 8 to start with but at the time I only had a 512kb memstick spare it wouldnt work whereas 7 seems or at least did to run fine on a 512 mem stick.

I will say though freenas only recognises 512 of the 768 installed ram.

I suppose I better pull one or both of the drives and run a diagnostic on it. I hope the warranty wasn't just a one year jobby, can't afford to be replacing 2Gb drives at todays prices
Cheers
James

To be honest FreeNAS 8 is a more commerical version and needs far higher system specs than your old base rig can really provide. They reccommend at least 1GB of memory for each TB of storage plus a bit more headroom and quite a hefty CPU to keep it running at a reasonable lick.

Surprised that you have mem problems?? I'm running 32 bit ver 7 and it sees all 3Gb of my memory ... no problems

It is running in one of those new fangled HP Microservers... but the spec of those is not OTT to be honest. Like you, I can't afford to splash the cash on lots of 2TB drives, so I'm running a RAID5 array of much smaller drives for now and file transfer speeds are in the high 80's at the moment.

I would have said Openfiler as well... because it is suited to older, less high spec rigs/setups and I've just got it running on a old socket 462 (Athlon XP 2400+) with 750Mb of RAM off a 80GB IDE drive.
It uses a Anaconda installer, which is straightforward, but with 1 drive it's recommended to partition the drive first with a 300MB Root, Swap ( twice your RAM) and the rest of the drive unallocated.

It doesn't set the world on fire but does the job