First off, let me know if this is the right place to ask this one, been lurking a while but still green when it comes to posting.
My (Previously Perfect) Plan
I’ve got some spare hardware I want to turn into a NAS box that includes an old Sandybridge mobo, a Xeon E3-1220 (yikes, but it was what I had lying around), and seven 2.5" hdds(again, lying around…) thrown into an old case.
While everything individually works and all, I’ve run into issues with a few different NAS OSes…
Some Hiccups
One example when I was trying FreeNAS I was unable to use either the NetBIOS name or IP of the machine to connect to a Samba share it’s hosting, even though I was configuring the host via the same IP. And when trying Openmediavault: I’ve only gotten the machine to boot correctly once. All it does now is scream after install that mdadm can’t find /dev/sdg (the SanDisk 64GB flash drive I’ve installed openmediavault on) then drops to recovery shell which listing the /dev/ dir confirms that /dev/sdg/ does not exist, even though I’ve got Grub on the same disk and that worked just fine
My Theories
Some things that might contribute to the shitshow:
For openmediavault:
I’ve got it installed on a USB flashdrive, which may/not be overheating when running the OS, which could I guess lead to the disk not being found as it failed during init. (I’ll test this by installing on another drive when I get home)
The only time I was able to get it to boot(the very first install attempt), it saw the disks correctly but did not want to create a storage pool with them in it. As in I got to where you’d add the disks to the pool but it didn’t list any of them, the box was just blank.
For FreeNAS:
Not sure how I’d fix it as Windows shares are a mess that I’d rather not try to figure out. Something to do with how I’d set up my network interfaces, I think
Found that I don’t really like how the the Web GUI is set up, so I’d prefer not to use FreeNAS
I can get more details/photos and test some stuff when I get home from work today. Until then, any suggestions from your experiences? I’m open to trying whatever solution within reason.
Alright, I went and reinstalled OMV onto the Toshiba 500GB HDD I have. Going to circumvent any issues I’ve got with flash storage for the moment, will troubleshoot that later on.
Looks like I still can’t add any disks to a raid array:
Ran an update on the system when I got it online, so the packages are up to date…
Can login via Samba from a user I set up as well, so I’m good with access to shares via Windows PCs.
Success in creating the raid device when using mdadm from the terminal, it even shows up in the UI. Not sure if I was meant to do something completely different or not…
