FreeNAS Stability Issues

Software & Operating Systems Open Source & Web-Based
1

My FreeNAS server was fairly stable up until recently. I thought it might have had something to do with the 11.3 updates, but booting to 11.2 U7 I’m still facing issues.
This leads me to believe I’m having some issues with the NetApp Disk Shelf and/or the LSI SAS9207-8e I just added and moved all my disks over to, but I’m unsure if or how to see what’s going on with the disk shelf or the HBA card.

DMESG doesn’t ever show an error with either device from what I can tell.
The NetApp has 4 ethernet ports, is there a way to connect to it and view the status using these? They seem to be statically assigning themselves 169.x.x.x IPs.

Does anyone have some advice?

2

Well, what kind of symptoms are you experiencing?

3

When updating/starting/stopping jails I have unexpected shutdowns.
System seems to go through 1-3 unexpected shutdowns while trying to bring itself back up.
Random hard hangs where the console is frozen and the only way to fix is a hard reboot.
Issues with the ZFS pool, all the discs are accounted for, but one or two will say they’re unused after a reboot.
Issues with the pool not being brought up after a reboot.

4

Sounds like a power issue, the drives maxing out the rails perhaps. Have you tested the PSU?

5

There are two PSUs in the NetApp that are hotswap. I have no idea how to test them.

I will say I only have 11 HDDs in the 24-bay shelf.

6

My searches have all come up with nothing, but do you know of a way to interface with the NetApp through what appear to be ACP ports?
Telnet, SSH, web?

7

169.254.x.y is APIPA and is tldr bad

8

I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s just how NetApp’s ACP sets itself up.

I guess I’m wondering if anyone is familiar with these NetApp disk shelves and interfacing with them further?

9

Nothing in dmesg is unusual. Do you have email alerts configured?

Also weird that you’re getting apipa addresses on your interfaces since that should be handled entirely by software. And AFAIK, FreeNAS does not auto-assign apipa addresses (a lot of systems do this though).

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10

I’m referring to the ethernet interfaces on the NetApp disk shelf, these are the devices assigning themselves apipa addresses. Since this is one of the new variables I thought this may be what’s causing the issues and am trying to get access to any management interface it may offer.

I do have email alerts configured, I just get an alert that there was an unexpected shutdown.

11

The management ports?

Yeah, that’s really weird. When an HBA or backplane has gone down for me in the past, it’s been accompanied by a lot of dmesg errors.

That said, I’ve never used NetApp hardware, so I don’t know what its quirks are.

12

Yes, in NetApp terms they appear to be ACP ports. Need to try a port scan to see if anything is accessible, but they’re the ports doing apipa.

I also just figured out why I haven’t been able to boot 11.3 U7. I upgraded my ZFS pool with a new feature in 11.3. It’s incompatible with older versions now.

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13

I found the problem.

Reinstalling the base os appears to have fixed the issue.