Im pretty new to freenas and Ive tried some suggestiongs that I have found online, but I cant seem to figure out why my system is randomly shutting down and how to prevent it from happening more.
Info
Version: FreeNAS-11.3-U4.1
CPU: i5-3570K
Ram: 12GB
Drives: 4 x 2TB
what does the crash log say? FreeNAS has powerful logging functions and will have recorded what it was doing prior to the crash.
Click on the Alerts icon in the top right hand corner. It will tell you what it was doing when it crashed.
Usually a random shutdown happens when the system overheats, but if you have adequate cooling then you will need to troubleshoot all the components in turn.
Make sure you backup your data asap.
Where would I see the crash logs?
When I click on the alerts icon its just says:
The temps were previously fairely high but I bought a new cooler and tried to stress the system and couldnt get the cpu temps super high like going back through them temp logs on the dashboard I could only see a max temp of 75 C and that was only one point on the graph
Thanks for the additional detail. Unless you were doing something on the box at 5am that error tells me that it may have crashed during a scrub. Note if your pool is large then a scrub may take some time, possibly hours. If that is the case then it may have momentarily overheated and the motherboard shutdown. Your stress test may not have simulated a several hours full load with the case closed up.
I had a box that would overheat during a scrub in a similar manner and the log wouldn’t catch that as it is a hardware lockout, so it wouldn’t get written. I solved it with more fans.
To improve your chance of spotting things set up email alerts for cronjobs. You can set these up in the system menu under the email option and set it to email you when a job starts. It will also send you a dump on reboot of the system state.
There are some guides on the internet for piping your /var/log/messages log to a permanent file but that requires good knowledge of Unix so if you aren’t confident I wouldn’t try that.
If it isn’t temps related it may be RAM or some other aspect of the hardware causing a random reboot. The good news is freenas is portable so you can just unplug the drive with the image, drop it into new hardware and it will mostly work just fine.
To reiterate above though, backup your data as lots of reboots is not good for hard drives.
Yea I have most of the data backed up somewhere else (the stuff I really care about) so ill try to get some more hardware from a friend or something then, Ill try to get some capacity later.
Ive run hardware tests on the ram and cant seem to find anything wrong with it, and for the cpu Ive got a Hyper 212.
Do you have any suggestions for additional hard drives? Ive seen sone HGST drives that are referbished and are like 30 bucks now, but im not sure how those would compare to some wd red nas drives. Any thoughts would be appreciated.
I’m in the market myself at the moment as my array is at 80%. I used to get exclusively WD reds but not anymore with this EFAX issue. I’m looking at toshiba drives for bulk storage (5400rpm). HGST drives have a good reputation but its luck of the draw on whether any drive will be reliable. Frankly i’d just go on price and overprovision assuming a drive will fail.
Yea I saw 3TB refurbished drives for like 40 bucks so its like get way more of them then you need and just let them fail and just go with a zfs2 pool instead I just dont know if thats a good choice. What is the EFAX issue is that the SMR CMR thing?