Back online…

Today I decided that it was time to turn on my NAS box again. Well in fact it was about two or three weeks since I bought a new USB stick (I hope it’s more reliable than the oldest one I was using) and I put on it the latest OpenMediaVault release.

In the past week I tried several time to boot the box, and all of the time it ended with the machine running for less than an hour, and then suddenly shutting down without any advice. It seemed to end up in an unknown condition, where it seems to be sleeping, the power supply has a yellow led on (instead of a green one) and network cards blinks, so it seems more a power saving feature rather than a real shut down.

Today I decided I wanted to know more… so I started up the server and waited on the console. After it booted I opened two consoles, one for upgrading the whole system and the other one to monitor it using htop, whose package is included in all of modern Linux distros, even in OpenMediaVault.

I already told that after some time of usage, video suddenly disappears. Today it didn’t happen. Video output from VGA connector worked like a charm, so I was able to upgrade the whole system from the console and finally rebooted the system. I connected through the web console and I was able to activate SMB, import the RAID filesystem and USB filesystem on an external drive, browse to the shared folders I created and then make them again available on the network.

So it seems that now my OpenMediaVault box is running again. Now I wonder when it will shut down again without any warning… Maybe in the meantime I will look for a way to proper backup setup and configuration, so that a restart could be easy to manage.

openmediavault further steps…

Some time passed since I installed openmediavault on my new small server.

I was just thinking that it would have been simple to work on, but the web interface seemed to freeze on several configuration command. I thought I was using a bad UI, but a simple search on the forum lead me to a worst case scenario: one of the drive was really failing in my server.

As I mentioned in my previous post, something weird had probably happened during transport, as I found an unpinned heatsink. But maybe also the disk had its faults (I hope it gained those too during the transport).

So what now? I’m planning to replace the faulty disk with a new spare disk as soon as possible, to see if every problem goes away and I will be able to fully test openmediavault.

Let’s see…

A new gadget is coming…

Even during holidays I can’t resist watching eBay and similar sites. And thanks to YouTube channels I’m following (first of all My PlayHouse), I decided to buy a new 1U server to join to my DELL PowerEdge in my data center.

It’s basically a 64 bit dual core Opteron with 8GB RAM and 2x1TB SATA disks.

I’m planning to use it as a NAS with FreeNAS to share an iSCSI device for my ESXi host running on the DELL PowerEdge.

More info coming when the device will be in my hands..