Quick Note, This is NOT a deep dive post into troubleshooting a downed volume, in this case I knew the drive was unavailable since boot and my goal was to re add the logical drive after correcting the physical connection issue.
This happened to me due to a Hardware issue. A power surge killed my UPS, like fully in that it wouldn’t turn on. SO had to rip it out and rebuild my DataCentre since I’m a poor man without proper servers, or server mounts. It’s a ghetto mans DataCenter.,.. anyway. The single USB enclosure housing a 2 TB HDD which was mounted and shared via SMB on the FreeNAS server didn’t power on. I decided to open the case to see if I could find the issue (the PSU was fine as I was reading 12 v from the standard barrel connector. After I removed the case I was shocked find it was powering on… ok what gives. Put the case back on and nothing, it’s like the power barrel isn’t reaching the internal pins all of a sudden. I’m not sure if this was cause I swapped it with another 12v unit within the rack, either way I found an adapter to fit the same female and male ends and amazingly it worked lol, how useless but randomly came in use in my life.
So now back to FreeNAS with the USB drive powered on and connected.
First thing on the UI was the critical alert of the Volume being down. I wasn’t sure how to bring it back online with commands like lsusb being useless.
I found this FreeNAS form post with someone having a similar issue were the logs stated the simplest solution:
Recovery can be attempted by executing ‘zpool import -F vol1′
I SSH’d in and ran that command ageist the known volume that was down and lo and behold it appeared to have fixed my mounted USB drive…. but my SMB share just wasn’t available…
SO restart the SMB share… nothing… OK what gives… I dont’ remember documenting exactly how I set this up and it older FreeNAS 11.1-U1… so now I check the source server via SSH…
“zpool status” now shows the volume is there. checking “df -h” shows it’s mounted as /SMB… yet going to the Sharing -> Windows Shares and checking the shared volume states it should be /mnt/SMB but it’s not mounted as such hence why it’s not showing up…
Now 2 questions pop in my head 1) did I mis-configure something or 2) is the mount process different during boot in which it will mount the volume under /mnt instead of the root… not sure what happened here.. also not sure exactly how I should fix it. I want to avoid a reboot as it hosts iSCSI based VMFS volumes for my ESXI hosts.. what a pain…
ok… sigh mmmm I can either link or mount the volume accordingly at this time, but not sure how that will affect the server at boot….
So after talking to the “experts” apparently I did something wrong (how classic) due to a mix of my ignorance and … ahem… a system design in which the backend shouldn’t be touched outside the frontend… like lame SharePoint… anyway to read the details see this snippet:
Though have to give credit where it’s due and it’s nice to get clarification on things that piss me off so much it actually triggers my “flight or fight” response in my brain and I get like raged.
So taking a few minutes to cool down to hopefully resolve what should have, as usual, been a rather easy process became a royal pain in the fucking ass. But a “learning” experience none the less. Say that shit more than enough times in this stupid field of shit… ughhhh
OK now not pissed…. I went to Storage -> Volumes via the front end, and even though it showed green and healthy from the backend import command, I clicked the volume and selected “detach” from the bottom. I chose not to destroy my data (default, good stuff), and to not remove the share configuration (SMB service stopped anyway).
Then I clicked import volume (no encryption) and lucky for me the volume in question was the only one available in the dropdown list. The wizard successfully imported the volume, and sure enough doing a “df -h” on teh backend showed it mounted as /mnt/SMB ands retarting the SMB services worked and navigating the share also worked.
Yay well this sure was a learning experience…. don’t mess with the backend too much with FreeNAS (soon to be TrueNAS CORE).
Cheers