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I think I may just change cases anyway. I have my trusty old antec900 unused. The Mobo should fit right in, no? Reason being I need more HDD space as I'm ordering another SATA card and some new HDD's as well :). I think the 900 will work well as the case works great with some silent fans. Airflow on that baby is great. Seems the dell case is way noisy. I changed the stock 140mm fan to an enermax one and that helped but stoill it's pretty loud.
Ok,Ok....sorry your pm got buried with others, or maybe I just don't care :PQuote:
Originally Posted by Detale
The bay isn't actually a bay, the front part of the space is for a system fan to bring air in and fan it over the expansion cards while the blue locking mechanism's are actually to lock full size 64bit PCI server cards into place and hold them there securely (hence the front fan to cool them).
You can transfer your existing parts over to the antec case without in anyway altering any of the system utility of the server.
The case in it's day was larger and more powerful than a standard case because it had a far more powerful PSU and larger internal expansion, that time has well and truly passed and the Antec will actually provide better cooling.
Thanks Art you ROCK!. BTW I am sending your stuff out tomorrow bud ;)
OK so I haven't yet transferred the server innards to my Antec 900 because I can't seem to find documentation on the front panel headers anywhere. on the current dell board there is one large pin connector that I don't know what pins go where when trying to use standard case pins. so I'm stuck for now :(
Also I have been trying my hardest to get Freenas to run from a USB but in the bios I can't seem to find anywhere to "boot from a USB" or anything like that so I don't think this is an option to me at the moment, right?
Without installing onto a USB is there any way to save my configuration so I don't have to re-enter all my disks when I restart the server?
On another note I'm thinking of getting this board to use as a server next
MBD-X7SLM-L-O LGA 775 945GC mATX Server Motherboard
It's only $55 used at MC and I have a 775 CPU and a bunch of 1GB sticks or DDR2 ram. Do you guys think it's worth it to spend the $55 seeing as I'm sure I can boot from USB and it has an integrated GB NIC? Not to mention on board SATA II ports (4).
My setup boots from CD-ROM, and reads the config file from a USB-attached floppy drive. :lol:Quote:
Originally Posted by Detale
I was trying to remember how I told it to save to the floppy, but after some googling it seems you only need to have a USB stick or a floppy inserted and FreeNAS should auto-save the config file to either location for you.
There should also be a option in the web interface to download and/or restore the FreeNAS configuration file manually.
I'll add to this post as I think of points to answer your query Detale, but the first point regarding the Servers BIOS a. it is an older machine from when bootable USB devices were first being used. More importantly though it is designed as a Server there is no specific need for it to be booted from a USB bootable device unlike a desktop, it is simply an option that is not needed.
If you could take a pic of the connector(s) that you aren't sure of that would help.
@ cousin Art ;) I will take a pic tomorrow. My problem is that I want to be able to save the configuration so i don't have to add then mount each disk every time I reboot and then enable the services. Kind of a PITA.
@Lee I have a USB stick inserted and it reads it as da0. There is an option to save the config file as XML but I can't get the server to read it. It always says something like "no config file found using default settings". When I try to restore the config file it reboots and doesn't help either. I tried formatting it as NFTS and now Fat32 should I try formatting it as UFS??
BTW I added another TB disk and decided to format it as UFS and my transfer speeds are now around 200Mb/s. I'm currently moving all the data on another TB drive formatted NTFS to the UFS drive so I can reformat the first drive to UFS as well. Seems file system had something to do with it.
http://img188.imageshack.us/img188/5732/capturecm.jpg
From the FreeNAS documentation pages:Quote:
Originally Posted by Detale
If I'm not mistaken, by "MSDOS formatted" they would mean just FAT right? I'd try that and then UFS if FAT doesn't work.Quote:
The floppy disk or USB key must be already MSDOS formatted (FreeNAS will not format it).
Well I tried it UFS formatted I guess when I have time I'll try regular Fat next.
Been a while now and all was working well until last night when I had to shut the system down to clean the floors in my house. When I turned the system back on and had to reconfigure everything once again 2 of my disks weren't showing up and the others that were showing were acting odd. I could see the disks but couldn't save to them or delete them. A few options later (reinstall freenas, new install CD, etc) later I got fed up put the apprentice on a USB drive, watched it and went to bed.
OK so this morning I decided to see what would happen if I used my old Gigabyte mobo (GA-EP45-UD3R) and an E3300 I have laying around. a 2gb stick of ram and a crappy vid card I rescued from a junked computer. Some old raedon I didn't even look, but it's good for this :). I threw it all into my Antec 900 case which has plenty of room for HDD's and has on board SATA ports, and gigabit Ethernet so I don't have to use controller cards either. Not to mention fantastic airflow. It's working GREAT!!! My throughput speeds are better than ever. I Installed onto a USB stick finally (which I couldn't do due the server not allowing a boot from USB). Now when I restart I don't have to reconfigure everything!!! Thats huge for me!
Here's a shot of the speeds compared:
OLD
http://img682.imageshack.us/img682/4222/freenas2.jpg
Older as well
http://img188.imageshack.us/img188/5732/capturecm.jpg
NEWEST!!!
http://img245.imageshack.us/img245/8480/freeiq.jpg
Now this is transferring a 4.7GB file in about 60 sec. Thats great for me. Honestly I don't even care what was wrong with the server anymore I'm a' keepin' this one :)
Thanks guys again for all your help ;)