Comments on: The littlest Thumper: OpenSolaris NAS on an MSI Wind PC

By: Juan Orlandini

Juan Orlandini — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 20:37:30 +0000

Ran into an issue with this setup.

I read this and was very impressed with what you did. I bought a slightly different version of the MSI setup you describe: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001R1X0I0

This uses the Atom 330 processor and I like the dual core nature of it. It all worked really great. Moved a couple of USB drives from an old 32 bit pentium setup and added two 1.5TB drives to the internal SATA controller. I had to do some minor surgery to the hard drive/cdrom assembly so that I could screw in the second hard drive, but other than that – it was a piece of cake. I was sharing ~3TB of usable space in less than a day.

Until… I decided to move a whole bunch of data from one of the ZFS filesystems over NFS to one of my macs. About 20GB into it, the network on the MSI drops out. I did a whole bunch of research and it turns out that the Realtek 1Gb Ethernet controller has a known issue: http://bugs.opensolaris.org/view_bug.do?bug_id=6807184

There’s no know work around for this with the native rge driver. However, there is a third party driver “gani” that seems to have fixed the issue for me: http://homepage2.nifty.com/mrym3/taiyodo/eng/

I used the amd64/gcc config…

Hope this helps you guys….

ps On the motherboard remove thing – the only tricky part was that the “screws” includes the two screws on either side of the VGA connector.

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 04:07:32 +0000

Ah, I got the impression that some kind of complicated case modification was required to get the CF card to fit. I’m glad that isn’t the case. By the way, which CF card did you use? I’m trying to make sure I get a card that will work with OpenSolaris.

Also, regarding ECC I’ve heard that ZFS will write whatever it gets from the memory, so there may be some risk involved with going without ECC. On the other hand, I’ve also heard that this is less of a problem with modern quality hardware.

A somewhat less expensive setup with ECC I’ve seen so far is at http://www.nerdblog.com/2009/04/good-enough-zfs-nas.html. It’s about $180 for the processor and motherboard each and the setup is nowhere near as small as a nettop setup.

By: Joshua Barratt

Joshua Barratt — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 15:38:08 +0000

I’m loath to take pics because it’d mean tearing it back down. I’ll try and be better about shooting pics as I go in future.

The motherboard uninstall was really nothing special, though — if you have the skills to get the case open, you have the skills to remove it. (Just ‘remove screws’, ‘remove motherboard’, ‘insert CF card’, ‘replace motherboard’, ‘replace screws.’)

Re: ECC RAM, it hasn’t been an issue for me, but I would certainly prefer to have it. You’re not going to get that AND an Atom-like processor, though. ZFS does the block checksumming, which somewhat offsets the risk, but not entirely.

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 02:08:44 +0000

Also, how did you remove the motherboard? Can you post some pictures of how this setup looks? Thanks again.

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 01:57:27 +0000

I’ve been considering a similar setup myself, possible with an inexpensive Atom 330 processor setup. The only thing holding me back though is the lack of ECC ram. How much of an issue could this be?

Thanks, Jonathan

By: Ian

Ian — Thu, 14 May 2009 15:07:52 +0000

Looks like you’ve got your hands full judging by your pictures! Babies certainly are time-consuming. I’ve found another good source, someone else setting up OpenSolaris (actually SXCE, pretty much the same) as a NAS, and covers some of the things you want to do: http://breden.org.uk/category/nas/
Useful as he’s a Mac user, too. Ian.

By: Joshua Barratt

Joshua Barratt — Thu, 14 May 2009 14:14:39 +0000

Thanks for the nice note, Ian. I haven’t messed with using it as a Time Machine target as I still have a Leopard server Mac Mini running (doubles as my media center) and am using that for TM.

To be honest this has pretty much been set it and forget it since the install — it works great and it “just works”. I would like to add in some more of the features I mentioned but so far have had other priorities. I’ll do an update post for sure when I do more hacking.

By: Ian

Ian — Thu, 14 May 2009 14:07:02 +0000

Thanks for this, it’s inspired me to change from FreeNAS to OpenSolaris on my nas. I’ve been wanting a proper ZFS solution, it’s not reliable enough under FreeBSD. Currently running an Intel Atom D945GCLF2 board, booting from an IDE CF card adapter, with a Sil3124 4 port SATA card hosting 4x 1TB WD Green power HDs RAID5, all in a 1U case (was a Lacie Ethernet Disk), so hardware not too different to yours. Good idea adding USB to pool, though I might go the eSATA route for backing up main pool. I’m also interested on your future improvements to your setup, please keep us posted! Also, have you got it working with Time Machine on your Mac? Thanks, Ian.

By: Joshua Barratt

Joshua Barratt — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 17:41:15 +0000

2008.11, correct. Good luck!

By: Bruce

Bruce — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 17:37:24 +0000

Even just knowing you used the standard installer is helpful, since I can then try it. Thanks.

I take it that was v2008.11?

As for where it fails, it’s the latter.