[CentOS] OT: Replacing Venerable NAS

Chris Adams linux at cmadams.net
Wed Nov 18 19:16:06 UTC 2015


Once upon a time, Warren Young <wyml at etr-usa.com> said:
> - They’re serious server-grade machines, not borderline flimsy boxes competing largely on price.  Built in and supported from Silicon Valley, not China. :)

iXsystems sells rebadged SuperMicro stuff, nothing special (not made in
Silicon Valley).

We bought an iXsystems TrueNAS (commercial version of FreeNAS +
"supported" hardware) system at $DAYJOB about 2 years ago, with the
dual-node "HA" setup, and it was not a pleasant experience.  Over the
first 6 months or so, our longest functioning uptime was about 10 days.
NFS would run and then just stop serving (no errors or anything).
Eventually, iX found and fixed a FreeBSD kernel NFS bug, but it was a
painful experience.

Then, early this year, we had a node fail, and it took them almost a
month to get us a replacement.

Their idea of HA is to monitor the ethernet links, not the services;
even though we have multiple links in a LAG, if one drops, the node
fails over (and now we're having trouble with CentOS 7 NFS clients when
the TrueNAS has a failover).  When we had NFS problems, we had to
monitor that externally and manually trigger a failover.  Failover
consists of "reboot the active node"; there's no graceful cluster tool
(such as Pacemaker on Linux).

And today, when trying to open a ticket, their website is broken because
one of their DNS servers is returning 10.0.0.240 for part of their
website (where the CSS is served).

-- 
Chris Adams <linux at cmadams.net>



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