Intel SS4200 running FreeBSD 7.1 with 4 x 1.5 TB seagate drives

[nadtz]

Well, just got home and swapped in an E4300 and 2gb stick of ddr2 I had snarfed from a machine that is not being used, no drives installed yet, but the device boots fine with the CPU and memory. both freebsd and eon are interesting options, time to do some research!

 

[simonlok]

Out of curiosity I am interested to know what you do with your root drive. It seems a lot of people are going with USB sticks. I seem to be the only person who has jammed a fifth 3.5" disk into the chassis. I think a 2.5" notebook drive would be optimal, there appear to be metal work that may have been intended for that purpose, though at some point in their development process Intel went with the DOM instead.

 

[nadtz]

I actually have a spare ata laptop drive sitting around, ill see what i need to get that working. I have a couple of weeks to play with the machine until I order a couple more drives so I think i'll play around a bit and see what I like best before I put this thing to real use. Im not very impressed by the EMC firmware to this point.

 

[nadtz]

Out of curiosity, do I have to do anything to get a drive that had been previously used working in this thing? I currently have 2 1.5tb drives, the box starts up and the blue lights go on solid for the HD and blink for power, but only one drive gets anything written to it. Do I have to actually manually wipe the drive(s) (I did attach the one that had been used to my windows machine and delete the NTFS partition I had created) and if so any util in particular I should use?

 

[nadtz]

After checking http://forums.smallnetbuilder.com/showthread.php?t=210&highlight=Intel+SS4200 I will check the drives when I get home tonight, yay for search.

 

[nadtz]

Hrmm, has anyone else tried replacing the DOM with another? i have a 4gb supertalent that refuses to boot in this system. I have a 2.5 adapter on the way but we had a DOM at work so I tried that but no luck, so I was just wondering.

 

[nadtz]

Well, I finally got everything working, thanks for the help from this and other posts about this device.

I replaced the EMC DOM with a 4gb DOM I was able to buy online for about $50

had to install freebsd 8 from USB CD, to do that changed bios settings for the hard drives to IDE (from compatible) and sata behind pata.

got freebsd installed, this DOM/USB combo is SLOW, it took several hours to get OS/ports/src installed, but now that i have everything set up its working well enough.

with some alterations followed the console stuff, while booting freebsd hit option 6 to get to the bootloader, 'set console=comconsole' to redirect to the console, then 'boot' to boot.

After installing there were some changes from 7 to 8 with zfs, I didnt have to recompile kernel but did use the other listed changes

All said and done I'm very happy, still have a few things to work out, ZFS pool isn't mounting on load, I'm sure that's just an option I have to find and change, and there seems to be some tweaking I can still do. I have 2 1.5tb seagate drives in use at the moment and im seeing

[root@storage /]# dd if=/dev/zero of=/space/tmp/test bs=1m count=4000
4000+0 records in
4000+0 records out
4194304000 bytes transferred in 57.127015 secs (73420675 bytes/sec)

[root@storage /]# dd if=/space/tmp/test of=/dev/null bs=1m count=4000
4000+0 records in
4000+0 records out
4194304000 bytes transferred in 34.351012 secs (122101323 bytes/sec)

i'll see what 2 more drives and some tweaking can do. This was actually a lot of fun and I'm kind of sad everything is working now and all I have left to do is tweak and wait for my other 2 drives, thanks for all the info here and elsewhere! Now I need to read up on zfs and get a switch that supports jumbo frames!

I was also curious about eon and opensolaris as cifs sounds like an interesting option, but I didn't have so much luck there. I could probably get EON to boot now, but the install for freebsd takes so long that I really don't want to redo it and my laptop hard drive doesn't seem to want to function with the 40-44 pin converter I got. I haven't done much in the way of network testing yet but a 1gb file seems to take a bout a minute. This is transfering from a laptop and its pretty darn fast compared to what im used to (usb external drives).

P.S. I should also mention that I upgraded the CPU and memory in the SS4200
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU 4300 @ 1.80GHz (1800.01-MHz 686-class CPU)
and 2GB of memory. I might end up with a 4gig stick in trade for some parts but im rather impressed as is.

 

[trikosuave]

Eon,

I have installed EON on my SS-4200, do you know of any walkthroughs to get the power LED to stop flashing?
Thanks!

 

[nadtz]

Eon,

I have installed EON on my SS-4200, do you know of any walkthroughs to get the power LED to stop flashing?
Thanks!

I'll admit I stopped worrying about the light after I couldn't find anything on how to get it to stop (with freebsd), but Id love to know if you find out. Did you install with a video card or via serial? I'm still interested in trying eon since my nas isn't fully built yet, but now that i've got everything working via serial and can play with zfs (which the more i learn about and use the more im loving it) im less concerned than i was.

 

[trikosuave]

Actually, I didn't use either a video card or a serial connection. I repinned the serial header according to the wiki but couldnt get anything on Putty. So I made a DHCP reservation using the ss-4200's MAC and used SSH. EON gets a IP address via DHCP right away so I made sure all drives were zero'd out (MBR) booted to a USB CDROM, ssh'd in and ran install.sh with a USB stick installed, then rebooted with only the stick, able to ssh again.

But the light flashes on and on....

 

[nadtz]

Actually, I didn't use either a video card or a serial connection. I repinned the serial header according to the wiki but couldnt get anything on Putty. So I made a DHCP reservation using the ss-4200's MAC and used SSH. EON gets a IP address via DHCP right away so I made sure all drives were zero'd out (MBR) booted to a USB CDROM, ssh'd in and ran install.sh with a USB stick installed, then rebooted with only the stick, able to ssh again.

But the light flashes on and on....

Ah, I'm trying to avoid a usb stick. I don't know if I got lucky or what, I just pulled a serial header from a trashed machine at work and it worked without issue. Once i figured out how to boot freebsd and redirect to serial I was a happy camper.

 

[Gidi]

But the light flashes on and on....

I'm running the box also with EON (snv129) but the led's on my box
look normal (drive and network led is flashing during activity).

You may check this story @ http://ss4200.pbworks.com/Boot+Issues+-+Power+light+flashes+continuously

 

[trikosuave]

Can someone please provide a link on where to order a PCI -1x to 16x flex cable and maybe even a cheap video card that they have used for the ss-4200?

Thanks!

Gidi- Have you altered the boot order? I haven't. Do you think the power LED is flashing because it tried to boot from the SATA drives first and failed?

 

[nadtz]

I'm running the box also with EON (snv129) but the led's on my box
look normal (drive and network led is flashing during activity).

You may check this story @ http://ss4200.pbworks.com/Boot+Issues+-+Power+light+flashes+continuously

My drive and HD leds are fine, its the power LED in the center of the drive leds that flashes constantly. My system is set to boot pata before sata (booting from a DOM unit) I'll triple check when I get home as I seem to recall the BIOS resetting to SATA before PATA after a reboot, but that might have been me messing around when I was trying to get everything functional when i first started playing with the unit.

 

[Gidi]

My drive and HD leds are fine, its the power LED in the center of the drive leds that flashes constantly. My system is set to boot pata before sata (booting from a DOM unit) I'll triple check when I get home as I seem to recall the BIOS resetting to SATA before PATA after a reboot, but that might have been me messing around when I was trying to get everything functional when i first started playing with the unit.

nadtz, the currently last entry in that link from Chris Dando shows how he fixed the blinking power led "problem":

Chris Dando said
at 8:51 pm on Sep 17, 2009


Just a final comment or two. First off thanks Michael and Frank for all your help. I ended up making an RS232 cable, went into the BIOS and changed the boot order so the IDE DOM loads first - no more problems! I can reboot as well as turn off and on without having to touch the reset key. My conclusion is that there must still be an MBR on one or more of the Sata drives but as changing the boot order has fixed my problem I am not going to try and erase it/them. As they say, if it ain't broke don't fix it. However, it I ever change drives I now know to make sure there is no MBR on the replacement disk/s

 

[yejun]

P.S. I should also mention that I upgraded the CPU and memory in the SS4200
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU 4300 @ 1.80GHz (1800.01-MHz 686-class CPU)
and 2GB of memory. I might end up with a 4gig stick in trade for some parts but im rather impressed as is.

Is your 4300 running at full speed? I read somewhere 45nm cpu will run at minimal speed.

edit: Actually e4300 is 65nm. I don't know why the other forum only mentioned e2200 and e5200.

 

[nadtz]

Is your 4300 running at full speed? I read somewhere 45nm cpu will run at minimal speed.

edit: Actually e4300 is 65nm. I don't know why the other forum only mentioned e2200 and e5200.

As pasted previously, the CPU is running at 1.8ghz just to confirm its running at full speed. And while doing reading I remember reading that the 45nm CPU's could pbe problematic, I could have gone with a E7500 but didnt want to deal with any incompatibility.

nadtz, the currently last entry in that link from Chris Dando shows how he fixed the blinking power led "problem":

Chris Dando said
at 8:51 pm on Sep 17, 2009


Just a final comment or two. First off thanks Michael and Frank for all your help. I ended up making an RS232 cable, went into the BIOS and changed the boot order so the IDE DOM loads first - no more problems! I can reboot as well as turn off and on without having to touch the reset key. My conclusion is that there must still be an MBR on one or more of the Sata drives but as changing the boot order has fixed my problem I am not going to try and erase it/them. As they say, if it ain't broke don't fix it. However, it I ever change drives I now know to make sure there is no MBR on the replacement disk/s

My system is set...

* IDE Configuration * Options *
* *************************************************** * *
* ATA/IDE Configuration [Enhanced] * Disabled *
* Configure SATA as [AHCI] * Compatible *
* Configure SATA Channels [Behind PATA] * Enhanced *

Like I said it doesn't bother me much, but I do find it interesting that apparently this is not normal behavior.

<5 minutes later>
Setting
* SYS Green LED Default [On]
in the bios fixed this for me. now if I could just figure out why I cant boot my IDE 2.5 drive Id be golden.

 

[jlw2_74]

Newbie in trouble?

I have just hooked up my ss4200e on my router(new NAS and drives).
Drive lights stay blue, NIC flashes once in a while(blue) and the nasty flashing power light. I tried reset no luck.I have very low level tech ability.
ANY HELP WOULD BE GREATLY APPRECIATED. jlw2_74and more

 

[nadtz]

I have just hooked up my ss4200e on my router(new NAS and drives).
Drive lights stay blue, NIC flashes once in a while(blue) and the nasty flashing power light. I tried reset no luck.I have very low level tech ability.
ANY HELP WOULD BE GREATLY APPRECIATED. jlw2_74and more

If you are using the EMC software, depending on the size of the drives it will take a long time (I believe it was ~18+ hours with 2 1.5tb drives for me) to initialize and build the array.

If thats not the issue check out

http://communities.intel.com/message/80485?tstart=0

you want to be 100% positive there is nothing on the drives

 

[yejun]

I received mine today. With stock CPU and memory, zfs is really slow. ZFS 30MBps write, UFS 70MBps write. Both results are under FreeNas with single driver.

I also tried EON as well, it's even slower.
The other thing I found out is the DOM is only visible in recover mode. EON can boot from DOM, but it isn't mounted.