The other week I decided I was going to put together a NAS. Not knowing too much about the ins and outs of doing it homebrew, I did a quick search and settled on trying FreeNAS. I went ahead and ordered a few hardware items and set to work putting it all together. For the record, the mobo I ordered was an Asrock H61M/U3S3. (I can provide more h/w info if needed, but I feel like the mobo is in question with some of the problems that I encountered)
In spite of the latest beta FreeNAS distro not including DLNA support out of the box, I decided to go with it anyway since it had support for the mobo's NIC (whose exact model designation escapes me at the moment), and earlier versions do not. Loaded it onto a USB stick, attached it internally via a USB header pin, set up the 5 HDD's I have as raidz2, and all was good.
I then got the itch to try to set up a DLNA service via serviio. Not being a Linux guy (more power to all you guys, but the level of complexity isn't something I relish, and I say that knowing it isn't terribly complex), the arcane way of getting serviio to work on FreeNAS 8 made me look for an easier alternative. What seemed "easy" was to make a persistent Ubuntu stick and install serviio on that, since doing so appeared far easier. Installing ZFS on Ubuntu to get access to the raidz array also looked to be easy to accomplish.
I used unetbootin to make a persistent install of Ubuntu 11.04 on a stick and plugged it in. BIOS got confused on boot order between the stick exchange, so I reset that and rebooted. Ubuntu came up, I set up a new user, thinking it was going to save that on the persistent area on the stick, and went about installing zfs. Well, that seemed to not work, as after compiling the source, I couldn't enable any zfs commands. Fine, I thought, maybe it needs a reboot. After rebooting, the mobo seemed to forget about the USB stick, and I had to re-enable the boot order in BIOS again. Strange, but whatever.... After getting back into Ubuntu, none of the changes I had made seemed to stick. .... Did a quick search, some random reports of persistence not working well with Ubuntu 11.04. I wiped the stick and put 10.10 on it, tried again. Same problems, and 10.10 didn't have support for the mobo's NIC, to boot. Along the way, I read somewhere that having USB 3 enabled might cause problems, and disabled that, even though I had NOT attached the stick to any USB 3 ports at any time. I have tried 5 different ways of making a persistent USB Ubuntu stick, to no avail (unetbootin, LiveUSB123 (or something), the utility linked to from the Ubuntu website, using Ubuntu's own disk creator via a VM in Windows, and doing a complete CLI procedure within Ubuntu via the VM).
So, I seemingly can't get a persistent USB stick with Ubuntu to work, and from what appears to be USB issues with my mobo. Any Ubuntu distro, on reboots, seems to make the mobo forget that it needs to boot from the stick, and requires going back into the BIOS to point to the USB device. On top of all that, persistence on the Ubuntu distro appears to not be working, and I can't tell if it has something to do with the mobo-USB issue.
To be perfectly clear, the FreeNAS stick still works perfectly when I plug it in, other than a one-time BIOS change to set it to boot from it (no nonsense with the mobo forgetting about its existence on reboots). Frankly, I can live without the DLNA, but it would be nice to try it out without necessarily waiting for the official FreeNAS 8 release which promises to have DLNA support back in.
Anyone have any thoughts on the matter that could allow me to have a persistent USB install of Ubuntu running hassle-free?
In spite of the latest beta FreeNAS distro not including DLNA support out of the box, I decided to go with it anyway since it had support for the mobo's NIC (whose exact model designation escapes me at the moment), and earlier versions do not. Loaded it onto a USB stick, attached it internally via a USB header pin, set up the 5 HDD's I have as raidz2, and all was good.
I then got the itch to try to set up a DLNA service via serviio. Not being a Linux guy (more power to all you guys, but the level of complexity isn't something I relish, and I say that knowing it isn't terribly complex), the arcane way of getting serviio to work on FreeNAS 8 made me look for an easier alternative. What seemed "easy" was to make a persistent Ubuntu stick and install serviio on that, since doing so appeared far easier. Installing ZFS on Ubuntu to get access to the raidz array also looked to be easy to accomplish.
I used unetbootin to make a persistent install of Ubuntu 11.04 on a stick and plugged it in. BIOS got confused on boot order between the stick exchange, so I reset that and rebooted. Ubuntu came up, I set up a new user, thinking it was going to save that on the persistent area on the stick, and went about installing zfs. Well, that seemed to not work, as after compiling the source, I couldn't enable any zfs commands. Fine, I thought, maybe it needs a reboot. After rebooting, the mobo seemed to forget about the USB stick, and I had to re-enable the boot order in BIOS again. Strange, but whatever.... After getting back into Ubuntu, none of the changes I had made seemed to stick. .... Did a quick search, some random reports of persistence not working well with Ubuntu 11.04. I wiped the stick and put 10.10 on it, tried again. Same problems, and 10.10 didn't have support for the mobo's NIC, to boot. Along the way, I read somewhere that having USB 3 enabled might cause problems, and disabled that, even though I had NOT attached the stick to any USB 3 ports at any time. I have tried 5 different ways of making a persistent USB Ubuntu stick, to no avail (unetbootin, LiveUSB123 (or something), the utility linked to from the Ubuntu website, using Ubuntu's own disk creator via a VM in Windows, and doing a complete CLI procedure within Ubuntu via the VM).
So, I seemingly can't get a persistent USB stick with Ubuntu to work, and from what appears to be USB issues with my mobo. Any Ubuntu distro, on reboots, seems to make the mobo forget that it needs to boot from the stick, and requires going back into the BIOS to point to the USB device. On top of all that, persistence on the Ubuntu distro appears to not be working, and I can't tell if it has something to do with the mobo-USB issue.
To be perfectly clear, the FreeNAS stick still works perfectly when I plug it in, other than a one-time BIOS change to set it to boot from it (no nonsense with the mobo forgetting about its existence on reboots). Frankly, I can live without the DLNA, but it would be nice to try it out without necessarily waiting for the official FreeNAS 8 release which promises to have DLNA support back in.
Anyone have any thoughts on the matter that could allow me to have a persistent USB install of Ubuntu running hassle-free?
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