NASLite Network Attached Storage

Hi,

I am setting up my 1st NASLite-M2 here and using an Asus P5AD2 Deluxe board that I am no longer using as my computer.
1 gig of RAM
3 WD5002ABYS 500gb hard drives

It has a Marvell 88E8053 PCI Express Gigabit LAN Controller onboard.

This is not in the list of Network cards. I got thru the initial setup and when I reboot I get a beep and I see it said network connection failed. Obviously I am thinking I need a compatible card.

My only question is that it beeps one time then flashes a couple of things on the screen then automatically shutsdown with no option to enter a menu of any kind.

Is that normal??

Unfortunately that is normal. The Marvell chip is not supported and if NASLite can't find a valid NIC it shuts down immediately. I'm not sure why Tony and Ralph designed it this way, I'd rather see it come up with the menu system.

To what end? If there isn't a NIC then it isn't a NAS and servers no function other than to convert electricity into heat. There is nothing to configure at that point.

Mike

Well I don't need it to stay running but it would be nice if it waited for about 30 seconds so I could at least read the screen and not have to reboot a couple times to piece it together. I only saw on either my 2nd or 3rd reboot that it was NIC (while it did seem obvious).

In any case I pulled apart another old computer I had in the attic collecting dust and pulled a 3com NIC out of it and it connects fine now. Telnet seems to work so on to getting my next problem solved when I get home tonight!! For some reason it won't let me mount Disk-0. Disk-1 and Disk-2 mounted fine.

You need to put in the unlock key to be able to export the disks. Do that and it should work.

Mike

A super nice gigabit card that works with NASlite is the Intel PRO/1000 MT Desktop Adapter Seen people test out Intel gigabit cards to other gigabit cards on the net and the Intel one is the faster one of all they tested with.

-Raymond Day

Also see this thread: viewtopic.php?f=22&t=2928

If you installed NasLite on disk-0 then you must also format disk-0 afterward to use the remainder of the space on the drive for storage.

Sorry, been away.

Mike,

Here is one scenario. I put together a new server with 9 drives and wanted to get everything configured but I could not because the onboard NIC was not recognized. It would have been much more convenient if NASLite would have let me partition, format, and setup all of those drives. (I had set aside the time to do this.) Instead I had to stop what I was doing, get a NIC, and then do the setup. Inconvenient and unnecessary IMHO.

Tom

OK,

Time is time and what is the difference if you put the NIC in first and then configured the whole system the one time? The alternate being that after you had set up the drives, save the config, shut down, install the NIC, reboot, go back in and config the network, save, reboot, put in unlock key and then use.

Makes the latter sound a bit silly, no? The fail to prompt is there for a reason, so you don't go through all the configuration just to find out that your NIC is not there and the machine will not work. To my thinking the fail out is a time saver.

I will agree that maybe there should be some sort of message with the fail out status left on the screen so one does not have to go through what you did.

Mike

Without a NIC card the system is not configurable, in short, without a NIC, a systemID cannot be generated for the unlock etc, and without a systemID you have no NAS.

During the resource check, the Detecting network device message will issue FAILED in red and reboot.

There are two conditions that will issue a shutdown at boot time. The first as you can tell is a lack of a NIC. The second is a lack of a config device. In both cases the instance initialization cannot proceed due to missing resource identifiers hence the immediate shutdown.

A possible compromise we can offer is the addition of a delay after fail before shutdown. Perhaps 5 seconds? I'm just throwing this out, so any comments are welcome.

For newbies ... or "slow readers" ... I would suggest 30 seconds.

Tony,

I like the idea of a delay before reboot. Even better, "press any key" to reboot. The first time it happened to me I didn't even know what happened - I booted the machine, turned my head to look at something else, and all of a sudden it was rebooting.... My first thought actually was that I had a hardware failure.

Tom

Full auto-shutdown would be ok with me (rather than waiting for user KBD input). In many cases there's not even a KVM connected, with the system in an attic or closet. So ... if the NIC fails, it may be a while before user connects Keyboard/Video.

On a semi-related note though: it would be nice if we had a feature which keeps the Syslog on a continuous (auto-rotate, lets say 512kb?) basis so that it can be inspected to detect issues prior to current boot. ( i.e. the Syslog survives a reboot. Put the log file in same location as a "Status\htm" folder on Disk-0, but maybe name it something else.)

Two great points, especially the second one.

Mike