Upgrade time – and a question
Feb. 26th, 2022 05:46 pmThanks to a fellow member on a mailing list, who sent me a replacement motherboard (complete with RAM!) I've been able get my Microserver N40L working again (as well as to upgrade my recently-bought cheap 2nd hand Microserver N54L to 8GB.)
So far the N40L has no disks. I plan to reinstall the disks of its old RAID, built under Ubuntu 14.04 about 8 years ago by![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
hobnobs.
Because the array is a Linux mdraid, which won't work on FreeBSD (I think), I put OpenMediaVault on a USB key. The web UI works although IMHO it does look, well, a little bit amateurish.
I've upgraded its firmware to the Oct 2013 version, which AFAIK is the latest.
The thing is, its fans run full-speed all the time. It didn't do that before.
Is there anything you can do to set the fans to automatic speed control rather than full? My N54L is virtually silent, but the N40L sounds like a vacuum cleaner and can be heard 2 rooms away.
Speaking of the N54L: I put TrueNAS Core on an old laptop HDD in an eSATA caddy (powered from a USB port). It works like a dream. It happily imported my old ZFS RAIDZ, created with 64-bit Ubuntu Server on a Raspberry Pi 4 a couple of years ago now. It allowed me to add a couple of shares, and without any faffing around with permissions, it Just Works™. I'm very impressed. It even has htop preinstalled. The web GUI is very smart and professional-looking.
It supports both SMB and AFP out of the box, and right now my fiancée's MacBook Pro is backing up to a Time Machine share on the TrueNAS box, over wifi.
But TrueNAS Core does want to be installed on a proper hard disk. The old FreeNAS and NAS4Free could be installed onto, and run from, a USB key. If you still want that, you might try XigmaNAS. It's a fork of FreeNAS before iXsystems renamed it, and it does still support booting from a USB key. I gave it a quick whirl in VirtualBox and found its installer a lot more complex and confusing, though, so I gave it a pass.
So far the N40L has no disks. I plan to reinstall the disks of its old RAID, built under Ubuntu 14.04 about 8 years ago by
hobnobs.Because the array is a Linux mdraid, which won't work on FreeBSD (I think), I put OpenMediaVault on a USB key. The web UI works although IMHO it does look, well, a little bit amateurish.
I've upgraded its firmware to the Oct 2013 version, which AFAIK is the latest.
The thing is, its fans run full-speed all the time. It didn't do that before.
Is there anything you can do to set the fans to automatic speed control rather than full? My N54L is virtually silent, but the N40L sounds like a vacuum cleaner and can be heard 2 rooms away.
Speaking of the N54L: I put TrueNAS Core on an old laptop HDD in an eSATA caddy (powered from a USB port). It works like a dream. It happily imported my old ZFS RAIDZ, created with 64-bit Ubuntu Server on a Raspberry Pi 4 a couple of years ago now. It allowed me to add a couple of shares, and without any faffing around with permissions, it Just Works™. I'm very impressed. It even has htop preinstalled. The web GUI is very smart and professional-looking.
It supports both SMB and AFP out of the box, and right now my fiancée's MacBook Pro is backing up to a Time Machine share on the TrueNAS box, over wifi.
But TrueNAS Core does want to be installed on a proper hard disk. The old FreeNAS and NAS4Free could be installed onto, and run from, a USB key. If you still want that, you might try XigmaNAS. It's a fork of FreeNAS before iXsystems renamed it, and it does still support booting from a USB key. I gave it a quick whirl in VirtualBox and found its installer a lot more complex and confusing, though, so I gave it a pass.
