Well I finally updated my second NAS to FreeNAS 9.3 and it was not straightforward even though it has the exact same hardware build as the first NAS it crashed hard when I attempted the update and totally corrupted my FreeNAS install on that NAS! I performed the web update just like I did with the first NAS but when it rebooted and started applying the new update it said it failed and when I rebooted the USB drive I booted off had no bootstrap. Even installing back to 9.2.18 failed!

 

Well this was last Thursday on March 26th and so it took me until the next Wednesday, today April 1 to get it done since I had moved all my data carefully over to my other NAS during the days leading up to the upgrade attempt I was not rushed. I also had to take care of other things around the house like my yard. What I thought would be an hour update at the most turned into quite a bit more.

 

I started getting CPU errors plus some SCSI errors when my system tried to access my USB devices as well. The fact that I received USB errors was a very serious issue since I don’t have any internal DVD drives on these NAS systems but install off of USB thumb drives and USB DVD drives all gave errors when accessed. I could install FreeNAS from a SATA drive with the system covers open but I had to install to my USB drive for booting so that was still a no go. I figured I could update my motherboard bios and that may take care of the CPU errors but just in case I ordered a matched pair of Xeon E5345 Quad Core Processors so that when I was ready to work on the NAS they would be there in case the others were actually bad.

 

Well come today when I finally had some time to tackle this NAS  issue I was able to get it going after installing the new Xeon E5345 CPU’s and updating the bios of my Intel S5000psl motherboard with “Intel’s Deployment Assistant” booting off of a temporarily connected internal SATA DVDRW drive I connected with the system chassis opened up. Turns out that I had to install the update since the old motherboard bios couldn’t handle the new CPU’s stepping code as well as taking care of the issue with the USB devices throwing errors.  I had noted the stepping code of the new CPU’s and checked on the release notes and the new CPU stepping codes were included in the motherboard bios update.

 

With the new CPU’s and the motherboard updates the 9.3 FreeNAS update on my second NAS worked beautifully as I thought it would last week! I had good feelings right on initial boot off of the FreeNAS 9.3 image since when it had failed it would hang at the new FreeNAS grub screen and go no further. While following the error messages I had noticed the SCSI errors when the USB device “da0” was accessed and this no longer happened after the bios motherboard update.

 

I make a habit of saving my FreeNAS configuration even when doing minor updates so once I got my second NAS back into the rack and cabled up@ 9.3 FreeNAS version I logged into the web interface using the DHCP address it picked up and uploaded my old configuration and FreeNAS updated the old settings rebooting a couple of times and everything was back to normal. I verified from my XenServer shell I had the NIC’s cabled right by pinging the interfaces and then watching the storage become available in XenServer environment.

 

Now both NAS are @ FreeNAS 9.3 and I have my redundancy back! I also believe my old CPU’s are good but I had to test the new CPU’s to give EBay feedback plus didn’t want to switch back and forth so will repurpose the old CPU’s somehow.

 

Here are my babies at the bottom of my rack purring like normal. I will grab a couple of slim DVDRW devices for them for fall back devices for issues like my USB flaking on me though.