Freenas losing NFS shares after deleting a pool

Tuesday, June 9, 2015 at 2:12 PM
Had a fun experience today.  The home lab has (at least one) Freenas 9.3 storage server configured with two separate volumes.  One volume is shared via NFS to my VMware vSphere lab environment, while the other volume is used for general smb/cifs duties.  

After running out of storage on the general-use volume, I decided to play "musical data" and shuffle things around with the main goal of adding larger/newer/additional drives.  After backing up the data, I deleted the general-use volume.  The vSphere environment immediately went into a panic, with sirens and red lights flashing everywhere.  (okay, maybe no sirens or lights, but it was NOT happy)

I knew the issue was in the Freenas realm because it all came crashing down when I deleted the general-use volume.  While I was fairly confident that I had not deleted the NFS shares, they were now missing from the configuration!  My guess is that the file sharing configuration was saved on that general-use volume - and I eventually tracked it down.

Freenas has a "System Dataset" as shown here:


Unfortunately for me, the default volume for the System dataset pool was my initially configured on the general-use volume.  I believe that Freenas recently added the ability to use the "boot volume" as the System dataset pool, which is great!  (Just wish I would have known a little sooner).

After changing my system dataset pool to freenas-boot, I re-configured my NFS exports and the vSphere environment sprang back to life.

Not dissing Freenas at all... just posting my experiences.  I think Freenas is the bees knees and will continue using it for the foreesable future.

Motorola AP8232 running 5.5.0.0-173506X

Tuesday, June 2, 2015 at 9:08 PM
I purchased handful of Motorola AP8232's on eBay for my home network.  "as-is, no returns".  These don't boot up like all the other Motorola AP's I've worked with, nor are they running a familiar version of WiNG.

These are running BootOS 5.5.0.0-173506X and won't actually let you login to the standard CLI. Most Motorola APs use 19.2k for the serial console, but these ones are running 115.2k.  You can use the standard "reset/factoryDefault" login to set them to factory defaults, but that won't help.  After a few errors and timouts, it'll dump you to a either a boot# or diag> prompt.  You can even get to a linux root shell through the "service start-shell" command!

My guess is that this firmware is an engineering build and you can do all sorts of interesting things.  I'm not interested in getting that in-depth with this AP.  All I really wanted was a handful of enterprise-grade 802.11ac access points.

After a little bit of hacking around, I finally figured out how to get it to run production WiNG code!  I'll save the how-to for another blog post.  I just wanted to get this out there in case anyone else has similar APs and wants help getting them up and running.

Truncated serial console output from the engineering build, along with the failed/timed out login:

[ 85.322215] ge1 { autoneg'ed 1Gb/s, autoneg'ed full duplex, Cu }
Waiting for system initialization to complete.............................[ 167.852645] CCB:15:MROUTER Po rt ge1 detected on Vlan 1
.
process "/usr/sbin/snmpd -f" started


Please press Enter to activate this console.
ap8232-A3632C login: admin
Password:
Unable to connect to configuration-manager: Resource temporarily unavailable
Login incorrect
ap8232-A3632C login: admin
Password:


Login timed ou
Please press Enter to activate this console.
ap8232-A3632C login: admin
Password:
Unable to connect to configuration-manager: Resource temporarily unavailable
Welcome to CLI


Unable to connect to configuration-manager, executing limited diagnostic shell


==== WARNING ====


The CLI process has not initialized.
Please exit this shell and try again.
If this problem persists then this shell
provides a limited subset of commands
to allow you to restore the system to
a working state. Please use "help" or "?"
to see a list of available commands.
diag >set
boot Boot commands
delete Deletes specified file from the system.
exit Exit from the CLI
help Description of the interactive help system
logout Exit from the CLI
reload Halt and perform a warm reboot
service Service Commands
show Show running system information
upgrade Upgrade firmware image

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