Help, someone, please!

 

My server keeps disappearing from the network. The machine itself is still powered on. I can't access it via the web interface. The server's monitor connection also becomes unresponsive. I have to shut down the server and restart. The time between this happening is becoming less and less, to the point that the outages' frequency is every 10 minutes or less.

What details can I provide that might help provide useful info?

 

The mobo is a new supermicro 775 one that Tom uses for the 15 drive servers. It was running well for a week or so; this is the second unit as the first was DOA. CPU is a celeron 420, used in my server for at least 2 1/2 years. I have 4 GB of RAM which hasn't been through memtest yet. PSU is a 650 W Antec and seemed to be doing okay in general.

 

ANy help appreciated greatly; this is a very frustrating time right now!

I have 4 GB of RAM which hasn't been through memtest yet.

Well... sounds like a very  good place to start. 

Many motherboards are very picky about the memory they use.  Some can properly set the clock speed, timing, and voltage needed by the memory strips, many cannot.  You may need to set them by hand in the BIOS instead of letting it set them for you.

 

Perform a memory test... let it go through several cycles, preferably overnight.  Do not proceed to anything else until you see NO errors.

 

Joe L.

Thanks (once again), Joe. It seems to be working well right now, so I'm going to try and watch a show with my wife. Will do memtest overnight and post back here some time after that.

Okay, I did 12 hours of memtest, with 8+ passes and not a single error. However, it seems from the POST screens that one of my two Promise TX4 cards is a little wonky. The drives are not detected by the card's BIOS, and unraid coughs and splutters a little during the boot sequence with lots of "retries", but it does boot up. As soon as my mini-SAS to 4xSATA forward breakout cable arrives, these two cards will be retired. Hopefully the problem will go away then.

FIXED, I think.

 

I installed a disk last week as parity, but it was DOA. So I used another fresh drive in my case as parity instead. However, I didn't remove the bad drive. SInce it didn't show up as a device, I figured there'd be no harm in keeping it connected until I had to make further changes tot he array next week.

This drive was causing my TX4 card to act "wonky" on start-up it seems. Since removing the faulty drive, all appears to be going well, and I can write large multi-GB files to the array again without crashing. I'll add a "solved" to the thread title after my 300 GB test transfer. It's already gone a LOT further than any before this without crashing since my problems started.

Glad to hear that it looks to be fixed.

 

Misbehacing drives can cause all sorts of things to go odd.

Glad to hear that it looks to be fixed.

 

Misbehacing drives can cause all sorts of things to go odd.

 

Thanks. I guess I've learned that now. It's crazy that every time I post in here with problems, I think I've learned a lot about how unRAID works. Yet, every time, I feel like a complete noob when my next problem arises.  I'm supposed the tech guy within my circle of friends and family!