The setup is two whitebox servers made of the following:
- Gigabyte GA-MA78LMT-S2 (bios vs 3.2)
- AMD Athlon II X4 645 Propus @ 3.1Ghz
- 4GB (2x2) G.Skill memory
- LSI SAS3442E-R Raid card (don't like, but does work)
- 4x Seagate Constellation ES 2TB drives. (ST32000644NS)
- Intel EXPI930CTBLK GB nic. (as the primary and the onboard nic for replication)
I setup both, but had a UPS fall over and one of the servers wouldn't boot back up afterwards. I was getting stuck at Verifying DMI Pool Data... Genereally resetting the CMOS would fix this, but it didn't. (this is a good page for those running into this error) Usually it's the CMOS corrupted, or something in the way of the boot process. After a while I figured the master boot record was messed up, so I reinstalled NexentaStor. Well, that didn't work either and after a few hours of messing around with it, I finally fixed it. I force wiped the entire hard drives. It seems the boot sector was messed up and even reinstalling NexentaStor wasn't fixing it. While I have a raid device, I have it setup in JBOD and am going to use ZFS to manage the raid.
To clear off the entire drive, I just went into the LSI bios and told it to create and then destroy the raid. After doing that, I reinstalled and the system booted again.
Update:
It appears that there is an issue with the LSI card and NexentaStor. After reinstalling, I reboot and get the same issue. So sometimes it will boot, but once it doesn't. It's over. I think I have a choice to install a couple of drives on the MB SATA controller for the OS, or just not use NexentaStor.
I'm going to reinstall the HA setup for Openfiler for now. I've set one of these up before. While it does well, (though ZFS of BtrFS would make it 100x better) it's not polished. Actually the UI is quite buggy. I just need something that will boot for this location. I will get supported hardware for the co-locations if I go NexentaStor.