[OpenIndiana-discuss] OI on USB flash drive

Fri Apr 30 22:21:26 UTC 2021

Hi Michelle

I don't know how happy you are going to get with a QNAP Hardware as base 
for OI. QNAP is very exotic Hardware. It may be USB what they are using 
in princiapl, but unless you are sure the Controllers are actually the 
Controllers they are saying they are and the Storage is not a SD card in 
Hiding, you are going to have a bad time. ZFS does not assume the 
Storage to be uncorruptable, and thus far every SD-Card I found was so 
terrible, that one meeting with ZFS showed just how much dataloss these 
cards have.

QNAP and Synology usually use RAMDISK based approaches which run fully 
in RAM and only use the Storage to boot.

SmartOS does the same, so this could work.

In my career and with friends I have seen many OS installation to USB 
drives and SD-cards go horribly wrong. Those storage Options usually 
don't survive for long and then the whole OS is gone. I've seen it with 
FreeNAS(FreeBSD), Linux and illumos based Oses. I use Disks or SSD's as 
Storage for the Pools. The Cable can be USB. But it needs to be a Disk 
and not a flashdrive to at least Guarantee some use.

My Hardware recommendations for Cheap Home Servers for NAS on a budget 
include HP Microservers Gen8 (Gen10 works too, but they spew warnings on 
boot) SuperMicro Mini-ITX Boards. HP Workstations, or Workstations and 
Gaming and Office Rigs in general and of course Dan McDonalds HDC3.0 [0]

-Till

[0] https://kebe.com/blog/?tag=HDC

On 30.04.21 17:19, Michelle wrote:
> Good suggestions, but sadly didn't work.
> 
> Using option 2 single user also fails with the same errors.
> 
> I've also tried the USB interface in various booting modes,
> unfortunately none of which work.
> 
> I took a look at the variables in the boot options, just for the sake
> of it, and couldn't find anything obvious that would help
> 
> Michelle.
> 
> On Fri, 2021-04-30 at 20:00 +0000, Reginald Beardsley via openindiana-
> discuss wrote:
>>   Try selecting the "reconfigure" option when you first boot the
>> installed image.
>>
>> It is *supposed* to reconfigure, but I spent 50 hrs before I found
>> out how to get 2021.04.05 to boot after the install. I thought the
>> issue was the particular nVIDIA driver, but that was not the case.
>>
>> I also got a fresh install of 2021.04.05 to boot properly by coming
>> up single user, "touch /reconfigure; init 6".
>>
>> Good luck,
>> Reg
>>
>>
>>       On Friday, April 30, 2021, 02:50:50 PM CDT, Michelle <
>> michelle at msknight.com> wrote:
>>   
>>   OK, this is where things are going to get a bit awkward.
>>
>> Scenario – QNAP NAS TS-251 decided to install their own Malware
>> Remover
>> which tells me it’s removed files, but doesn’t tell me which ones
>> it’s
>> removed, and I can’t kill the remover itself. If I Ssh in and remove
>> it, it simply re-installs itself. I'm not a fan of malware removers
>> that don't tell you what files they've removed.
>>
>> So… the decision to rip it apart and install my own operating system.
>> After all, it’s on an American Megatrends bios.
>>
>> The 2gig of RAM was replaced with 8, and the storage is a half gig
>> USB
>> flash module. So the flash module has to be replaced also.
>>
>> I thus have a USB header unit and I’ve also tried to install Hipster
>> to
>> a flash drive connected via a USB harness, and also to a USB key
>> directly.
>>
>> On install, I get an error…
>>
>> openindiana drm: WARNING: [drm:pci_dev_create:93] ddi_prop_get_int()
>> failed
>>
>> … which repeats three or four times during the installation.
>>
>> After installation is finished, the installation OS goes down, but
>> says…
>>
>> openindiana genunix:WARNING: xhci has no quiesce()
>> reboot: not all drivers have implemented quiesce(9E)
>> Please see veradm/messages for drivers that haven’t implemented
>> quiesce(9E)
>> Failed to process boot arguments from Boot Environment.
>> Falling back to regular reboot
>>
>> Then on reboot, the boot comes up but gives…
>>
>> WARNING: pci at 0,0pci8086,f35 at 14/storage at 3/disk at 0,0 (sd0):
>> Commend failed to complete… Device is gone
>> Warning: Pool “rpool” has encountered an uncorrectable I/O failure
>> and
>> has been suspended; “zpool clear” will be required before the poor
>> can
>> be written to.
>> Warning: pci at 0,0/pci8086/f35 at 14/storage at 3 (scsa2usb0): Reinserted
>> device is accessible again.
>> Warning: Pool “rpool” has encountered an incorrectable I/O failure
>> and
>> has been suspended; “zpool clear” will be required before the poor
>> can
>> be written to.
>>
>> ...that last repeats three times and the unit sits there.
>>
>> I did try searching for devices with no drivers, but the only thing
>> that came up were the two processor cores.
>>
>> I did try creating a Solaris 2 partition and installing to a
>> partition
>> instead of the EFI whole disk option, but that failed on fdisk and
>> didn’t even install the files. I had to destroy the partition table
>> in
>> order to get back to getting the installation to work.
>>
>> Also, in the installer, when I tried to go to a partition
>> installation
>> and pressed F5 to change the partition type, it would go back to the
>> installation menu again, so I’m presuming that it just doesn’t like
>> the
>> USB as a target.
>>
>> I’ve got an ugly feeling that I’ve got no way of getting around
>> this.
>> Yes, I know I can put the SATA drives in and make a slice for rpool,
>> but where’s the fun in that?
>>
>>
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> 
> 
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