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 Post subject: Freenas on ex490?
PostPosted: Sun Jul 24, 2011 1:45 pm 
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Hey all,

I've been frustrated by my ex490 for a while. First of all, I can't get it to set up Time Machine on my new MacBookPro with HP's 3.0.2b120 software, and when I installed OSX 10.7 Lion on my old MacBook, it stopped there as well.

I've been thinking about getting another piece of hardware like a Synology box or something, but I was wondering if it would be possible to install something like FreeNAS on the HP hardware to save myself some money. Has anyone done this? It seems like it should be possible, but I can't find any posts with direct information about doing this.

It looks like I'd need one of the VGA cables from here: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=8066 Is that right?

If this could work, it would save a ton of money vs getting a completely new set of hardware.


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 Post subject: Re: Freenas on ex490?
PostPosted: Mon Jul 25, 2011 7:23 am 

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I have the VGA cable and I have tried this. Freenas V8 needs to be installed on its own dedicated drive. They suggest USB. However I would install freenas, but when I tried to boot from the USB flash it would not work. I did specify the USB flash key as the first boot option but it still did not work.

I tried different USB keys without success. However the same devices in another machine worked.

I gave up.


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alanh
 Post subject: Re: Freenas on ex490?
PostPosted: Mon Jul 25, 2011 7:57 am 
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Did you try all of the USB ports? (i.e. both front and back?) Did you try installing onto HD0? Just wondering....

-alan


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 Post subject: Re: Freenas on ex490?
PostPosted: Mon Jul 25, 2011 8:01 am 

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I only tried the front and back usb ports. I dod not want to install it onto a HDD and V8 will use the whole disk for the install and will not allow you to use the free space as storage.


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alanh
 Post subject: Re: Freenas on ex490?
PostPosted: Wed Oct 05, 2011 10:13 am 
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Recently upgraded to just released Freenas 8.0.1 and this one also works just fine. Still using UFS mode, as ZFS requires 6GB (actually 8GB) to function at expected speeds and so far I don't see the need for ZFS and such required memory upgrade.

My system (EX490) changes:
- uProc update: Intel Pentium Dual-Core E5400 2,7Ghz
- added HD's: 2x Western Digital Caviar Green WD15EADS. 1.5TB
- Gen3 cable: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=8066 residing in upper drive bay and with jumper installed on motherboard (VGA, Keyboard, Mouse and BIOS access all working).
- 4GB USB stick with Freenas 8.0.1 (plugged in at the front side).

Running the 2x 1.5TB disks in RAID config and accessible via CIFS (Samba). Currently I'm trying to get the original disk up and running as AFP share to use it as Apple TimeMachine disk, but this somehow doesn't work yet ... user privileges issues or something...


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 Post subject: Re: Freenas on ex490?
PostPosted: Mon Jan 23, 2012 9:50 am 
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I already posted much of this in another thread, but I figure that someone else might find this here and find it useful:

I have had success booting FreeNAS 8.0.3 on my ex490!

1. I downloaded the FreeNAS installer ISO.
2. Then, using my Mac and Parallels, I booted off the ISO and had it install to a small USB stick.
3. I then took that USB stick and plugged it into a relatively recent windows laptop and booted off the USB.
4. I turned on the network interface using the CLI and saved the settings.
5. I moved the stick to the bottom rear USB port on the ex490.
6. If I left all four HD's in their trays, the ex490 booted WHS, which isn't, of course, what I want it to do.
7. I powered off, ejected the system drive, and then powered on again.
8. FreeNAS booted this time and I was able to access the web GUI from a remote machine!


Now to set this thing up properly so I have a working NAS again.... It definitely doesn't seem as easy as the initial WHS setup was, but I already have the hardware and it's cheaper than buying an empty NAS enclosure. If I can get this working, I think I'll buy a blank drive and pull the WHS system drive permanently (or at least until I give up entirely on the hardware and want to sell it).

My problem before was that I had assumed that the FreeNAS ISO was a working system and not an installer.

Can someone correct me if I'm wrong about this, but the ex490 only has one RAM slot, right? Therefore the maximum amount of RAM is 4 GB (i.e. no ZFS possible)?

Also, slootj, were you able to get Time Machine running? If you're on Lion, you'll probably need to upgrade FreeNAS as it has more stringent requirements for what volumes it will allow to be used: http://support.freenas.org/ticket/535


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 Post subject: Re: Freenas on ex490?
PostPosted: Thu Jan 26, 2012 12:33 pm 
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As it turns out, reading the manual can be useful I was able to do a full time machine backup last night.


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 Post subject: Re: Freenas on ex490?
PostPosted: Thu Jan 26, 2012 2:49 pm 
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I haven't tried FreeNAS, but I'am able to do pretty much the same thing on my ex495 running Ubuntu 11.10 server including Time Machine backups with the latest Netatalk.

Here is a good starting point if you are feeling adventurous.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1895084


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 Post subject: Re: Freenas on ex490?
PostPosted: Fri Jan 27, 2012 12:27 pm 
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I strongly suspect that with Ubuntu, I'd need to get the VGA/keyboard cable in order to get the installation done. I might think about it though: it looks like FreeNAS recommends 6 GB as a minimum for ZFS and 8 GB preferred, while the Ubuntu and other Linux documentation seem to indicate that 4 GB might be enough (which is good as that's actually possible to do in the ex490).

I use Ubuntu every day as one of my workstations, but that setup looks a lot more involved than what I'm used to from there....


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 Post subject: Re: Freenas on ex490?
PostPosted: Fri Jan 27, 2012 12:59 pm 
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alanh wrote:
I strongly suspect that with Ubuntu, I'd need to get the VGA/keyboard cable in order to get the installation done. I might think about it though: it looks like FreeNAS recommends 6 GB as a minimum for ZFS and 8 GB preferred, while the Ubuntu and other Linux documentation seem to indicate that 4 GB might be enough (which is good as that's actually possible to do in the ex490).


It may be possible without the cable, but it is very handy to have for whatever you choose. I have the VGA only version. You can use an USB keyboard/mouse if you install the supplied jumper.

I haven't tried raid, but have used LVM. LVM allows you to group multiple physical drives into a volume group. Then you can carve up the volume group into logical volumes any way you want. You can increase or decrease the sizes of the logical volumes. You can add additional physical drives to the volume group over time. I believe you can do this in combination with raid. Although I don't know the memory or processing requirements.

I just upgraded my ex495 to an Intel E5700 with 4G of memory. The E5700 supports virtualization if you want to run KVM as well on ubuntu. You already have a license for WHS2003 so you can throw that on there as well. I also did this using Citrix XenServer and ran both ubuntu server and WHS2003.

You have to be a real hack to get this all set up. It's not like restoring the WHS2003 from the HP DVD.


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 Post subject: Re: Freenas on ex490?
PostPosted: Wed Feb 01, 2012 1:05 pm 
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In theory, would this work? http://www.oempcworld.com/OEMPCworld-co ... 400ER.html

It appears to be a single 8 GB DIMM, albeit at a prohibitive price.

What about an Intel Xeon x3085? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6819117134

The FSB on that is 1333 MHz, and I note that the current processor is 800 MHz... I've read that the 1066MHz processors work and get automatically adjusted by the BIOS.


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