WHS v1 issues on a HP ex485

[joutlaw]

I have a ex485 that would not stay up for more than 5 minutes at a time around a month ago. I concluded that the system drive (Seagate 750GB) was bad. It was replaced with a Samsung 500GB drive I had laying around. I did a server recovery and got the system back up. I installed Homeserver Smart and all drives were ok. I then got a couple of errors on my second drive. It was a Hitachi 1TB but it only had 1 relocation event.

I then had an issue where the homeserver would stay up for a few days, then be unresponsive from the shared folders or RDP. I could ping it and get responses back. My router would show it was still connected, but with only one connection. It would require I hold the power down for 4-5 seconds for it come back up.

I ended up replacing the Hitachi drive with a Samsung 2TB drive and still have the same results. I bought a new router and swapped ethernet cables. I updated the NIC drivers, which was scary with it being headless. It came back up with no problems, but still have the same issue with it losing connectivity. I'm really at a loss at whats going on.

When the homeserver loses connectivity, I notice that no other events are logged in the Event Log until it restarts. I can check the chkdsk logs and they look good. All logs show they complete at around 12 AM. The timing of when I lose connectivity is sporadic as well. Yesterday, I was logged into a PC at home when I clicked on one of the share folders. At that point the homeserver went down, but my remote RDP session was retained to another PC on my network. I could no longer RDP or access shares on the homeserver. The homeserver external website was no longer accessible as well.

Is there any way to turn on any enhanced logging? I don't know what else to try at this point.

 

[Binky]

Do you have a spare blank drive to run a full setup of WHS on? Id probably go that route, since you can probably install WHS to test the hardware in much less time than troubleshooting the current installation. If the fresh version checks out, its not the hardware (other than the HD of course). WHS also has a pretty decent reinstallation method that will preserve the data, but that will reset you to stock, so I'd probably do a full fresh install as a test if possible.

 

[joutlaw]

Do you have a spare blank drive to run a full setup of WHS on? Id probably go that route, since you can probably install WHS to test the hardware in much less time than troubleshooting the current installation. If the fresh version checks out, its not the hardware (other than the HD of course). WHS also has a pretty decent reinstallation method that will preserve the data, but that will reset you to stock, so I'd probably do a full fresh install as a test if possible.

Yes, I have that Hitachi 1TB drive that showed 1 bad sector and 1 relocation event. I think the drive is ok. I may try that. The server recovery is pretty slick and since the add-ons are already in the same directory its not that big of deal to reinstall everything.

It actually just quit responding again and I tried unplugging the network cable and plugging it back in. No difference in response. I do see activity on the LAN interface in the back so that leads me to believe the NIC itself is good.

All of the health indicators also appear good when the problem occurs. Quite strange. This server ran for nearly 3 years 24/7 without a hiccup.

 

[Binky]

I would try a new install on the other drive first. That way, if it turns out to be a hardware failure, you don't screw up your existing installation. Of course, if it turns out to NOT be a hardware failure, you just wasted some time. I think i remember the WHS V1 installs taking 1-2 hours on a pretty slow machine, but its mostly without user interaction.

I don't think the bad sector will be an issue. One of my old data drives from my retired WHS v1 machine has a few hundred reallocated sectors but its never had any problems.

 

[joutlaw]

I replaced the stock celeron on my ex485 with a E5200 dual core last year. It ran fine for over a year with that proc so I don't think its related to this issue. It does the recovery install relatively quick. Will try this evening if the weather is still a mess.

 

[joutlaw]

Last Thursday I put in my old Hitachi 1TB drive did a server recovery. So far, it has been up since then. I now have 2 relocation events on this drive and it stays much warmer than the other 3 drives in the bay.

I've got it working pretty hard with SABnzbd + SickBeard + CouchPotato + Headphones.

 

[joutlaw]

Well... Saturday it went down again. No drive LEDs are lit on the ex485 and the health indicator light is flashing blue.

I've about had enough of this and looking for a slick deal on a HP Proliant or Fuji server.

 

[jcmuse]

i'm having similar problems. Funny that i happen upon this thread.

My mediasmart hangs every night around midnight. Are you sure chkdsk is completing successfully? I think it is the reason the system hangs.

Like you, i'm not going to waste my time figuring it out. Going to throw this thing in the trash and go with a self-built unit. The incidence of hard drive failure with these mediasmarts is astounding. The two mediasmarts i own have both had issues. 1 actually had to be replaced.

 

[joutlaw]

Yep, I gave up on this. I have spent countless hours working on this thing. I'm going WHS 2011 on the new build.

I needed something quick so I just ordered these parts for ~ $250:

Intel Celeron G530 - should be fine for what my WHS does... mainly file serving, backups, and newsgroup duties (SickBeard, Headphones, CouchPotato)
BIOSTAR B75MU3+ - nice bang for the buck USB 3.0 and SATA III in the event I go SSD in the future.
G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) F3-12800CL9D-8GBRL
Antec EarthWatts EA-380D
Cooler Master RC-343-KKN1 Elite 343
2 x Antec TriCool 92mm DBB Fans

I have a the following drives, which I hope are still good.
Hitachi 1TB 7200RPM drive - OS
2 x Samsung 1.5TB
1 x Samsung (really Seagate) 2TB

 

[Binky]

You should like WHS 2011 a lot. Look into the various drive pooling setups before you install. I went with drivepool which is brain dead simple and seems to be working pretty well for $20. There are several other solutions including flexraid.

 

[joutlaw]

You should like WHS 2011 a lot. Look into the various drive pooling setups before you install. I went with drivepool which is brain dead simple and seems to be working pretty well for $20. There are several other solutions including flexraid.

Good deal. I will look into drivepool. With WHS2011 at rock bottom pricing, it makes it an easy decision to look else where for "drive extender" replacements.

Does anyone know if the external URLs are available in WHS 2011? i.e. I had https://johndoe.homeserver.com on my ex485. It took care of SSL certs and dynamic DNS automagically.

 

[joutlaw]

Good deal. I will look into drivepool. With WHS2011 at rock bottom pricing, it makes it an easy decision to look else where for "drive extender" replacements.

Does anyone know if the external URLs are available in WHS 2011? i.e. I had https://johndoe.homeserver.com on my ex485. It took care of SSL certs and dynamic DNS automagically.

I got the new WHS build up and running yesterday. I am still migrating data from old drives, but so far everything is running smoothly. This little Celeron rocks. It blows the E5200 away that had swapped in my ex485.

WHS 2011 is much snappier. My existing homeserver.com domain carried over and Remote Access is working as before.

I really hate the the Home Server is gone for Server 2012.

 

[joutlaw]

This has been up for a week and still running good.

I'm using DrivePool and so far everything is working like I want. Only issue I have ran into is streaming media libraries randomly erroring out. I deleted the database it uses and so far its better. My music library is ~60K songs, pics are around 15K, and ~700 videos.

 

[Binky]

An added bonus of WHS2011 is that Acronis DriveImage works on it (haven't tried a restore yet) and so does NOD32 AV. Of course, WHS2011 has built in backup too.

The dashboard is a major PITA. I found a script that automatically closes it.

 

[Slimline]

Your success with WHS 2011 makes me happy. I have my copy sitting in front of me as I migrate my 2.5tb's of data over to my backup drives. I am looking forward to installing 2011 and hope I love it as much as V1. I was really sad to hear Microsoft was dropping support for V1. I also bought Stablebit Drivepool. One question, do they have any form of shadow copies/backup for shared folders in 2011? It always pained me that if i accidentally deleted something from a shared drive it was pretty much GONE. I have been poking around but havent really read anything of the sort yet.

Oh, and are you still problem free? Still like it? Did you put any av on your server? I am looking at Eset Nod32 since it appears to be the favorable solution to gdata which I read isnt great. Im pissed avast has not come out with a solution yet as I am licensed for almost another year for V1 with them.

Slimline

 

[joutlaw]

Your success with WHS 2011 makes me happy. I have my copy sitting in front of me as I migrate my 2.5tb's of data over to my backup drives. I am looking forward to installing 2011 and hope I love it as much as V1. I was really sad to hear Microsoft was dropping support for V1. I also bought Stablebit Drivepool. One question, do they have any form of shadow copies/backup for shared folders in 2011? It always pained me that if i accidentally deleted something from a shared drive it was pretty much GONE. I have been poking around but havent really read anything of the sort yet.

Oh, and are you still problem free? Still like it? Did you put any av on your server? I am looking at Eset Nod32 since it appears to be the favorable solution to gdata which I read isnt great. Im pissed avast has not come out with a solution yet as I am licensed for almost another year for V1 with them.

Slimline

I am still enjoying WHS2011. It has been running flawlessly.

I got creative with backing up my wife's Macbook Air. I had an old Intel Atom SFF PC with a 250GB drive. I put FreeNAS on it and setup an AFP share. Her Macbook is now able to backup to it via Time Machine, since backups broke with the release OSX 10.7 on WHS2011.

If you want to backup your OS drive in WHS2011, it wants you to use an external drive. Since I had the FreeNAS up and running, I setup a Windows share for my WHS C: to backup to. Unfortunately, it is not an incremental backup but it does run once a night. WHS2011's Dashboard will not allow you to backup to a share, but you can RDP to your server and configure it via Windows Server Backup.

I currently am not running AV. I never did on WHS v1, but it may be something I look into. Most of my data is replaceable. I duplicate my Photos and send them to Amazon S3 via CloudBerry.

I've been very impressed with the performance, considering the relatively low cost of the components. The G530 is more than enough for most WHS tasks.

 

[Slimline]

Thanks for the update. I just got the server all up and running tonight with 7tb of space. The install was flawless with no surprises. Stablebit was very straight forward to install and use and my drive pool is just as I expected it, Like WHS V1.

I setup the free trial of Eset nod32 v 5.x and it seems to be ticking away without issue. All I have left to do is to setup my computer backups and its like nothing ever happened, only im now running the updated 2011 I am happy with it so far. I was a little surprised they removed user shares, but I just set them up manually and all is well.

I still havent thought much on the osx backup issue, its disappointing it cant work with the newer versions of osx. I may just buy the wife an external hard drive to use as a time machine backup to prevent hassle.

Cheers to whs 2011