Friday, April 6, 2018

Setting up VirtualBox on NAS4Free

Turn VirtualBox On

Make sure the selected folder does exist.


No matter how I tried, I can not shut VM gracefully. So I would just send ACPI shutdown to a VM. It would be marked as Stopping and just hang there. I usually restart VistualBox using this GUI.

Guest VM Settings



Few comments on VM settings:

Guest Set-up

Install hung on me in preparing headers phase at 83%.  Seems to common.  Another time it told me linux install failed.  Finally I went back to the VM settings and set the HD to be SSD.  Then install completed.

Helpful: instructions to set Ubuntu as a guest OS.
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install dkms
sudo apt-get install virtualbox-guest-dkms

The latter seem to install 5.1.34 modules while my host runs VirtualBox 5.2.8.  Hmmm .  I dig have a guest additions CD for 5.2.8.  Should have used that!  Tried it.  Install script succeeds but upon reboot VirtualBox service fails to start and SATA erros are abound.  I will be sticking with older guest add-ons - at least those start.

To install default desktop GUI I did:
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

But during this installation I get:
ata3.00: exception Emask 
ata3.00: failed command: FLUSH CACHE

And if I resume and continue the installation, it does get completed, but then upon the reboot into graphical mode, the VM is aborted.
So, it is not an unmitigated success by any stretch.

Wednesday, April 4, 2018

What's New?

By now I run NAS4Free 11.1.0.4 (5321).

The hardware was replaced more than once with little to no disruptions.  This is a mixed bag of recycled desktop parts, but it does the job:

CPUIntel Core i3-4130 Haswell 3.4GHz LGA 1150 54W Dual-Core CPU BX80646I34130
MotherboardGIGABYTE GA-Z87-D3HP LGA 1150 Intel Z87 ATX Motherboard
RAMCrucial Ballistix Sport 16GB kit (8GBx2) DDR3-1600 1.5V 240-Pin 9-9-9-24 BLS2CP8G3D1609DS1S0
DVD ROMnone
PSUAntec EarthWatts Green EA-380D Green 380W
CaseCooler Master RC-600-KKN1-GP Gladiator 600 Mid Tower ATX Case with 140mm Fan (Black)
Case FanRosewill ROCF-11003 Hyperborea 140mm
Case Fan HDsRosewill ROCF-11003 Hyperborea 140mm
UPSAPC BACK-UPS ES BE550G

Hard drives are now connected directly to the motherboard - no more HD cages or add-on controller card.  Cages were confusing to me when troubleshooting HD SATA problems. I still run two mirror pools and this works well for me so far.
DiskSize (MB)DescriptionDevice modelSerial numberRPMPool
ada06TBSeagate IronWolf NAS HDST6000VN0041-2EL11CZA17617E7200BMP
ada36TBWestern Digital RedWDC WD60EFRX-68MYMN3WD-WXN1H84576NR5700
ada16TBWestern Digital RedWDC WD60EFRX-68MYMN1WD-WX21DC4D5XPZ5700vault
ada26TBWestern Digital RedWDC WD60EFRX-68MYMN2WD-WX11D841V6X05700

What's really new - my attempts to run virtual machines on this NAS box.  NAS4Free 11.1.0.4 has VirtualBox 5.2.8 with phpvirtualbox 5.2.0 as web GUI. More details in a separate post.
Relevant:
http://www.dotnetmafia.com/blogs/dotnettipoftheday/archive/2010/09/22/fix-high-guest-cpu-utilization-in-virtualbox-by-disabling-nested-paging.aspx
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Ubuntu_as_Guest_OS