A few years ago I recovered an old SAS NAS and installed TrueNAS on it. It runs on a Supermicro motherboard and has an Areca 1883 SAS HBA (flashed to IT version 0x2228). At the time after a lot of research I found a way to hack the drivers into a finished installation and the whole thing did very fine for three years.
For … reasons this box never got updated and worked just fine but for other … reasons I am having a spring clean and installed 25.04 and… the workaround I worked out last time no longer works.
Fine. But after 90mins on the forum here and one search engines in general I am still not able to install the driver.
I can be quite dense when it comes to seeing the obvious (hence my username…) but there seems to be no way to feed in drivers during the TrueNAS install process, and once it is installed, no amount of devtools, zfs set readonly=off or any such hijinx seems to make any difference.
I can’t be the only one who needs to add drivers for hardware, and there are a few guides out there, but none of them got me to seeing my SAS disks.
I would be most grateful if anyone could point me at a resource that explains this? If it exists? But Shirley…
The followup answer would be to enable dev mode & accept all the risks that go along with it. There are enough “caution, warning, dangers” in there that I don’t feel I the need to add any more.
Given the relatively low costs of a LSI 9300-8i or whatever series HBA from a known-good reseller on ebay, is trying to resurrect this card worth your time?
I would not have asked had it not worked fine for years as a TrueNAS. I will see what i can do to revive it - I installed the drivers now and it still does not see it, so perhaps the whole thing can finally go to the big playground.
I am actually fine to know that this no longer works - I completely missed the shift away from FreeBSD (under which the system used to run) and when I started with FreeNAS in the olden days, people flashing their RAID cards may never have been welcome or encouraged - but it certainly was very common then.
Maybe you would be surprised to see how many pieces of equipment have had a second lease of life through TrueNAS, and I don’t know whether you can tell how many people have been blessed with a great system who otherwise could not have afforded one - simply by recycling bits. On behalf of all those I would like to thank the developers and the community very much, from the bottom of my heart!
