While it may seem weird, I’ve been looking for a way to headless boot a system, so I can quickly run TRIM on a bunch of SATA SSDs (LSI 9305 doesn’t pass this through for my Crucial MX500s), then put everything away.
Live Booting w/ sshd
I was looking around, and there’s no easy way of starting up a Linux Live environment with sshd present and running with root user access (security issue).
But it appears as though TrueNAS SCALE 25.10 allows using TrueNAS Connect remotely to install the OS which means all I’d need is a USB->SATA adapter or another USB drive, and I can then install and run TrueNAS headless.
Quirks
Sadly, there’s no “live” environment. You still have to install it, but I like that I can use it for this purpose. Not sure how it’ll work when the pricing model becomes a thing, but today, I can do a headless install.
My Use Case
In my case, the server board I wanna use only has VGA-out (even my newest ones do), and I don’t have a VGA display other than a 32" TV which I don’t wanna lug around. Because of this, I need a headless boot environment, and TrueNAS Connect seems to be the solution :).
Something must be wrong. I think you need at least a keyboard to start TrueNAS from the new GRUB prompt because it wants you to choose either TrueNAS or the Serial Port version.
I guess that’s a flaw in all this. You’ll never know if it gets to that point without a screen :(.
Even though there’s a default. It doesn’t do the countdown. It stays on the GRUB screen forever.
I ran into a different issue where hitting [ENTER] caused it to reboot the system, and then it didn’t come back up again. Something weird’s going on there, and I can’t tell if it’s TrueNAS SCALE 25.10 RC or my board.
I have IPMI, but the board is so old, it uses some Java thing that doesn’t work, so I can’t use it.
@elvisimprsntr I have a Startech VGA to HDMI dongle. Not sure if it’s any different, but none of the CLI stuff would show when I tried it with a portable HDMI display. I gave up trying after that.
Either way, it’s much more convenient for me to do this stuff remotely on a headless system. I never have a monitor connected to my servers.
I’ve never seen it stall out at GRUB in that manner - normally it’s either “flashing cursor” which is typically bad media, or “doesn’t find boot media at all” which is usually dodgy BIOS/UEFI.
It appears the CPU soldered into that motherboard has a 3.3V problem where it can’t pull up or something?
I was looking it up, and it’s called the Intel C2000 bug. I’d never heard of it until now, but it affects boards like the ASRock C2750D4I.
I don’t really understand it, but I realized this morning that I could use a spare my Epyc board with two SlimSAS ports that’ll provide enough miniSAS HD ports. Sadly, I don’t think I have enough adapters, so I dunno what I’ll do at this point.
Java Console
@saspus It won’t even let me download the JAR anymore, and I don’t have an old enough Java installed to run the Java console anyway nor do I want to install it. Lastly, I tried in the past, and Chrome wouldn’t let me.
Serial Console vs VGA
@elvisimprsntr Are you saying that the serial console redirect setting in IPMI is causing issues with VGA out when using an HDMI adapter? The VGA out works fine btw. It’s just that I don’t see anything over HDMI when using a VGA adapter.
But I’m wondering if that’s also related to the C2000 error and something to do with USB port power.
Again, the solution to this is in an appropriate Docker container. You can even run it in Docker Desktop on your PC. I gave a link above. But that won’t help you if your motherboard’s bricked by the C2000 bug.
I had no clue this was a problematic chipset until a few nights ago when I spent hours trying to figure out what was going on. Took a lot of troubleshooting.
The board had been working perfectly fine for years!
I know a buddy who’s good with soldering. I could ask him to help me fix the board, but the solutions are ALL OVER the place. I’m not sure which one’ll work.
The solution I went with
All I wanted was something simple to TRIM 130+ SSDs.
That C2000-based board had 12 SATA ports, and I have SATA (host) → SAS connectors that work with direct-attach boards. Since I wasn’t using it, it was supposed to be simple to setup with a headless live environment.
I finally did it though! I had to break out my spare Epyc board and a brand new-in-box processor with a brand new-in-box heatsink. Long story on why I have multiple of these.
That Epyc board comes with two SlimSAS connectors that do SATA or NVMe. I only needed SATA for TRIM; remember, LSI cards don’t pass it through to my Crucial MX500 drives.
Since I modded my Storinator XL60 with 128 x 2.5 drive bays, I have spare direct-attach boards. I used SlimSAS to 2xSFF-8643 cables which plug directly into those Storinator boards.
It let me hotswap those 134 SSDs with ease! The setup was jank, but I could do 16 at a time, and that saved a lot of time.
Not headless
Unlike my aging C2000 board, the Epyc has HTML-based console access, so I didn’t need the TV (with VGA), but I kept it there since it was already on my workbench. All I needed SSH for was copying over the “TRIM all these drives at the same time” bash script.
supermicro has an ios and android app called IPMIView, it may get you by. I have run the IOS app on my mac to get a remote console. Somewhere I also found a docker build with an old IPMI java version of Firefox.
Rob
