In addition to my recent woes of attempting to upgrade from TN Core to TN Scale (Dragonfish), it also looks like my in built MOBO NIC is not up to the task anymore. It is a dreaded Realtek variety and has been struggling to sustain the load of my necessity to backup my 14TB of data.
Every so often, the network for my NAS will simply collapse and the only way I’ve found to restore the connection is to go through a reboot process.
So I come to you again dear community members in search of advice.
First, my hardware is… very old. It’s an old computer I had built for my mom years ago that dates back to 2013. Hardware as follows:
AM3 Phenom X4 965 Black Edition
Asrock Motherboard
32GB of RAM
LSI HBA SAS adapter
My first question is, is there a faster way besides a reboot that I could try to restore the network connection after it fails?
If you have physical access to the NAS (monitor, keyboard), then I guess bringing down the interface & back could work:
ip link show (lists interfaces, find the one you are having issues with)
ip link set #NAME# down
ip link set #NAME# up
Should work fine; if you are connecting remotely, do not bring down the interface you are using to connect unless you have a monitor & keyboard handy to hookup to the NAS.
I mean, I don’t see why it wouldn’t work, but not in the sense that I’m recommending it (not for any particular reason, just I haven’t ever used that specific card). Make sure the pcie x1 bus isn’t shared with something else that is in use; lotta motherboard have restrictions where connecting to x brings down or shares bandwidth with y. Check manual for your motherboard to confirm.
Depends on if you feel it is worth spending the money to do so.
My $0.02 on what I would recommend to upgrade to would be entirely dependent on your use case & budget. Otherwise maybe you’ll listen to me give an uninformed suggestion & then you’ll spend money you weren’t comfortable with & not have enough ram/cpu/storage/networking for your vms/apps/data/throughput.
Edit: Don’t forget to check other things like the ethernet cable itself before spending money that you might not have to.
Thank you all for your suggestions! I ended up getting the new NIC and will install it once it arrives tomorrow.
For now my use cases are primarily as a home storage and backup server, a VM testbed plus docker containers, and as a media server.
Performance wise, the AMD 965 appears to do it’s job well enough for the small tasks I place on it, but it certainly seems like if I were to get heavier into virtualization that having more cores and RAM would be beneficial.
