Hello,
Had some electrical power issues at my house and they might be the cause of what I am currently experiencing which is that the Configure Network Interfaces (choice 1) at the console startup yields no interfaces. My TrueNAS system had been running fine, although I am not a heavy user of the system. I can access my IPMI Supermicro web interface (so ethernet cable and that port are good) when I plug the ethernet cable into that port, but the other 2 LAN ports have no lights and seem dead. I have removed the battery to clear the CMOS and tried reseating the PCI card and booted the server to the Console setup with our the PCI card. No network interfaces. Thinking that the NICs are dead/bad but Iām not well versed with how to troubleshoot those so just looking for help from anyone who might have had similar issues in the past. I canāt imagine that anything with the jumpers on the motherboard have changed since the system was working fine and no hands were in on the system. I could replace the PCI card but not sure if that card is the actual issue as it could be something on the motherboard as well? I did have trouble last week booting to the BIOS since there is a date issue (past 2021 or somethingā¦) with the Supermicro boards. Got the Blue screen with AB in the lower right, but got past that by clearing the CMOS. Not quite sure what I should be looking for in the BIOS to confirm the NICās are working. I am looking for LAN info, correct? Donāt really see much within the BIOS about LAN. Any help is appreciated. Thanks.
Dan
- Supermicro X9SCM-F
- Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1230 V2 @ 3.30GHz (8 cores)
- 8 GiB RAM
- 2 WD Red 2TB NAS SATA drives
- Dell H310 6Gbps SAS HBA w/ LSI 9211-8i P20 IT Mode for ZFS FreeNAS unRAID
Do you have a separate NIC installed? What model? Looking at dmesg at the console and looking to see if any errors are reported for your NIC models may help. Booting a Live Linux version and seeing if the NICS show may help also. No show and we can make an educated guess the NIC or NICs are dead
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Thanks for the reply. I donāt think I have a separate NIC installed. I thought the point of the PCI card (which is the Dell H310 card right?) was to manage the hardwired NICās and the SSD drives. I ran the dmesg via the shell on the startup console and donāt see any errors. I donāt have a way of exporting that text but there is a line that says: lo0: link state changed to UP. is that the IPMI port? no other lines about a link state.
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You can try looking at the online manuals for the motherboard and IPMI. Try to see if the onboard NICS can be viewed or turned on/off in there. When you mentioned pulling the PCI card, I thought you had a separate NIC and werenāt referring to the HBA card.
At this point, I think your onboard NIC died. You can try looking at the LSPCI info and DMESG for error related to those, if you want.
This shows my two different NICs on my system in the PCI info
lspci | grep Ethernet
This shows all the info for the ixgbe driver. I expect your onboard Intel to use the same.
sudo dmesg | grep ixgbe
It is possible to turn on/off the onboard gigabit Ethernet controller in the X9SCM-F bios - in the South Bridge Config section. The default setting is Enabled, but perhaps it somehow was turned to Disabled?
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No NICs shown with the first command, although the IPMI port does work. Should that lspci | grep Ethernet command yield something for the Ethernet IPMI port? Assuming the NICs are dead, then since they are hardwired (yes?) onto the motherboard then I am looking at a new Supermicro board or something equivalent.
The response on the second command was āuser root is not allowed to execute ā/sbin/dmesgā as root on TrueNASā
You can try it without the āsudoā portion. I was using the GUI shell. I am not sure if the IPMI port will show within TrueNAS
I had read that the LANs could be configured in the South Bridge part of the BIOS but the only things showing for me in that area are USB functions, Legacy USB Support, BIOS EHCI hand-off and Port 60/64 Emulation. All are Enabled.
I had tried that as well, but same result
It does on mine (Iām not sure which one of the 2 Intelās it is, though).
This is a long shot, but try pulling the BIOS battery, and letting the board sit cold until all the BIOS config drains away from the NVRAM. Then reset the BIOS to defaults after replacing the battery with a fresh button cell. Reboot and then set your BIOS to what you had it before.
I suspect this is because a weak BIOS battery has confused the board into thinking it doesnāt have onboard NICs anymore.
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Donāt a lot of these boards survive bios resets on battery removal & require pins to be jumped? I remember having some trouble undoing settings on my board & pulling the battery did nothing. Had to follow instructions to shorting a jumper to get it back to defaults.
Speaking of jumpers, might be worth checking this one (no clue how the jumpers magically moved by themselves, but whatever):
Jumpers for BIOS reset:
Writing in proper paragraphs would help getting more people to read/grasp all that.
I always laugh when I see comments from computer people that have the word āconfusedā in them.
A computer never gets āconfusedā. There is not in-between, only yes or no. 0 or 1.
I get it, software people never got to build a computer from scratch or have much hardware or server experience, but stop using those inexact terms once you get serious about this.
I would take ācorruptedā, but then. never seen a corrupted bios due to bad/low battery.
(Once battery voltage drops to a certain level, the bios simply goes to defaults).
Unless there is a BIOS setting that can disable the NICs, a āfreshā CMOS battery will change nothing.
(Even with the battery out. Defaults should be for all devices to be on/available).
This is an add-on pcie card, so it should be available regardless. I have had some quad Ethernet fail suddenly, but never from a power outage (UPS). Some failed due to high inrush current when powering on.
Try a different pcie slot first.
Then try with a different OS. WinPE would be my choice and you should know within 3 minutes, if Windows sees the NICs or not.
(they would show under Device Manager, even if there is no drivers for them).
I donāt know as much about computers as the next guy, but Iām confused because I thought OP was talking about the NICs that are soldered onto the mobo, not a PCIe NIC.
As far as āconfusedā bioses; Iāve had to pull out pogo pins or desolder bios chips a dozen times or so to reflash bioses that are so far gone that any built-in recovery methods are no longer relevant. (Iām in no way implying that OP has a corrupted BIOS).
Realistically though, youāre likely close to the truth. Iām more suspect of a jumper being in the wrong place, a completely fubar cable, or an actual physical fault, instead of the hardware itself being āconfusedā.
Confusion on machines begins when a ā0ā should always have been a ā1ā (vice-versa) & something beyond reasonable control made it otherwise.
LAN 2 is now working and I can access the TrueNAS web GUI! Thanks for all the suggestions and help. LAN1 seems dead and the IPMI is still working. Previously I had been using LAN1, but that port is dead now. So, changing the jumper on JPL2 seems to have been the step that got LAN2 working.
I had previously taken the CMOS battery out and let the system discharge/cool over night and additionally I had shorted out the solder points near the CMOS to fully discharge. None of that ever seemed to help. Although I did also recently change out the CMOS battery with a fresh one. Old one came in at 3.1 volts.
Now I have a date conflict between TrueNAS and the BIOS. I think my next step is to get the BIOS updated to 2.3a. As far as I can tell the system seems to freeze if I go past 2021 and TrueNAS recognizes the date in the past on the BIOS (2012 right now) and that is causing some update and email problems, maybe other issues as well. Thatās a separate issue.
Dan
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