SMB Service Failed to Start

TrueNAS General
1

I have a xeon (E3-1225v3) based system that has been running FreeNas/TrueNas for about 5 years. Two days ago, my SMB shares went offline on all computers on the network. I cannot re-enable the SMB share service (SMB service failed to start.).

I have tried removing an SMB share & re-adding it, but that also fails.
I was on version 11.x and attempted to upgrade to 13.x to fix the issue, but I also get random errors that prevent me from upgrading. I used a spare SSD to install a fresh copy of 13.3-u1.1 (13.0 will not install). I imported my configuration file, and SMB service still won’t enable.

There seems to be a number of threads on this specific topic, but I couldn’t find a single fix. Any thoughts?

2

Ended up doing a fresh reinstall & and importing the pools.
If anyone sees this post in the future, unfortunately, I don’t have a solution besides starting from scratch.

3

Generally you can run smbd -d 5 -i to start in interactive mode which will print errors.

Old versions of truenas did little to protect from inadvertent user-initiated permissions changes to samba state directories which often resulted in users breaking the service. Another common cause is data corruption on the boot drive.