N5200 FAQ
From NAS Website
FAQ Information
This page is very much still a work in progress, it's been suggested that we have an FAQ page to collate all the quick Q&As that have been gathering in the unofficial forums, but please feel free to add anything else you think would be useful! P.S. I suck at editing Wikis, so please feel free to tear this apart!
I've just got my n5200 installed / migrated onto a RAID5 config, and it's telling me I've got to wait 6 months for it to build!?
Don't worry, the "Remaining Time" dialogue can be a little misleading. It's not unusual to have to wait many hours for multi-terabyte arrays to migrate, and then many more hours for it to rebuild. Don't worry too much about the remaining time, the % complete indicator is much more useful. With a typical configuration a 5 x 500gb RAID-5 array takes approximately 8 hours to build.
The email notification doesn't work on my n5200, and doesn't display any error messages, what's going on?
If you're running firmware 1.00.05 (see the "About" dialogue in the WebGUI) or earlier, you might want to upgrade to 1.00.07. If you don't fancy a firmware upgrade, there are modules in this Wiki which will fix it as well.
I've upgraded my n5200 to the latest firmware and it still doesn't want to send email, with any of the options on the setup page!?
It does appear that there may be an issue with the DNS resolution of the n5200, so try using your mail servers IP address instead. If this still doesn't work, you'd be advised to start checking your mail server configuration to ensure that it is configured to accept mail from the n5200.
I've just added another hard disk to my RAID5 setup, and I can't get the Migrate RAID function to work for me at all.
If you're running firmware 1.00.05 or earlier, you might have more luck upgrading to 1.00.07 as this seems to work for some people.
I just confirmed that a migrate operation works under firmware 1.00.10. Went from 4 disk raid 5 to 5 disk raid 5. All 480GB of previous data in is accessible. All Folders are accessible. Migrate Time was about 18hrs to go from 750GB to 1000GB nominal
I'm planning on mainly using my n5200 for 'x' in a RAID5 configuration. What's my optimal stripe size?
How long is a piece of string...? Lots of opinions on this one, but larger stripe sizes do seem to offer better performance on large files. Many people are reporting good performance on 1MB stripes as opposed to 64KB.
I've just got my new n5200 out the box, but I want to get it running on the latest firmware. Am I best to configure the drives in a RAID array before I upgrade the firmware, or after?
The firmware is stored on the IDE Flashram disk as it is received. Updating before the disks are installed should be fine as well as updating after the disks are installed. Both methods have been tried and verified. This allows Thecus to sell "bare" systems with the enduser installing the drives.
I've just got my new n5200 out the box, but it's only beeping (interval aprox. 5 sec) and hangs at 'self testing'.
Check if the RAM Module is tighly assembled. The beep seems to be the normal BIOS message for RAM failure.
After copying data to my n5200 via nfs all umlauts are wrong and are not displayed over smb
nfs has some problems with iso8859-1 <-> uft8. There is a converter that did the trick for me convmv. I'm using this parameters: /raid/data/module/PERL/perl/bin/perl convmv -r --lowmem -f iso8859-1 -t utf8 /raid/data/mp3/*. You need the perl module.
An exclamation point ("!") appears in the LCD display. How do I get rid of it?
The "!" mark appears if there is an entry in the HBT log (for the LCD display driver?). It's nothing very important. To clear the mark, using the front control panel on the N5200, press the "ESC" button once to enter "log mode", then simultaneously press the "down arrow" and "enter" at the same time.
The Module Management menu only seems to be present if the RAID array is HEALTHY.
The N5200 drops its connections periodically.
I had the problem that my N5200 would drop its connections (SMB, AFP, etc.) every six hours of uptime and log the message, "The system N5200 WAN network was unplugged". That is, the connections would be dropped as soon as the Thecus hit 6 hours of uptime (or 12, 18, ...). The problem was solved by disabling DHCP on the WAN interface and setting a static IP.
The N5200 tends to get slower over a period of days/weeks until it no longer responds to disk requests until rebooted.
I had this problem on my N5200, and was able to resolve the problem by disabling Active Directory security. After further research, I found the Thecus local time may have been a few minutes off (but less than five minutes). Current experiments with the Thecus time set correctly (now using NTP) has been full speed for over two weeks.
What version of Linux does the N5200PRO run?
As of firmware 2.00.12:
root@127.0.0.1:/# uname -a
Linux N5200 2.6.13N5200 #135 Mon Sep 1 12:51:50 CST 2008 i686 unknown
What filesystem does the N5200 use?
When setting up disks on the N5200 (I am discounting iSCSI, which uses the filesystem chosen by the controlling server) ext3 is used. mdadm is used to create devices md1, md2, md3, etc..., and those devices are then added into volume groups (vg0, vg1, vg2, etc...), which are then added into logical volumes (vg0/lv0, vg1/lv0, vg2/lv0, etc...), which are then mounted on the root drive.
root@127.0.0.1:/# df
Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/ram0 54533 41200 13333 76% /
...
/dev/vg0/lv0 706143624 132724 706010900 0% /raid0/data
/dev/vg0/syslv 1015704 32988 982716 3% /raid0/sys
/dev/vg1/lv0 706143624 131264 706012360 0% /raid1/data
/dev/vg1/syslv 1015704 32836 982868 3% /raid1/sys
/dev/vg2/lv0 706143624 131264 706012360 0% /raid2/data
/dev/vg2/syslv 1015704 32836 982868 3% /raid2/sys
/dev/vg3/lv0 942708264 131264 942577000 0% /raid3/data
/dev/vg3/syslv 1015704 32836 982868 3% /raid3/sys
/dev/vg4/lv0 942708264 204612 942503652 0% /raid4/data
/dev/vg4/syslv 1015704 34100 981604 3% /raid4/sys