[rescue] Friend needs storage solution

[Steve Sandau]

>>Some things try to hard to be useable by anyone who is clueless, that
>>they become unusable by anyone with a clue...
> 
> 
> Oh, someone with a clue can work with it, but people with clue aren't
> necessarily the target audience!
> 
> One thing I think they made too complicated was the software RAID.  Not
> to mention the fact that softraid volumes won't start on boot and
> require manual intervention to be functional again *grumble*
> 
Yes, just had a run-in with this problem. Ity was compounded by having a 
flaky disk as part of a stripe set. (At least that appeared to be the 
problem from the errors we saw.) The only thing that saved my friend's 
data was a full install of FreeBSD on the same box so we had a few 
useful commands like vi, grep, awk, less, and so on. Then we rebuilt the 
stripe set and all the data magically reappeared. :-)

IMO, FreeNAS is not really worth it; you might as well just install 
FreeBSD, unless you are unable to configure anything without a web 
interface.

On the up side, I have never used the FreeBSD RAID utilities. It only 
took a couple of hours to do the install and research gvinum enough to 
recover the data on the stripe set.

Steve