Question about swapping motherboards

[EPU]

Hi, need some advice please.

I've an ASUS motherboard, which appears to have developed an issue with one of the memory slots (the IPMI and MemTest both indicate an issue with the slot, not any of the DIMM's). It's not a dealbreaker, as the board runs fine otherwise, it just means I can't use 2 of the slots and so lose 64Gb RAM. Having spoken to the supplier, it appears they can't RMA the board and have offered me a full refund if I return it.

Checking PCPartPicker, I have options for a replacement, but all of them require moving away from ASUS to another manufacturer.

Having read the threads here, it seems that aside from backing up configs, it should just be a case of swapping out the boards and FreeNAS should do the rest. Is that the case or is there anything else I need to consider ? (hardware spec is in my sig).

Thanks in advance.

 

[sretalla]

Having read the threads here, it seems that aside from backing up configs, it should just be a case of swapping out the boards and FreeNAS should do the rest. Is that the case or is there anything else I need to consider ?

There's nothing baked into a TrueNAS install that refers to specific hardware, so as long as you stay with the architecture of x64 and have the same type of NICs onboard, you should be OK with little or no disruption.

NIC changes can cause disruption if the driver change means that the name of the NIC in the OS would change for example from em0 to igb0 if you change the model of Intel NIC. This can manifest in jail or VM networking problems (but should be easily rectified... the more complex your networking setup, the more problems that may need fixing).

 

[EPU]

Thanks @sretalla

My intention is just to swap the Motherboard, and disable the onboard NIC's (as I use an Intel add-in 10Gb NIC), so nothing else, aside from the motherboard, will change.

From what you've said, this means it should swap out just fine.

 

[Chris Moore]

Thanks @sretalla

My intention is just to swap the Motherboard, and disable the onboard NIC's (as I use an Intel add-in 10Gb NIC), so nothing else, aside from the motherboard, will change.

From what you've said, this means it should swap out just fine.

FreeNAS / TrueNAS detect hardware during boot, every boot, so you could change something every time you down the system and it shouldn't hurt. The way I have my system configured, the only time I down the system is to change something on the system board. Last time I rebooted, it had been over a year, because I had not even updated the OS, since my last reboot. The only problem you might run into is if you changed the NIC, which doesn't apply in your situation, but if you did change the NIC, you would need to access the system from the local console to configure the IP address. As long as the same NIC is still in the system, the IP will stay with the NIC. I think the OS makes that association by MAC because I had to swap a system board out and all the same hardware was present, just a different MAC, and I still needed to reconfigure the IP address. I have also had to replace a SAS controller due to a failure and that presented no problem to the OS. It will find the disks as long as there is a supported controller to provide a data-path. You can move drives from a SATA controller to a SAS controller also. The OS scans all available drives at boot to find what pools are available and automatically mounts the known pools regardless of what controller is hosting the drives. A pool can even be spanned across two different controllers.
The way the system works is super resilient. I even moved platforms from Dell equipment to Supermicro. Not a hint of a problem.