Month: December 2018

FreeNAS installation failed – Operation not permitted

Posted on by Jesper Ramsgaard

Ran into an annoying problem, have been having this problem multiple times in the past, and never remember what the fix is. So now it’s on the blog for the next time that I need it. Use the shell option in the FreeNAS installer, the disks that I wanted to install onto was ada0 and ada1.

1. sysctl kern.geom.debugflags=0x10
2. dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ada0 bs=512 count=1 && dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ada1 bs=512 count=1

This will wipe out the sectors that keep the partition schema and afterward, you can install FreeNAS without problems.

ESXi – physical memory population

Posted on by Jesper Ramsgaard

Had en interesting problem where a ESXi host only showed it had 30GB of memory, but the motherboard was populated with 6*8GB modules. In earlier versions of ESXi 5.5< it was possible to use dmidecode to show how the physical hardware was populated. But since 6.0> that have been removed.

The new command to find those kind of information are now “smbiosDump”

smbiosDump | grep -A 6 'Memory Device'

You can also just run smbiosDump without any paramenters and you get a hole lot of information to crawl through.