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"Starting service" (but it is started)


akiller

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Hi all,

 

I believe this may be the root cause of a number of issues on my server. DrivePool appears to lose connection to its service despite the fact the service is running. I'm assuming it uses port 27525 for communication and I'm unable to manually telnet to that either. I've tried manually stopping/starting the service and that doesn't help. If you see the attached screenshot it was attempting to do this for over 12 hours.

 

The only way I can get around it is via a reboot, however I seem to have have to flip the power off because it just gets stuck at the "rebooting" stage once this happens, which is rather annoying! Which leads me to wonder if it's a driver issue?

 

I've attached the service log if it's of any help. I put a new disk in last night and had set it up to start mirroring my files to it, which I was hoping would have finished by this morning but clearly not.

 

For the record the scanner is working perfectly fine and I'm assuming you use the same communication method.

 

Cheers :).

 

 

post-1631-0-18267000-1414335297_thumb.png

DrivePool.Service-2014-10-26.log

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Actually, could you get the error reports from the system? They may indicate why it is "stuck" like this.

http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_2.x_Error_Reports

 

Also, could you get a memory dump of the DrivePool Service when it's in this state?

http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_Service_Memory_Dump

It sounds like something is causing the service to hang, and that is probably why it's hanging 

 

After doing that, could you reset the settings for StableBit DrivePool and see if that helps?

http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_Q2299585B

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Hi Chris,

 

I'm really sorry for the late reply it's been one of those weeks! I think I've identified the problem, and it's not DrivePool ;); well.. I believe it does have a bug which I'll explain but it wasn't the root cause of my problem:

 

Basically despite the fact I had ~60GB free on my C partition I discovered there was a process which slowly ate away at that free space overnight by apennding to a log file. Eventually I ended up with a 60GB log file and 0KB free on my C partition. As soon as this happens the DrivePool UI bombs out, but I can still read/write to my pool. Even once the process which created the log cleans itsself up and releases the space, giving me 60GB back, DrivePool fails to recover - even if you restart the service - until you reboot.

 

Now that I've stopped this process running DrivePool appears (touch wood..) to be rock solid again.

 

So in summary I think DrivePool may have a bug when you hit 0KB free space. I know it's rare and should never happen but it may be worth you guys investigating. Fortunately it's fairly easy to create a blank file of arbitary length to to simulate:

fsutil file [createnew] <FileName> <Length>

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/cc753059.aspx

 

Cheers,

Andrew.

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By the way, this should probably be in another thread but another "bug" I spotted.
 
I decided to remove an unused partition on one my drives so that I could extend the main partition which was already added to my pool. For whatever reason Windows decided to convert the disk from basic to dynamic when I did this and DrivePool lost all trace of the drive. I removed the missing drive from the pool but it never re-appeared under the list of available disks like I was expecting.
 
I was a bit confused as I could still see the drive and its contents in My Computer. After a few hours of pulling my hair out I found out that DrivePool won't work with dynamic disks (and then that my drive had been changed to dynamic) so I had to re-format it back to basic. As soon as I did it appeared again.
 
To avoid this frustration for other people would it be worth showing a list of unsuitable disks in the UI, with a reason why they're unsuitable?

 

 

Have to say, I quite like giving software suggestions out, usually (as a developer) I have to fend off people sending me change requests :D.

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For the forums, it's fine and we don't mind posting multiple bugs in the same thread. 

 

As for the Dynamic Disks..... The entire windows system for handling these is a mess. Which is why DrivePool doesn't support adding Dynamic Disks to the pool. There are too many possible issues with doing so.

 

Normally, when extending a partition, it shouldn't convert it to a dynamic disk, unless the partition is BEFORE the existing one on the drive.  Or extending to another drive.

 

 

But your  suggestion is definitely a good one, and I've passed it on to Alex (the developer). 

Link here: https://stablebit.com/Admin/IssueAnalysis/12384 (Will not show anything unless a public reply is made, this link is mostly for housekeeping for us)

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Yup, been testing Dynamic Disks for another ticket, and it DEFINITELY warns you that it's converting them to dynamic disks before doing so. However, like a lot of prompts in Windows.... nobody reads them (I'm guilty of this as well).

 

To be honest, you're much better off using a hardware software based RAID solution (yes, that's confusing). Such as the Silicon Images chipsets. Or a more hardware based solution, like the HighPoint RocketRAID cards. They work better, and get better performance.

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