OK!

Tried to install ClearOS 7 from USB, didn't work, tried from CD-ROM, it worked but with BootLoaderError: failed to write boot loader configuration
so during boot i added the dmraid -r -E /dev/sda and it worked!

Now i'm stuck trying to install some modules and i get an 'perl(Time::ParseDate) error

and now
Exception: [u'ERROR with transaction check vs depsolve:', 'proftpd >= 1.3.4a is needed by app-ftp-core-1:2.1.20-1.v7.noarch'

UPDATE!
after yum update it went ok, it started installing.

UPDATE 2
installed the recommended driver r8169 and now nothing works anymore, it shows only the loopback interface, what to do?

Can you remember if you installed any particular drivers in the past? This is a long shot, but what is the result of:

lspci -k | grep Eth -A 3

uname -r

You are going to research whether this is a software problem, or co-incidentally the hardware started to fail about the same time you started the re-installs. Why did you re-install anyway if the system had been working well for 2-3 years? I take it you don't have a full system backup of the originally working system...

At http://danda.poweredbyclear.com/master-frame-crash.html you will find some information which may or may not help you. Still a work in progress interrupted when I was hospitalized, so beware as it is still draft status...

Hello and thank you for answering,
@ Tony
My main reason for reinstalling the system was the intrusion prevention not working, second reason is that there were more people playing around with it and i needed a fresh install to avoid any surprises left around the system.
I have only backups of the home folders and the mysql, resolv.conf and some other minor files (to me the most important things), alltho there should be also the standard backup made by the system. I will read throu the link you sent me and see if it will help.

@Nick
I never installed any drivers, everytime i installed it, the system worked out of the box. The mainboard is a miniitx mainboard witrh a T2510 core duo processor and a realtek gigabit and a marvell NIC, both onboard. (as you would expect, the link is down and i cannot access the machine to give you the output of the lspci

When i reinstalled the system i cleaned all fans, i checked and also replaced the RAM, the capacitors on the board looked fine to me alltho i dind't check them but i would notice a bad cap. On the power supply i have hooked up also my EchoLife HG865 GPON (2A/12V) and the Yeastar PBX (rated at 5A but i don't think it drains so much power). The same configuration was working well also before.

You can run the commands from the console (alt+f2 from the GUI). I don't need the results verbatim, just the type of NIC, the driver in use and the kernel version.

i have no access to the machine until monday..

Here we have it:

lspci:
01:00.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88E8053 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 15)
Subsystem: SysKonnect Device 4340
Kernel driver in use: sky2
Kernel modules: sky2
--
02:08.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation NM10/ICH7 Family LAN Controller (rev 02)
Subsystem: Intel Corporation Device 0000
Kernel driver in use: e100
Kernel modules: e100

2.6.32-573.1.1.v6.i686

I would keep going down Tony's hardware approach for the moment.

There is an alternative driver for the 88E8053 NIC (sk98lin) which is the one on Marvell's site. There is also a kmod version of the sk98lin which would be better to use. Unfortunately you are running the i686 version of ClearOS and I don't have the facility compile drivers for it. I can only do x64 drivers. Tim Burgess has some drivers pre-compiled but I don't have any links to where he holds them at my work. I'll have a look at home this evening and see if I have current links there. If you can find it, it could be worth trying.

I've found a link to Tim's repo. You can get the driver here.

Nick Howitt wrote:

I've found a link to Tim's repo. You can get the driver here.

thank you for the link,
i've installed the driver and i cannot get the system to use it:
lspci -k | grep Eth -A 3
01:00.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88E8053 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 15)
Subsystem: SysKonnect Device 4340
Kernel driver in use: sky2
Kernel modules: sk98lin, sky2

in /lib/modules/.../modules.alias
i made
alias pci:v000011ABd00004346sv*sd*bc*sc*i* sk98lin
and
# alias pci:v000011ABd00004346sv*sd*bc*sc*i* sky

where did i go wrong?

Create a file /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-sky2.conf (it can be called anything.conf). In it put one line:

blacklist sky2

At this point you can reboot which is a bit drastic. Alternatively, from the console, try:

rmmod sky2

insmod sk98lin

service network restart

Don't do this from a PuTTy session, and especially not from a session connected to the sky2 card.

Hello.
i managed to load the driver, reset the BIOS to failsafe and still i get the lockups....
I am really considering a new board, i liked this one because it is a miniitx and it's mini....

what to do, what to do?!.....

I have a couple of PC's at home with a Gigabyte H97N-WiFi mini-itx board. It has 2 wired NIC's and WiFi which is way OTT for a desktop. I just use one wired NIC. In any case I would tend to avoid recommending on-board WiFI because of problems locating the antenna for good coverage. It would probably make a good home server. Mine have an i3 4130T low power processor and fanless PSU and it draws about 20w as a desktop so should make a good low power server.

Hello,
i.ve just purchased a GIGABYTE GA-N3150N-D3V, quad core with 2 NIC's. Hopefully this lockup thing is going to end soon i am also going to switch to version 7, just hope that i will be able to import the sql database.

That board uses Realtek NICs - probably a variant of the RTL8111/RTL8168
If so, make sure to use the r8168 driver and not 8169.

Tony Ellis wrote:

That board uses Realtek NICs - probably a variant of the RTL8111/RTL8168
If so, make sure to use the r8168 driver and not 8169.

that sounds like the 8169 is a bad driver...

Not a bad driver - just the incorrect driver for the 8168 chipset. Realtek also produce a 8169 chipset which is for the older style PCI cards. I have a few and the 8169 driver works well with them. The 8168 chipset is PCI Express - quite different, and thus the 8169 driver is only partially compatible. Enough to make it seem to work, but incompatible enough to cause hangs, slow transfer etc. Just a matter of matching the chipset with the correct driver. Unfortunately, the CentOS/ClearOS Version 6.x distribution only has the r8169 driver and therefore installs this by default, there being no proper r8168 driver. Hence the need for you to add this manually. This is all true for Version 6.7. I don't know whether for Version 7.x the r8168 driver has been added to the default install. Hence my warning to check what you have and the driver you use...

ClearOS 7 is the same - no r8168 driver. I have a kmod one compiled here and Tim's one is here. They should be functionally the same (but not exactly the same as mine will have my name in the rpm and, presumably, Tim's has his. Also they may have been compiled against different kernels but it should not matter).

For ClearOS 6.7 my 64-bit kmod driver is here and Tim's is here. Tim's is one version older than mine. Tim also has a 32-bit driver which is a bit older here. I don't have a 32-bit driver.

How is the install going on the GIGABYTE GA-N3150N-D3V?

Care to give us an update... seems an interesting little board.

I've had a thought on this board. If you have installed my r8168 driver, can you check it is being used with "lspci -k | grep Eth -A 3". If it is still using the r8169 driver, please can you install this r8169 driver as well? It will remove r8169 compatibility for your NIC and a reboot should then get the r8168 driver working with your NIC.

.

what to do, i've spent yesterday and today trying to figure out how to install clearos and i came to theese conclusions:
1. boot from USB....no way
2. install 6.7 -> no video after boot
3. install 7.1 -> bootloader error, i don't find the place where to input the dmraid -r -E /dev/sda

.................................

In 6.7 when booting try changing the vga parameter in the grub line (press enter when told when booting) to something like vga=791. Add it if it does not exist on the line.

You'll need my ClearOS6 drivers instead of the ClearOS7 ones for ClearOS 6.y. The r8169 one should not have made any difference if you had loaded my r8168 driver. All it does is stop the r8169 driver from loading for your RTL8111/8168 card. At a minimum you need the r8168 driver and then, if ClearOS is still loading the r8169 driver (do "lspci -k | grep Eth -A 3" to check), you need to also load my r8169 driver or blacklist the existing r8169 driver.

That GIGABYTE GA-N3150N-D3V board has a PCI slot. ClearOS 6.x still has good support for older NICs. Do you have a spare older PCI NIC you could install and ignore, or better still disable in BIOS, the on-board ones? This would give you a better chance to install and get things running in standalone mode; then set about fixing the on-board NICs and finally changing to gateway mode.

I agree with Tony. That chipset has always been problematic not only for ClearOS but also other operating systems as well...including Windows.

Hello,
i've bought the board especially to fit into my 1U rackcase and because of the low power cunsumption 8W TDP, wich is rather impressive. Most of theese kind of boards come with Realtek RTL8111/RTL8168 chipsets so there's not much space to work around this problem.

I managed to reinstall ClearOS 7 because my linux knowledge doesn't include driver installation and left it overnight to update. On monday i will see that to do about the drivers.

i am really losing it...

after having trouble with samba 4...so i decided to try clearos 6.7, installed it, graphics didn't work, i messed around with it and got to a screen with 2 x the main screen mirrored inside wich was freezing after some seconds.
Now, trying to reinstall, the system boots up, then a black screen with the mouse appears and the it freezes.

There have been many appends here in the past regarding a blank screen. If you have tried them all and failed this would be my approach in your situation - have to make an assumption or two here...

1. Go back to the old board and attach the disk that will be used on the new board
2, Disable the on-board NICs and install a PCI NIC
3. Install as a standalone machine and get everything installed, registered, updated rpms etc
4. Ensure you can access this system using ssh, wincsp or Putty etc and webconfig on port 81 is reachable.
5. See elsewhere on these forums how to disable the graphics screen and have the machine come up with a simple terminal logon screen. Alternatively use yum to remove the tconsole, gconsole and clearos-console rpms if you are like me and never use the graphics screen. Ensure the machine boots to the logon screen.
5. Transfer disk and NIC to the new board. Even if the screen is still unreadable, you should still be able the access the machine webconfig screen and with ssh etc and install the correct NIC drivers, enable the on-board NICs, change to gateway mode and etc.
6. With the on-board NICs working, remove the PIC NIC in the configs and then physically remove...

Hi and thank you for all the great help. In the end i did this:
1. install Clearos 6.7 32bit
2. the api still doesn't work i get the "Number of created screens does not match number of detected devices" error when trying Xorg -configure but with Alt+Fx i can switch to console so it doesn't matter that much.
3. i changed the driver to RTL8168 and things are working fine.

Conclusions:
1.I as relative linux newbie couldn't install ClearOS 7 on my GIGABYTE GA-N3150N-D3V motherboard, it cannot be installed via USB, when booting i must run the dmraid command to avoid the bootinstaller problem and even when passing theese problems, the system seems to run quite bad. I mistakenly installed SAMBA 4 wich didn't work for some reason and i couldnt uninstall it so i had to reinstall.
2. I will stick to clearos 6.7 for as long as i can and maybe switch to the 64.bit version but i am not sure if it's the right choice.

ANYWAY, you helped me out alot and i wanted to thank you for this!

Glad you have it working. How is the performance?

One thing has been niggling my mind and reviewing this thread I see now what it is . You talked at one stage about having to use "dmraid -r -E /dev/sda". Looked up what it did. What that command is meant to do is remove metadata written to a disk by a BIOS that had fake raid enabled. I downloaded the manual for your new board and it doesn't appear to support any form of fake raid. So why was the dmraid erase command necessary? Either the disk had come from a machine that had been using fake raid, or the first sectors of the disk has something unusual the was messing up the install that the "erase" cleared. If in fact had come from a machine with fake raid, the proper way is to use the utility routine in the BIOS for that machine to remove the raid array. However, a "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=4096" would have nicely wiped all traces of anything from the first section of the disk :-)

Tony Ellis wrote:

Glad you have it working. How is the performance?

One thing has been niggling my mind and reviewing this thread I see now what it is . You talked at one stage about having to use "dmraid -r -E /dev/sda". Looked up what it did. What that command is meant to do is remove metadata written to a disk by a BIOS that had fake raid enabled. I downloaded the manual for your new board and it doesn't appear to support any form of fake raid. So why was the dmraid erase command necessary? Either the disk had come from a machine that had been using fake raid, or the first sectors of the disk has something unusual the was messing up the install that the "erase" cleared. If in fact had come from a machine with fake raid, the proper way is to use the utility routine in the BIOS for that machine to remove the raid array. However, a "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=4096" would have nicely wiped all traces of anything from the first section of the disk :-)

Hello,
the "dmraid -r -E /dev/sda" option was the only way to get the install to finish, it would stop with an error when trying to write the bootloader and i fount it on
this topic, i had the exact same problem. The disk was the one from my old machine. 1 Tb WD Red.

the BIOS allows only RAID AHDI and IDE as settings for the SATA port.


The performance is not very impressive, i use only Zurmo and some minor php scripts, and sincerely Zurmo is working more or less the same as on the old system, this is why i was considering the 64 bit version.

Thanks - that link is similar to what I suspected - a means of clearing something on the disk that was fouling up the install.

I am not so sure you will see that much of a speed difference between 64-bit and 32-bit. I have two identical motherboards, one running ClearOS 6.7 32-bit and the other 64-bit. Hard to tell the difference. If anything, the 32-bit is a little quicker but that is probably because each only has 2 Gig memory, penalizing the 64-bit as 64-bit code usually takes more memory for the same function leaving less free for buffers etc compared to my 32-bit machine. Where 64-bit comes into its own when you install more than 4 Gig memory and have the applications to make use of it. The flat memory model of the 64-bit is much better and more efficient, as well as having a much higher memory limit. The 32-bit fudges the way it uses memory over 4 Gig. I also suspect that kernel enhancements will mean that ClearOS 7 is faster - but that doesn't seem an option for you at the moment...