Helios4 Support

[customer001]

Once gain my helios4 has REBOOTED because the power cord was touched by an ethernet cord. Guys... if I lose my data I'm going to be very very angry. I want a power cord replacement ASAP

[sirleon]

You should try to be more polite.

[gprovost]

6 hours ago, customer001 said:

Once gain my helios4 has REBOOTED because the power cord was touched by an ethernet cord. Guys... if I lose my data I'm going to be very very angry. I want a power cord replacement ASAP

 

As send by PM, we will send you on monday a new power adapter. Meanwhile to avoid frustration and risk of data loss, I would strongly recommend to stop using the faulty power adapter. Sorry for the trouble and thanks for your patience.

[gprovost]

On 8/23/2019 at 11:57 PM, fred_jones said:

I'm trying to install my OLED display and having trouble with sys-oled. Specifically it will not run.

 

It is installed.

 

The i2c device has been detected. Still nothing in the display. Ideas?

 

Is the sys-oled app running ?

sudo systemctl status sys-oled.service

 

[AgentPete]

On 10/29/2018 at 8:37 AM, NickS said:

OLED panel

Here's my version of the sys-oled script with various panels for...

System Logo;

System Load, Fan & Temperature;

HDD activity;

Network activity;

Temperature & Clock

 

Anyone wishing to deploy it will need to change the location of their HDDs in status_hdd()

Also change location of  temperature sensor in cpu_temp() depending on your Kernel

 

Apologies for the crude code - Python is not my favourite!

oled.py

 

 

There are some really nice examples of even more creative uses of the OLED display over on GitHub, including a graphical clock,  vertical scroller, display sysinfo, a Tweet scroller, weather update, and so on.  Unfortunately, they all need some adapting, which is beyond my pay grade. But hopefully, a coder might be interested…?

[Zed]

Are there any plans to do another run?

[gprovost]

12 hours ago, Zed said:

Are there any plans to do another run?

 

We will announce soon our next roadmap ;-)

[prok]

Hello, I'm going through the setup tutorial, but I'm unable to connect to the Helios4 via serial port. I'm running PuTTY on Windows, and installed the FTDI driver (via setup executable) from the page linked in the installation guide. When I attempt to connect, nothing happens. The device shows under Device Manager using the COM3 port. I tried setting the speed to 115200 for the COM3 port via Windows settings, but that didn't make a difference. Is there something I'm missing?

Edited August 29, 2019 by prok
more info

[jimandroidpc]

My OMV was updated & running fine. doing rsnapshots from 1 drive to another. just started getting this error after the last update. Any ideas?

 

 

[aprayoga]

1 hour ago, prok said:

Hello, I'm going through the setup tutorial, but I'm unable to connect to the Helios4 via serial port. I'm running PuTTY on Windows, and installed the FTDI driver (via setup executable) from the page linked in the installation guide. When I attempt to connect, nothing happens. The device shows under Device Manager using the COM3 port. I tried setting the speed to 115200 for the COM3 port via Windows settings, but that didn't make a difference. Is there something I'm missing?

 

Hi,

Just wanted to make sure, do you see something like in screenshot below?

 

 

 

[prok]

20 minutes ago, aprayoga said:

Hi,

Just wanted to make sure, do you see something like in screenshot below?

 

 

Yes, my device properties look like that.

[gprovost]

@jimandroidpc This an OMV issue, please go on their forum to report the issue. It seems to be problem related to RRDtool which is used to collect stats from difference device of the system (disk, network, cpu load, etc...). It doesn't look like a major problem. But anyway this is not the right place to report the issue.

 

@prok When you system is powered on, do you see LED8 ON and LED1 blinking ?

If yes, then it means your system is up and running, therefore your issue is effectively on establishing the serial connection.

If no,  then it means something else is wrong and that could explain why you don't see anything on the serial console.

 

[prok]

@gprovost Thanks for the response. I do see LED8 on and LED1 blinking, but I figured out that my issue was the login prompt wasn't printing even though the connection was successful. I'm assuming it's a problem with my instance of PuTTY, since I'm able to see the password prompt if I enter a username. Thanks again.

[AgentPete]

A minor question. The fans on my unit go to “max” if it is shutdown (via OMV). This isn't a temp "cool-down", they will stay in this state until the unit is repowered.  Other than isolating the unit from the mains, is there any software remedy for this? Thanks.

[pekkal]

On 8/23/2019 at 6:30 AM, gprovost said:

@customer001 Please send me private message with your details and order number.

 

@pekkal Well based on the picture I can see cracks on the OLED display (bottom right corner of the diplay), so you might have tighten the screw a bit too hard and bend the PCB which can have effect on how operate the display. You can also send me private message and see what we can do.

 

 

Thanks! Changing the display fixed the issue: tighten the screws with fingers only!

[gprovost]

@AgentPete  We designed Helios4 as a 24 / 7 server board with the idea you won’t shut it down or if you do you would just unplug the AC/DC adapter (like raspberry pi). However there is a suspend mode that you can use and then perform a wake-on-lan.

Anyhow I must admit it would have been better to have a proper shutdown mode. In our next product we will design with a dedicated power management IC in order to support power off mode.

[AgentPete]

6 hours ago, gprovost said:

@AgentPete  We designed Helios4 as a 24 / 7 server board with the idea you won’t shut it down or if you do you would just unplug the AC/DC adapter (like raspberry pi). However there is a suspend mode that you can use and then perform a wake-on-lan.

Anyhow I must admit it would have been better to have a proper shutdown mode. In our next product we will design with a dedicated power management IC in order to support power off mode.

Not a problem, very easy to fit a switch into the power cord, or to plug into a wall socket Just wanted to make sure there wasn’t a patch I should have applied.

[condetec_r&d]

Just got a couple of devices from the third batch a few weeks ago. I'm not a hardware nor a linux expert but, it has been really interesting to get to work with this devices as prototypes for NAS deployments.

 

I've read as much as I could searching for this, but couldn't find a straight forward answer... since we want to make the most out of this little devices I was wondering:

 

As far as I understand, the SATA ports on the Helios4 have PM features, and if that is right, it means that with a SATA port multiplier board it should be theoretically possible to attach more than 4 hard drives, right?

But on some part of the documentation I also found a statement of a max 48 TB on 4 drives, and a top 16 TB on a single device.

Also, since the power consumption documented with 4 drives is so below the stated capacity of the provided power supply (12v@8a=96watts), could it be possible to power those extra devices trough molex splitters?

 

Could you help me clarify this?

Thanks!

[SweetKick]

I've just finished the setup of my Helios4 Batch 3 device and I'm having trouble with the Wake-on-LAN (WoL) feature.

I've followed the instructions on the Wiki, despite the note saying WoL should enable by default as of Armbian 5.77 my 5.91 Debian Stretch installation's eth0 device did not have WoL enabled (sudo ethtool eth0 | grep Wake).

While following the steps to manually enable WoL (sudo ethtool -s eth0 wol g) did change the flag the systemd service didn't persist it across reboots, the service didn't seem to run/apply post reboot and produced errors:

Sep 01 17:18:51 helios4 systemd[1]: Starting Wake-on-LAN for eth0...
Sep 01 17:18:51 helios4 ethtool[1491]: Cannot set new wake-on-lan settings: Operation not supported
Sep 01 17:18:51 helios4 ethtool[1491]:   not setting wol
Sep 01 17:18:51 helios4 systemd[1]: Started Wake-on-LAN for eth0.

I ended up following these NetworkManager steps and was able to get the WoL 'g' flag to persist across reboots.

 

My issue is that after executing the "sudo systemctl suspend" command the Helios4 does appear to suspend (fans go to low speed, network connection drops) but after 1-2 min the device seems to reboot itself automatically and come back online.

I even unplugged the Ethernet cable post suspend to ensure no magic packets were received and the issue persists. Has anyone else encountered this issue or can confirm WoL is working for them?

 

Everything else about the device seems to function correctly, I did notice some odd behavior with the power supply such that after plugging it into an outlet there is a slight delay before the green light comes on and powers on the Helios4, seems stable once running though.

 

Thanks.

[gprovost]

@condetec_r&d The Armada 388 SoC used by Helios4 supports Port Multiplier (PM)—Performs FIS-Based-Switching as defined in the SATA working group PM definition. We tested only once with a PM card (1 to 5 Ports) based on JMB321 chipset and it works as expected. But we haven't done any throughout tests, so unfortunately we don't have enough data to give recommendation on PM usage.

 

Regarding the advertised max raw capacity of 48TB, this doesn't take into account Port Multiplier usage. It was just the max raw capacity using 4x of the biggest NAS HDD available at that time on the market.

 

Yes the PSU could in principal support couple of additional drives, however the specs of the PSU is taking in consideration HDD spin-up current spike at start-up. Unless you are sure you can staggered the HDD spin-up at startup using PUIS mode (unfortunately a lot of drive don't support this mode), then you can forget using the same PSU to supply the HDD connected to the Port Multiplier.

 

 

 

[gprovost]

@SweetKick Regarding the issue of WoL not being enable at each startup, there is effectively a timing issue that seems to be new... the eth0 interface is not yet ready when helios4-wol.service is triggered. I'm going to look at this and see how to fix that.

 

Regarding the other issue where your system reboot 1-2 minute after the system has been put in suspend mode, my guess is because you have installed OpenMediaVault. OMV install watchdog service by default. When the system is put in standby / suspend mode the watchdog is not stopped, therefore since nothing will be kicking the watchdog in that state, the watchdog will reset the system after 60sec.

The workaround for now is to disable watchdog service.

 

sudo systemctl disable watchdog

 

Note: you will need to reboot after you disable the watchdog in order to ensure the watchdog is stopped.

 

This also something I was supposed to investigate, in order to see how to make systemcl disable / enable watchdog before / after going to suspend mode.

 

Edit:

Actually I forgot but I did work with OMV guys to fix the watchdog / suspend issue here : https://github.com/openmediavault/openmediavault/issues/343 But the fix only made to it OMV5.

You can add manually the tweak for OMV4,  by creating files /lib/systemd/system-sleep/openmediavault and /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/openmediavault with the code you find in this commit : https://github.com/openmediavault/openmediavault/pull/345/commits/1c162cf69ed00beccdfe65501cb93f6fb1158df0
 

Edit 2:

I fixed the issue related to WoL not being enable at startup. The issue was now that we rely completely on NetworkManager to configure the network interface, the unit file that enabled WoL on eth0 didn't use anymore the right target dependency and was called too early. Just edit /lib/systemd/system/helios4-wol.service,

 

Replace :

Requires=network.target
After=network.target

 

by :
After=network-online.target
Wants=network-online.target

 

then do sudo systemctl daemon-reload and reboot the system

 

[SweetKick]

@gprovost I am running OMV 4 and the watchdog service was the issue.

I reverted back to the default WoL configuration then adjusted the existing helios4-wol.service file with the "network-online.target" changes, I see the Wiki was updated as well.  Creating the two "openmediavault" files with the contents from your commit link and giving them execute permissions solved the issue.

 

Thanks.

[Last_phil]

Hi guys,

first of all sorry I'm not technical at all so my questions might be a bit dumb

 

I have an helios 1 gen I think on which I have installed OMV and it has been working since day one. 2 months ago I needed to move it from the room where it was. I haven't took the time to plug it back. I just tried to turn it on this morning and I can't connect to the OMV or even with putty via SSH.

 

At first the led 1 was not on so I hit that reset button and now I can see that green light so I guess there's something booting up. The fan are full speed and never stop.

I tried to connect via putty via serial, but I can't seem to do much.

 

any hint on what I should try?

 

thanks

 

 

 

[paulhart]

HI,

 

I recently received and set up my Batch 3 Helios - it's working like a charm so far!

 

Question: How do you make a backup image of the SD card so that, if/when it fails, one can quickly create a new card by imaging a configured card? Is this something you can do while the card is in use, or do you need to take the device offline while making the image?

 

Thanks,

 

Paul

[FarS1GHT]

I have a Helios4 Gen 3. Last night it was storming bad and the power was flickering. I decided to unplug all electronics to keep them safe. After the storm has passed I plugged everything back in. I noticed that the Helios4 was making a continuous beep noise. I could even hear it in another room. Basically a very high pitch beeeeeeeep that never stops. I was hoping it would go away but it didn't. 

 

Following morning I removed the board from the enclosure to identify if it was the power supply, hard drives, or the board making the noise. I removed everything from the board then just plugged in power, beep is back. 

 

I'm assuming there is something bad with it and it's going to fail. I don't believe I can exchange it. I've invested so much money and time into this with 40TB of storage and waiting for the unit to get manufactured and shipped to me. Funny thing is, when it's on it still works as intended and I still can login to OMV, etc.

 

I would appreciate any and all help with trying to diagnose this sound as I believe there is no speaker on the board or moving parts. I also can't sleep with it running next door. 

[FarS1GHT]

Update!

 

I figured out the issue. I have Daisy chained 4 USB fans with the provided USB ports and I had left those plugged in while testing. I unplugged them and the sound went away. Then I kind of juggled around the cables and plugged them back in and viola. No more noise! Maybe it was drawing too much power or something. I will use an external power supply for them. 

[gprovost]

@Last_phil So you are saying the LED1 is blinking yes ?  If LED1 is blinking it means the OS has booted, however it can be in a degraded mode explaining why you cannot SSH.

What do you see on the serial console ?

 

 

@paulhart You should refer to the following thread.

 

@FarS1GHT Yeah not really recommended what you are doing with those daisy chained fans. Even the Heliso4 USB power rails have over current and thermal protection, it hasn't been design for some funky power supply use case

[dazhan98]

Hi,

 

I own a helios4 batch 3 and just curious, does anyone know how long it usually takes for an armbian release of a debian update? they just released 10.1, I was thinking of waiting for a Helios4 image before setting everything.

 

Best Regards,

David

[Last_phil]

10 hours ago, gprovost said:

@Last_phil So you are saying the LED1 is blinking yes ?  If LED1 is blinking it means the OS has booted, however it can be in a degraded mode explaining why you cannot SSH.

What do you see on the serial console ?

 

 

@gprovost actually it's not blinking it's always on. when I connect on with putty it's it's just black, nothing.

I tried some command to validate the ip adress and it's only initramfs

after some reading I tried the exit command followed by fsk but it doestT seem to work. then i tried a reboot.

 

 

 

[martinayotte]

9 minutes ago, Last_phil said:

command followed by fsk

It is not "fsk" but "fsck" ...