Control Services

Services → Control Services, shown in Figure 8.1a, allows you to quickly determine which services are currently running, to start or stop services, and to configure services. By default, all services (except for the S.M.A.R.T. service) are off until you start them.

Figure 8.1a: Control Services

In order to provide a separation between the services that were installed with FreeNAS®, and are considered to be core to the NAS, and those third-party services which were installed into the Plugins Jail, this screen is divided into two tabs:

Core: lists the services that are installed with FreeNAS®.

Plugins: lists the services which were installed using Plugins. This tab contains a warning if the Plugins service has not been started in the Core tab of Control Services.

A service is stopped if its icon is a red OFF. A service is running if its icon is a blue ON. To start or stop a service, click its ON/OFF icon.

To configure a core service, click the wrench icon associated with the service or click the name of the service in the Services section of the tree menu.

If a service does not start, go to System → Settings → Advanced and check the box “Show console messages in the footer”. Console messages will now show at the bottom of your browser. If you click the console messages area, it will pop-up as a window, allowing you to scroll through the output and to copy messages. Watch these messages for errors when you stop and start the problematic service.

If you would like to read the system logs to get more information about a service failure, open Shell and type more /var/log/messages.

NOTE: if you are unable to start any core services within ESXi, make sure that you only have one vcpu. If that is not the issue, create a Tunable called kern.hz with a value of 100.