limetech

I agree with Joe. In fact, lower than 1 hour to me seems too short. The difference in power savings has got to be insignificant, but wear and tear on bearings probably is not insignificant.

RobJ, Thanks for your thoroughness & all the support you provide here - I very much appreciate it! I re-enabled the driver 'import' messages to log into the system log, and will fix the flash permissions - you'll see this in the next beta. As for 'sata_nv.swncq=0' I'd be interested if this fixes those errors.

Actually the Main page is showing fields from /proc/diskstats (well it's showing /sys/block/xxx/stats for each disk, but this is the source of /proc/diskstats). Unfortunately, it's showing the wrong fields Fixed in next beta.

Please post that syslog if you still have it. Do you like this new behavior or should we change it back? Do you mean you want to see the [major,minor] of each disk?

Yes. I figured this was possible as long as it was partitioned and formatted outside of the user interface. If there was a way to select a specific partition on a drive designated as cache, that would be helpful. one reason being the outer tracks can be much faster then the inner tracks. If I plan to use a partition for a supplementary root or vmware images, I want that to be where I designate it. For example. 1 boot - 2 swap - 3 root & data 4 cache The partition numbers do not need to be in ascending order on the disk. For example, if you are trying to put the cache on the innermost cylinders, then you can do this: 1 cache 2 swap 3 root & data 4 boot But create them in this order: 4 2 3 1 (from beginning of disk to end of disk).

Do you mean a separate partition on one of your data drives? If so, no. But, you can use the 'fdisk' command to manually create multiple partitions on your cache drive and unRAID will use partition 1 (so you have to have a partition 1). But you could then use other partitions on that drive for non-unRAID purposes. If you want to do this though, you have to also manually create the ReiserFS file system in partition 1 as well before assigning the drive as the Cache drive to prevent System Management utility from wanting to format it (which will also create a new partition table). Note this will work only with the Cache drive, not the parity/data drives. Make sense?

Download. Critical bug fix in this release. If you are experimenting with 4.4-beta1, please upgraded to -beta2 and discard -beta1. Also rewrote disk spinup/spindown (again) - reverting back to method of s/w monitoring of i/o to determine when to spin down a disk. No longer uses 'hdparm' command to set the spindown delay. Also added some more choices for spindown delay value in the System Management Utility. unRAID Server 4.4-beta1 Release Notes ===================================== Changes from 4.4-beta1 to 4.4-beta2 ----------------------------------- Improvement: added more spin-down delay settings (15, 30, 45 minutes, 6, 7, 8, 9 hours) and changed method of disk spin-down/spin-up: - No longer use disk's internal spin-down timer; instead monitor I/O directly. - A spun down drive will spin-up on demand when it recieves an I/O command (this is unchanged). - The 'Spin Up' button in the System Management Ultility now uses a SMART command to spin up the disks. Bug fix: if a drive took longer than 10 seconds to spin up, then a driver timeout error and subsequent SATA channel reset would appear in the system log. [fix is to increase scsi_execute() timeout (from 10 to 30 sec) in drivers/ata/libata-scsi.c] Bug fix: the 'Clear Statistics' button will now also clear the Cache Drive statistics. Bug fix: fixed crash which could occur if multiple disks fail in the same stripe simultaneously. Improvement: upgrade smartmontools package to version 5.38. Changes from 4.3.3 to 4.4-beta1 ------------------------------- New feature: support SMP (multi-core processors). Improvement: read performance enhancements. Improvement: update to linux kernel 2.6.26.5. Bug fix: fixed race condition in network initialization which would sometimes result in DHCP failure to get IP address. Upgrade Instructions (Please Read Carefully) ============================================ If you are currently running unRAID Server 4.2-beta1 or higher (including 4.2.x 'final'), please copy the following files from the new release to the root of your Flash device: bzimage bzroot If you are currently running unRAID server 4.0 or 4.1, please copy the following files from the new release to the root of your Flash device: bzimage bzroot syslinux.cfg menu.c32 memtest This can be done either by plugging the Flash into your PC or, by copying the files to the 'flash' share on your running server. The server must then be rebooted. If you are currently running unRAID Server 3.0-beta1 or higher, please follow these steps to upgrade: 1. Referring to the System Management Utility 'Main' page, make a note of each disks's model/serial number; you will need this information later. 2. Shut down your server, remove the Flash and plug it into your PC. 3. Right-click your Flash device listed under My Computer and select Properties. Make sure the volume label is set to "UNRAID" (without the quotes) and click OK. You do NOT need to format the Flash. 4. Copy the files from the new release to the root of your Flash device. 5. Right-click your Flash device listed under My Computer and select Eject. Remove the Flash, install in your server and power-up. 6. After your server has booted up, the System Management Utility 'Main' page will probably show no devices; this is OK, navigate to the 'Devices' page. Using the model/serial number information gathered in step 1, assign each of your hard drives to the correct disk slot. 7. Go back to the 'Main' page and your devices should appear correctly. You may now Start the array. If you are installing this release to a new Flash, please refer to instructions on our website at: http://www.lime-technology.com/wordpress/?page_id=19

What driver updates are you referring to? Actually i only refer to Intel PRO1000 driver update (v0.2.0 in 4.3.3, and v0.3.3 in 4.4b1) but i believe there are much more driver updates. I'll look into that, but you know what they say, "If it ain't broke..." This will be in an upcoming 4.4-beta.

This problem is a combination of 2 bugs. First is the timeout in the linux sata driver is too short for issuing commands such as setting the spin-down delay which results in all those timeout and reset messages in your syslog. Second is that in your case it so happened that multiple disks failed the same sector at the same time & uncovered a bug in the unraid driver which resulted in the crash. Both of these problems are fixed in 4.4-beta2. After a bit more testing we will be posting -beta2 today.

Those messages are harmless. What driver updates are you referring to? Well as perhaps you know, it 'kinda' works already. But there is more work in this area being done in the 2.6.27 kernel, e.g., refer to: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.file-systems/23338 At present 2.6.27 is still in 'prepatch' status, refer to: http://kernel.org/ When 2.6.27 gets released as 'latest stable' status, then we'll probably immediately upgrade. If this happens while 4.4 is still in beta, then we'll consider doing the kernel update at that time since this is a highly requested feature.

Will 5.38 do the job?

Although unraid-notify script solved all my issues with spun down, I am very much interested in this as well. This will be coming in a future -beta. The only changes between 4.4-beta1 and 4.3.3 are those detailed in the release readme.txt file. This is done on purpose in order to reduce the number of code changes which need to be examined if/when users report bugs.

The syslog looks perfect! Good report!

Please post your syslog.

Are you running a dual-core CPU? Yes, we'll do that soon.

What happens when it hangs? Does the video get trashed so that you can't read the messages on the screen? There are a couple of things to check for in your bios: - is ACPI enabled and what version (1.0, 2.0 or 3.0)? --- you can try to disable ACPI & see if it boots - is there an option in your bios to disable one of the cores? --- if so give it a try and see if it boots

Download. Time for a new set of features! As with past release cycles, we will be releasing a set of 'beta' releases, each with new functionality and/or bug fixes. The 4.4 series will probably be our longest with a substantial set of changes by the time we're done. Out of the gate, 4.4-beta1 now supports SMP (multi-core processors). Since we have a limited variety of multi-core test platforms, we are very interested in reports from the community regarding multi-core. Please post comments, positive and negative, in this thread. unRAID Server 4.4-beta1 Release Notes ===================================== Changes from 4.3.3 to 4.4-beta1 ------------------------------- New feature: support SMP (multi-core processors). Improvement: read performance enhancements. Improvement: update to linux kernel 2.6.26.5. Bug fix: fixed race condition in network initialization which would sometimes result in DHCP failure to get IP address. Upgrade Instructions (Please Read Carefully) ============================================ If you are currently running unRAID Server 4.2-beta1 or higher (including 4.2.x 'final'), please copy the following files from the new release to the root of your Flash device: bzimage bzroot If you are currently running unRAID server 4.0 or 4.1, please copy the following files from the new release to the root of your Flash device: bzimage bzroot syslinux.cfg menu.c32 memtest This can be done either by plugging the Flash into your PC or, by copying the files to the 'flash' share on your running server. The server must then be rebooted. If you are currently running unRAID Server 3.0-beta1 or higher, please follow these steps to upgrade: 1. Referring to the System Management Utility 'Main' page, make a note of each disks's model/serial number; you will need this information later. 2. Shut down your server, remove the Flash and plug it into your PC. 3. Right-click your Flash device listed under My Computer and select Properties. Make sure the volume label is set to "UNRAID" (without the quotes) and click OK. You do NOT need to format the Flash. 4. Copy the files from the new release to the root of your Flash device. 5. Right-click your Flash device listed under My Computer and select Eject. Remove the Flash, install in your server and power-up. 6. After your server has booted up, the System Management Utility 'Main' page will probably show no devices; this is OK, navigate to the 'Devices' page. Using the model/serial number information gathered in step 1, assign each of your hard drives to the correct disk slot. 7. Go back to the 'Main' page and your devices should appear correctly. You may now Start the array. If you are installing this release to a new Flash, please refer to instructions on our website at: http://www.lime-technology.com/wordpress/?page_id=19

Right, SMP support among others...

This topic has been moved to Feature Requests. [iurl]http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=2314.0[/iurl]

Download. The main purpose of this release is to address a problem related to hard drive model numbers. Starting with release 4.3.2 we used a different method of obtaining hard drive model strings (for identification purposes). This was necessary as part of another bug fix. The result of this change was that if a hard drive model string is greater than 16 characters, there was a possibility of the system reporting it as "wrong or missing" when attempting to upgrade from a previous unRAID release. To our knowledge only certain Western Digital model strings are longer than 16 characters and exhibit this problem. Also this problem does not happen for "new" unRAID configurations - it can just happen as a result of upgrading from a previous release. There is a workaround for this problem, but we decided that the best solution is to just fix it and produce a new release. If you have applied the workaround, then this release will still work for you. The second issue addressed by this release has to do with spinning up disks. You would think this should be a fairly straightforward operation, but the algorithms we've used in the past have all proved to be unreliable with various hard drive models. With this release we implemented yet another attempt at making this reliable. Normally we would not release non-beta code with these kinds of problems, but they are both related to quirks of hard drives which did not show up in our testing because we don't have those hard drives. We are thus indebted to the great community of users here who have shown great patience in working with us to solve these problems - thank you! unRAID Server 4.3.3 Release Notes ================================= Changes from 4.3.2 to 4.3.3 --------------------------- Bug fix: fixed problem where certain hard drives would be incorrectly seen as "missing". Improvement: changed hard drive spin-up algorithm in effort to make it more reliable. Changes from 4.3.1 to 4.3.2 --------------------------- Bug fix: if 16 or more disks connected, depending on the disks, system could improperly identify one or more disks. Bug fix: transmit correct hostname to dhcp server. Bug fix: fix problem in user share file system with 'chown' command. Improvement: provided abilty to manually define up to 3 DNS Servers when DHCP is not being used. Improvement: prevent mover from moving files in use. Improvement: added parallel port support. Improvement: added SiS 900 ethernet driver. Also supports SiS 7016 and SiS 540/630 chipsets. Changes from 4.3 to 4.3.1 ------------------------- Bug fix: fix yet another "clear new disks" bug. Upgrade Instructions (Please Read Carefully) ============================================ If you are currently running unRAID Server 4.2-beta1 or higher (including 4.2.x 'final'), please copy the following files from the new release to the root of your Flash device: bzimage bzroot If you are currently running unRAID server 4.0 or 4.1, please copy the following files from the new release to the root of your Flash device: bzimage bzroot syslinux.cfg menu.c32 memtest This can be done either by plugging the Flash into your PC or, by copying the files to the 'flash' share on your running server. The server must then be rebooted. If you are currently running unRAID Server 3.0-beta1 or higher, please follow these steps to upgrade: 1. Referring to the System Management Utility 'Main' page, make a note of each disks's model/serial number; you will need this information later. 2. Shut down your server, remove the Flash and plug it into your PC. 3. Right-click your Flash device listed under My Computer and select Properties. Make sure the volume label is set to "UNRAID" (without the quotes) and click OK. You do NOT need to format the Flash. 4. Copy the files from the new release to the root of your Flash device. 5. Right-click your Flash device listed under My Computer and select Eject. Remove the Flash, install in your server and power-up. 6. After your server has booted up, the System Management Utility 'Main' page will probably show no devices; this is OK, navigate to the 'Devices' page. Using the model/serial number information gathered in step 1, assign each of your hard drives to the correct disk slot. 7. Go back to the 'Main' page and your devices should appear correctly. You may now Start the array. If you are installing this release to a new Flash, please refer to instructions on our website at: http://www.lime-technology.com/wordpress/?page_id=19

Download. Another set of bug fixes, as well as a few minor improvements, most notable of which is a new control on the Settings page which enables you to define up to 3 DNS servers, the IP addresses of which will be put into the /etc/resolv.conf file when DHCP is not being used (i.e., when you are using a static IP for your server). unRAID Server 4.3.2 Release Notes ================================= Changes from 4.3.1 to 4.3.2 --------------------------- Bug fix: if 16 or more disks connected, depending on the disks, system could improperly identify one or more disks. Bug fix: transmit correct hostname to dhcp server. Bug fix: fix problem in user share file system with 'chown' command. Improvement: provided abilty to manually define up to 3 DNS Servers when DHCP is not being used. Improvement: prevent mover from moving files in use. Improvement: added parallel port support. Improvement: added SiS 900 ethernet driver. Also supports SiS 7016 and SiS 540/630 chipsets. Changes from 4.3 to 4.3.1 ------------------------- Bug fix: fix yet another "clear new disks" bug. Upgrade Instructions (Please Read Carefully) ============================================ If you are currently running unRAID Server 4.2-beta1 or higher (including 4.2.x 'final'), please copy the following files from the new release to the root of your Flash device: bzimage bzroot If you are currently running unRAID server 4.0 or 4.1, please copy the following files from the new release to the root of your Flash device: bzimage bzroot syslinux.cfg menu.c32 memtest This can be done either by plugging the Flash into your PC or, by copying the files to the 'flash' share on your running server. The server must then be rebooted. If you are currently running unRAID Server 3.0-beta1 or higher, please follow these steps to upgrade: 1. Referring to the System Management Utility 'Main' page, make a note of each disks's model/serial number; you will need this information later. 2. Shut down your server, remove the Flash and plug it into your PC. 3. Right-click your Flash device listed under My Computer and select Properties. Make sure the volume label is set to "UNRAID" (without the quotes) and click OK. You do NOT need to format the Flash. 4. Copy the files from the new release to the root of your Flash device. 5. Right-click your Flash device listed under My Computer and select Eject. Remove the Flash, install in your server and power-up. 6. After your server has booted up, the System Management Utility 'Main' page will probably show no devices; this is OK, navigate to the 'Devices' page. Using the model/serial number information gathered in step 1, assign each of your hard drives to the correct disk slot. 7. Go back to the 'Main' page and your devices should appear correctly. You may now Start the array. If you are installing this release to a new Flash, please refer to instructions on our website at: http://www.lime-technology.com/wordpress/?page_id=19

Welcome to the world of Realtek :'(

Dear Community, We have the next release, 4.3.2, ready to upload; however there's a bit of a problem. We are already close to our allotment of 40GB/month bandwidth, and if we post 4.3.2, this will put us over the top and result in the entire website, forums, and wiki getting "bandwidth exceeded" page Obviously we need to move to a dedicated server or something, but in the meantime... does anyone have any recommendations for somewhere we can host our download page? Cheers, Tom

Added parallel port support in 4.3.2 release. Serial port (8250/16550) support is already in kernel. Note that you might have to enable in bios; typically we disable serial ports in bios, mainly to save an IRQ.

My testing shows that this issue still haunts us. This was originally discussed in the 4.3-beta6 thread. Fixed in 4.3.2.