bidmead

It's great to have calibre running on my UnRAID server. Thanks for that. Makes more sense than installing it on some random LAN client. Or, worse, several of them. I'm running into a problem, though, that exposes my ignorance of dockers. When I try to set up the Content Server it announces that it's running on a network wildly different from my LAN., which knows nothing of 172.17.0.7. I can change the port, of course, but can't seem to find where or how to map the LAN address to my own. Installed on a LAN client, as calibre has always been for me in the past, the address of the Content Server is set to the address of the client. So I'm guessing I need to tweak the container parameters but I can't see how. LATER THAT SAME EVENING UnRAID's docker documentation appears to suggest that this is fixed under Docker Settings by changing host access to custom networks from disabled to enabled. However, my Docker Settings here on UnRAID 6.0.9 rc2 appear to glue this parameter firmly to "disabled". I'm wondering if I stopping the array will unglue this. All suggestions very welcome. LATER STILL (SOLVED) It's there in the docker parameters. To run a Web server inside a docker with the same address of your LAN you need to set the Network Type to Custom. Ha! This gives the docker an address on your LAN (not, as I rather stupidly thought, the same address as your NAS). Now Content Server will take that local LAN address with whatever port you allocate to it inside calibre and your calibre library now becomes accessible to any other client on your LAN. This is by far the easiest way, for example, of loading books onto my Kobo Aura. (I'm leaving this up in case it helps somebody else as this doesn't seem to be crystal clear in the documentation.) -- Chris

I'm puzzled by the notifications I found on my Dashboard this morning: a report that the parity check has concluded successfully, immediately followed by an error message from Parity Check Tuning that the parity check was aborted. (I am assuming that notifications are stacked newest uppermost.) My guess is that Parity Check Tuning is assuming that if it is set to run in increments of (say) three hours, any cessation of the parity check short of that time is "an abort". If this is right, unless the whole parity run mod 3 isn't exactly zero we're always going to see this "abort" notice. Can this be right? Please sanity check the conjecture from a relative newbie. -- Chris

It's for creating comics. An Android app called PicSay. Very easy and useful. I use it quite a bit. -- Chris

I'm not sure I see how that improves the security. And what if—as in my case—the array is unencrypted? -- Chris

Reposted from the General forum where it was incorrectly posted. Many thanks to @JorgeB for the redirection. With some additional thoughts (see below). ====cut here==== I've just precleared a 16TB drive and formatted it as btrfs-luks against a pass phrase. I want to mount it and share it as an unassigned device. It won't mount. Sensible, because I'm not giving it the pass phase. But I can't give it the pass phrase because I'm not being offered any way of entering the pass phrase. I'm struggling to find documentation in the manual about this. Anyone care to help? LATER THAT SAME OTHERWISE UNEVENTFUL AFTERNOON. Thanks for that very swift response, @JorgeB I was a few seconds ahead of that redirection with the solution and trying to post it here, but for some reason the this forum is being very sluggish for me today. I think it's worth expanding this beyond just trotting out the solution because I believe my newbie expectation that there would be a dialogue box for pass phrase entry on each attempt to mount the drive may not be exceptional. There is no such dialogue box. The second logical place to look for the entry of a pass phrase would, I believe, be in the settings for that particular drive in its listing under MAIN. Again, it's not impossible that others new to UnRAID might be tempted to look there. No, there's nothing there either. The pass phase that was entered when formatting the drive needs to be re-entered into the general Unassigned Devices settings, which you can pick up from the SETTINGS tab, under User Utilities/Set Encrypted Disk Password. I find both the location and permanence of this pass phrase, shall we say, counter-intuitive, but it is what it is. What this means is that the encryption of the drive effectively only kicks in if someone steals the drive but forgets to take the rest of the UnRAID box with it. Shouldn't there at least be an option (in the WebGUI---I've no doubt something can be cooked up at the command line) to insist that each mount occasion requires the pass phrase? -- Chris UnRAID 6.9.0-rc2

Apologies if this is covered elsewhere (as I'm almost sure it must be) but I've searched the topic and googled the Web and not found the answer. Which probably means it's bleedin' obvious, hence my apologies. I want to preclear a 16TB drive that's currently one of three unassigned devices. One of them is the DOM of the QNAP box hosting UnRAID. The other is an external USB hard drive. The preclear UI seems to be threatening to preclear all three of these devices. How do I ensure it only preclears the 16TB drive? (Yes, I can unplug the external USB drive, but the DOM is glued in place and I'm happy to leave it there.) SpaceInvader One's excellent (as always) video on the subject doesn't answer my question as he has only a single drive in his unassigned devices list. I'm running UnRAID 6.9.0 rc2 LATER THAT SAME EVENING OK, rather than just delete this post and pretend it never happened, I'll let my ignorance shine out for all to see and add some notes that may help some others running into this same (imagined) problem. There's no problem once you understand that 1) only UNMOUNTED unassigned devices are candidates for preclearing and 2) the "Start Preclear" in blue at the far right end of each device's listing on the preclear app page IS A LINK. Clicking this link only starts the preclear on that particular drive. It's not the case, as I previously thought, that drives with this blue message appearing at the end of their tuples are being lined up as candidates for automatic preclearing. Once you've clicked the link you get a dialogue box confirming that this is the drive you want to preclear. If you've hit the wrong link, you can back out at this point. There is an option, as I understand it, to the left of the set of icons above the unassigned drive list, for preclearing multiple drives, either in sequence or simultaneously. One thing I had guessed right: that the solution was bleedin' obvious. -- Chris

I was asking my question about RAISE and TRIM, @Marshalleq, from a position of ignorance. That's to say, I'm looking for an answer from someone who knows more than I do. You're asking me another question that seems to require the information I'm ignorant of. Is there someone here who can help us both out? I've put this question to the SSD manufacturer and will follow up here if I get a response. (Here's a useful gloss on how the SandForce controller and TRIM work, separately. There's no mention of RAISE here, but I'm assuming my cache OWC Mercury Extreme Pro, which uses a SandForce controller, also includes this DuraWrite feature. This may be an answer to my question but I don't understand SSD garbage collection well enough to be sure.) -- Chris

Thanks, @itimpi. I'm cool with the licence transfer process but think it's probably a good idea to have a physical backup USB drive ready. I've ordered another Cruzer. I'll report back here once that's all done. -- Chris

Thanks, @itimpi. I've realised subsequently that the official UnRAID USB backup downloads the output to the local machine running the WebGUI, so my remarks about backing up the USB outside the UnRAID NAS don't apply. But there's a possible scenario that worries me. If this is a fake 2GB drive posing as a 16GB drive (as UnRAID seems to be suggesting) it's a possibility that the destructive test I run will make the drive unusable. Whether it's 16GB or 2GB, it's working fine for now as a boot drive. My inclination would be to buy a second 16GB Cruzer Fit from the eBay SanDisk store (about £6), test that to guarantee it's a worthy understudy, and then run the destructive test on the working boot USB drive. Or am I being overcautious here? Advice very welcome. -- Chris

I'm talking about fan control from UnRAID. I attached a monitor to switch the boot order but now never see the BIOS. However, I noticed this morning that the speed for Fan 0 seems to be being reported on the Dashboard and fan control is apparently in the hands of Autofan v.1.6 thanks to the F71691a module I had tried (I thought unsuccessfully) to load. All is not well, here, though, as only one fan is reported and the detection of the minimum PWM value produces a line of HTML warning which looks like an uncaught exception. -- Chris

The question is: does RAISE replace TRIM? Unnecessarily running TRIM may not raise (ha!) any "issues" but you may be adding random wear to your SSD. -- Chris

Thanks, @itimpi. But I'm wondering about the logistics of this; 1. Back up the USB drive, having removed it while the array is (presumably) spun down but powered. 2. Leave the server alone while I… 3. Test the USB drive destructively with, say, F3 or some similar test. 4. Restore the original UnRAID data, reinsert the USB drive into the server. Because of 2. the backup and subsequent restore would have to be outside the UnRAID server. Is this the sequence you had in mind? Have you tried this? -- Chris

Ha! On the advice of @SpaceInvaderOne I've just installed the Dynamix Stats plugin, which has drawn my attention to an anomaly with my boot flash drive. I hadn't noticed before that on the MAIN tab what is supposed to be a 16GB USB stick is reported as only having 2GB capacity. The Stats plugin seems to make this very clear. Is this 16GB CruzerFit a fake? All suggestions welcome. -- Chris

I've just this minute got that exact tip from @SpaceInvaderOne, logged in here to report it and saw your message. Many thanks. This really should be mentioned in the System Autofan plugin, shouldn't it? -- Chris

I can't run sensors-detect on this 6.9.0 rc 2 UnRAID as there seems to be no perl available. Any suggestions? -- Chris

SSD TRIM I'm wondering if it's necessary/desirable/unrecommended to install the SSD TRIM plugin with an SSD that uses RAISE. -- Chris

Let me pitch in with the news that I have UnRAID running very nicely on a QNAP TS-853 Pro. With a few caveats (see below). I used the HDMI-out to switch the BIOS to prefer booting from the UnRAID USB. This meant I could leave the DOM in place. QNAP seems to want me to do this as it's physically secured with a huge blob of glue, although I'm told this can be fairly easily chipped away. CAVEAT1: No fan control now. Swapping the fans would be a fix, but there's no noise/heat problem that makes this an issue. CAVEAT2: The 2-line LCD display is stuck on "SYSTEM BOOTING". There's a Github project that might be useful here: https://github.com/bkram/qnapdisplay CAVEAT3: Shutdown doesn't ever shutdown the machine. It always reboots. I need to look into this but the workaround is to catch the machine just before the reboot and pull the plug. No big deal with a machine with removable drives which seldom needs to be shut down. CAVEAT4: This is a new one to me, and puzzling. The DOM is (obviously) an unassigned device and I leave it unmounted. As a precaution it's also set as read-only. SO AS IT'S UNMOUNTED, WHY AM I SEEING READS HERE? These reads are incrementing constantly. UnRAID 6.9.0-rc2 -- Chris

Like red wine—serve at room temperature.

It seems that unassigned drive encryption has developed since this video from SpaceInvader One. The password's no longer in plain text in a file called keyfile. It's now encrypted in /tmp/unassigned.devices/config/unassigned.devices.cfg. And despite being in /tmp, as far as I can make out the file persists through powercycles. So the data will remain encrypted if someone steals the drive but will autodecrypt if the whole UnRAID server is stolen. Have I got that right? -- Chris

Actually, the Maxtor story has one last chapter. I don't know if I'm right in continuing it here because it raises a rather different issue. But let's see. The old Maxtor failed the rebuild, almost certainly due to a bad sector or sectors. However, I understand that the PreClear app can reallocate dud sectors, so I ran the drive through another single-pass total preclear. It passed. So I've now set it up as I originally intended: it's a luks-btrfs unassigned drive exported as a disk share. It doesn't turn up under Main/Disk Share, I assume because it's not exported from the array. (Is this right?) The luks-btrfs format was created against a pass phrase which will be required every time the disk is mounted. You can set this drive to auto mount or mount it manually from the WebGUI. To do either of these you need (only once) to enter the pass phrase into Setting/Unassigned Devices/Set Encrypted Disk Password. Now the share can be loaded with no formality across the LAN. But this isn't, of course, very secure. You really want the share only able to be loaded against a pass phrase. But you can't share the disk until its mounted. And you can't mount it without the pass phrase. So, by definition, once it's a share its not password protected (except against it being stolen, with data access attempted outside the UnRAID device). Is this how it is, or am I missing something? (I feel I probably am.) If not, then the workaround is clearly to use something like VeraCrypt to create an encrypted disk image on an unencrypted share or drive and require Veracrypt on the client device for the decryption. -- Chris

Just to wind up the Maxstor story, I've successfully replaced that (now failed) drive with the second IronWolf Pro after a rebuild lasting one day, 10 hours, 26 minutes. The Maxstor data are all preserved and the previous 300GB Maxstor share is available across the LAN. But I've hugely expanded the capacity of the array. I have my green ball back again. Job done. Many thanks to this forum for the invaluable help. -- Chris

Yes, that makes a lot of sense, trurl. Today's hard drives (especially once they've run the gauntlet of PreClear), it seems to me, are considerably more reliable than the commodity drives that inspired the invention of RAID. And even more reliable, I'd argue, than the costly enterprise drives that RAID aspired to replace. Bigger but fewer makes good sense today. But I like the idea of having multiple hotswappable bays on an UnRAID system, if only because I can dump unassigned drives in there, test them with PreClear and use them experimentally as shares without having to add them to the array. -- Chris

The catch about migrating ever upwards to these very impressively engineered huge drives is that we begin to run into one of the issues that drove us away from RAID: the rebuild time and the pressure this exerts on the reliability of the other drives in the array. With UnRAID, I'd have thought, much of the USP is the ability to use a large number of rather smaller drives, recovering from drive failure over a tea-break rather than during a three day vigil. And, particularly, if failing to recover, at least not losing data on the other drives of the array. -- Chris

I pursued the rebuild of the Maxtor drive. But, as we might have expected, the work taxed the dear old drive beyond endurance. It failed the rebuild and UnRAID looped around several times trying the rebuild afresh until I put it out of its misery. I'm now running the rebuild on the second IronWolf Pro, which was always my original intention, to demonstrate that expanding capacity is a lot simpler with UnRAID than with, say, TrueNAS Core. -- Chris