technotic

I was just curious... How does Manuel feel about all of this? Manuel is probably the most supported guy in the entire tech industry.

Thanks again @JorgeB! What I ended up doing is since my parity was already trashed on the old array/old server, i created a new flash config. i dd'd it over to my 16gb IDSDM module slot 1, which is Dell's Internal Dual SD Module. seems that as soon as i did that, my trial key showed blacklisted. I'm guessing the dell SD card doesn't use unique CID. i considered buying an SD card with an editable CID, but i'll consider that later. *Note: one cool feature of the IDSDM is that you can use mirror mode and choose the mirror target, so i could use 2 editable CID SD cards, one to boot from and mirror to the other. during POST, the system compares the selected primary slot to the mirror. if the primary slot is different, it assumes the primary slot has been changed or is corrupted, and boots slot 2 instead. basically would give me a hot spare boot config. might require minimal interaction on my part to update the CID of slot 2 to the CID from slot 1, but its a fully offline operation and would always have my current config without having to schedule local backups. Anyway, I went ahead and made a backup of my old flash config and my new flash config, for safety. i stuck both drives in my laptop, copied my Plus.key file to my desktop, reformatted the old flash drive's partition, copied everything from the new flash drive to the empty fat32 partition on my old flash drive, deleted the Trial.key, pasted my Plus.key, re-ran the make-bootable.bat for good measure, stuck the flash flash drive in my new server's internal USB slot, and booted up. License was recognized valid and i went to work on the data transfer. i used the unassigned devices plugins and i think? the dynamix file browser plugin (or maybe it was advanced copy) and formatted and mounted one of the 10TB drives to btrfs. then i put my 3 data drives from the old array into caddies and loaded them into the bays. since i got those 5 10TB drives for my new array, and my chassis has 8 3.5" bays in the front, this worked out perfect. for now. I formatted one of the 10TB drives with btrfs and mounted it under unassigned devices. then i mounted the 3 drives from my old array, did some storage cleanup (deleted a couple TB of urbackup images and such. with the plugin installed i was able to browse each drive and select directories. one at a time, i selected everything i wanted to keep and told it to copy those files to the mounted btrfs partition on the 10TB. had some issues initially but finally got it sorted and the minimal 1.3TB of data was happily on one of my new array data drives. i unmounted the old array drives and used fdisk to delete the partition off each one. created a new pool of 3 disks. set it up to use zfs raidz with compression on, autotrim off. i started up the array with only the pool populated, then formatted the pool. a few seconds later i had a happy 8TB usable space 3-drive raidz pool up and running. stopped the array again to finish up. then i created a new config, preserving the pool. configured the same settings again on the pool, stuck one of the 10TB drives on parity, slotted the 10TB i now had all my data on, formatted the remaining 3 10TB drives with btrfs, and added them to the data slots on the array. with everything looking good, i started the array up and everything seems good! its currently building the parity on the array which should only take about 11 hours total i think. QUESTION: once I get the parity build finished, should I open up the file integrity plugin, create a valid checksum and set up a schedule for it to create regular checksums? it would be an added redundancy for the array data drives, right? how often would you suggest i set the schedule to build a checksum table? how frequently should i export it? i've never used this particular feature. is it unreasonable to even use this? i don't want to keep a massive checksum table on my array, and it would sorta defeat the purpose anyway. planning to schedule array scrubbing once a month, maybe weekly for the zfs pool. i'm open to input and suggestions. the pool is going to be used for all my libvirt/vm files, docker containers and data volumes, and just things that'll be getting lots of writes and load up array with my read-focused data. i intend to redeploy urbackup server for keeping my desktop and laptop backed up regularly. i like setting up weekly full image backups of my windows c partitions. i'm dozing off while writing this so i'll post this as is.

I will go this route then, thanks. I'm just not sure whether to trust the ZFS implementation right now. You did mention it's working fine with pools tho. I happen to like btrfs and have for a long time, so I guess I should go ahead and use this for my array? Will do this, thanks. I'm actually wanting to install unRAID onto the internal vFlash that is preloaded with esxi. I decommissioned the vFlash and just got done upgrading my iDRAC8 to the latest 2.85.85.85 (which was a pain, because I had to do an incremental upgrade in the middle, and had to boot from the support live image to do that. The only problem is that I need to ISO image it to load it onto vFlash. I'll probably just create an ISO from the USB drive, since that should set it up correctly. Anyway thanks for all your help.

Hi all, I've had unRAID for a couple years now and have been running with a relatively small amount of storage. 2x 3TB and 4x 4TB drives, 1 parity, 4 data, 1 "cache" pool (I stick my docker containers and vms here, and make backups to the array). I've been using btrfs for my data drives. It's been running on an old ASUS ROG Maximus V Formula with Intel i7 3770s and 16gb of DDR3. I upgraded my license to Plus during the Black Friday sale. What started as a "I'm going to get an LSI HBA instead of continuing to use the onboard Intel and asmedia SATA ports" turned into a Dell PER730 8LFF with 2x E5-2680v4, 128GB ECC RDIMM (only 2133mhz for now), 5x 10TB HGST SAS3 2017 drives (homelabsales, $55 each and free shipping if purchasing 5 or more). Couldn't pass that up. I did get an LSI 9300-8i and 2x 1x SFF-9643 to 4x SFF-8482 SAS3 cables (the new drives are 12gb/s). But I didn't realize this R730 came with a Dell PERC H730. The LSI card has the SAS3008 chipset, the PERC has the SAS3108 chipset. I'll post a separate question about that. So now I have my old unRAID server and the R730 is ready to put in service with the 5x 10TB drives installed. I recently screwed up my current array. I corrupted parity while a drive was missing. One of my drives went out and I got a replacement that started kicking back read/write errors about 16gb into the drive. Yes I should have run the full preclear, but I only partly ran it (aborted it after an hour as I was anxious to get my array back online). So aborted the rebuild and had to exchange the drive. I thought the drive I was replacing was 4TB but it was one of my 3TB drives. I replaced it with a 4TB. Since disk 4 in my array had nothing on it (it's a 3TB, as is my pool drive), I started up in safe mode, wiped the MBR/GPT of disk 4, assigned it to disk 3, only to realize that by trying to rebuild with the 4TB faulty drive, I could now only replace it with a 4TB drive. My dumb mistake (don't tell anyone that I work and have worked in high profile IT/infosec for 20something years) was clearing disk 4, as I now had 2 disks out of the array. I reassigned the 3TB to disk 4 and then put the replacement 4TB into disk 3. I tried a rebuild anyway, but most of the data (was mostly only urbackup files from my desktop which I can easily remake) was unreadable and I started getting all kinds of errors. Even trying to delete the files. Everything is fine with my disk 1 and disk 2, which is where almost all my data is stored. I was able to retrieve almost all the data from disk 3 by mounting it with option ro,rescue=ignoredatacsums. That's after I couldn't get anywhere with btrfs scrub and btrfs check. I hadn't bothered to create any checksums with the file integrity plugin yet. Anyway I'm not really worrying about that anymore at this point. I want to build a new array from scratch on my new system. Since I have 5 identical drives with a sufficient amount of storage, I'm thinking I might try the zfs option. I've always liked btrfs but my setup is somewhat ideal for running zfs if I wanted. My plan is to, once the new array is set up, copy all my data from the old array to the new one, then decommission that array, clear the drives, and use them as pool drives alongside the new array. I'm considering possibly putting the 4x 4TB drives into RAID 10 and pooling that, since I have a proper hardware raid solution. For pool drives, would this be acceptable? Or even two RAID 1s, and maybe RAID 0 on the 2x 3TB drives, still using those for my VMs and containers. I'm open to suggestions on how to use those 6 drives for pools. My old unRAID machine only has 1 1gbE NIC. I have a 2x 1gbE NIC, I could possibly set up LAGG on my switch for the new and the old server, to help migrate my data faster. Getting to the meat of my question: my license is assigned to my old server. No unRAID boot drive yet for my new one. Would the proper way to do this be to start a new trial with my new server, do the migration, then transfer my license to the new server? Part of the problem is that I want to use that same USB drive to boot with on my new server. It's a 128gb SSD Flash drive. I'm not 100% how I would do this. Use another USB stick to set up the new system, migrate the files, wipe the old flash drive, back up the flash drive on the new server, then restore it to the SSD Flash drive attached to the new system? Or can I just transfer it directly by having both flash drives attached to the new server? I'll fdisk the SSD flash drive first and just clean and create a new partition table first. Will a trial license be sufficient for the day or two I spend migrating my data? thanks in advance.

Where's the official UNRaid Day-Z server... 😀

Have you thought about converting your media to a format your tv or browser can play natively? For example, if your media was encoded to h.264 then it wouldn't need to transcode it. What codec and format is your media stored currently? This makes a big difference, because it has to decode the original codec, then encode the new codec, then send it to your device. The Intel 630 drivers do not support hardware encoding in Linux, I believe. Only on Windows 10/11 with the correct driver. Do you use Google Translate to translate languages to communicate? I think I saw Asian symbols earlier. Your writing makes me think that Japanese is your native language? I am asking if you use a translator, so that we can try to use proper English. Then the translation will be understood better.

It would be great to see FIFO2 certified Webauthn/CTAP integration into unRAID's authentication system. This would also make additional security protections convenient for users who wish to use it. Examples could be re-authenticating for unRAID server restart/shutdown, array stopping, docker installations, etc. I know it's not widely implemented yet, not as much as it should be, but security keys are slowly becoming more widely adopted, especially for some of us who do IT/infosec professionally. Plus, Google has integrated Titan key into the Pixel 6 series (I thought they had back with the 3 series but what do I know), so for people like me, a separate key isn't even needed (though I have 2). Biometric verification makes it nice too. Anyway, I know the API isn't the friendliest, but it would be a nice thing to have. Michael

I did a search but didn't see this requested, surprisingly. First off, I don't use remote access to my server. Access is limited to my LAN only. I run opnsense as a firewall appliance and my edge router. I would like the ability to install a custom server cert/key generated by my opnsense CA. This simplifies certificate installs. I did try manually replacing the certs but of course it said my cert wasnt valid and I needed to redeploy the unRAID provided cert to resume flash drive backups. Even the ability to generate a CSR that can be submitted to have signed as an intermediary maybe, since that should leave full My Servers support enabled. Just an alternate idea... Second request related to first... Support for host certificate verification. It would be a more secure alternative to ACLs, and especially for those connecting remotely, being able to require host certificate would help mitigate risks. This, of course, would be doable easily with being allowed to use a self hosted CA. Would be great to see these features in an upcoming release and aren't too difficult to implement, with the CSR/intermediary method requiring the most backend work. Thanks! Michael

i think proxmox would be good for what you're doing. i would recommend a separate install drive from the 2 though. unraid is the exception, not the rule, when it comes to server OS boot methods. Typically you'd install proxmox on a dedicated hdd. maybe a cheap ssd? a 500gb should be sufficient. you would need to re-partition and everything on the drive would be lost. possibly a more appropriate solution, given your circumstances, would be OpenMediaVault 5. there is a community KVM plugin that installs libvirt for hypervising. you can manage or create the vm's via the webui plugin or by enabling cockpit webui (it's a general server ui). you can also do virt-manager in a vm, if you're knowledgeable enough. there's also a plugin that lets you create shares on the root filesystem (root partition). so you could easily create a share for kvm on the root drive and store your vm's there, and use the 2nd drive as a storage pool, and grant access as needed, to your vm's. OMV5 is also a NAS/Media Server OS, so it has shares, smb, nfs, dlna, ftp, ssh, and a good webui. there are community addons as well. it uses portainer to manage docker containers and once you install the omvextras plugin, which is a community plugin, you can install docker and portainer and load up portainer directly from the webui. honestly, i love OMV5, i really do. the reason i decided to give unRAID a try is due to the way they handle arrays. ZFS is annoying and standard RAID has a limitation of stepping down all drives to the used capacity of the smallest drive. i have 3x 4TB, 1x 3TB, and 1x 1TB (was my root drive). with unRAID, i have 1 4TB drive as parity and 2x 4TB + 3TB as storage arrays. the 1TB drive is running as an unassigned device with BTRFS on it. my array is also using BTRFS. my appdata dir for docker and libvirt is symlinked from my array to my 1TB. the primary purpose of the array is for storing bare metal and incremental backups of my main system (1TB and 2TB nvme drives), my laptop (1TB + 500GB), my backups of my Unity projects, and other important stuff thats been sitting on small 320GB, 250GB, 120GB drives from years ago. i opted not to go with a caching drive, though i may move my 3TB to be a caching drive. sorry, got a bit off topic, but yah, check out OMV5 or ProxMox VE. or you could even go with a good Centos 8 or RHEL 8 hypervisor with GUI desktop and libvirt, add docker-ce and portainer, if you're looking for a hypervisor OS. in my experience, EL-based (Fedora, RHEL, CentOS) distros are much more stable than debian-based, and handle resources a bit more efficiently after long uptimes. hope this helps you out a bit.... Michael