KiiskiDR

Day 9: Still no further lockups of my web ui on any of my servers.

I have 6 servers: four old-school Pro, two recently upgraded from Starter and Unleashed to Lifetime (so I can upgrade), all were registered with Unraid Connect. The largest is a 50 bay system with about 42 of the bays full running an Epyc 32c/64t 256gb ram SAS with a few SATA system, a 12 bay ALL SATA HDD 3xNVME 3900x 64gb ram, 8 bay 5700g 32g SATA/NVME, a 6 bay SATA/NVME experimental box I made out of a Lenovo 920q using a 3d printed case, a newer Ryzen 5 8500g all NVME/SSD build, down to a measely 4 bay i5 6600K SATA/NVME box. I know it's not the hardware, because it's so varied, and the behavior is consistent across the board. I know it's not the new internal boot feature doing this, as there is only one system doing that right now, the 8500g box. For a long time I've had issues with this plugin working, and for the most part, some machines were staying online, and others weren't externally accessible, but internally accessible. However, I've ran into an issue lately where the web gui for my servers locally would all stop working, I'm talking about "Tower.local" in the browser, not just using Connect. This behavior is extremely consistent as of late. It's never happened before, either, even when remote access was wonky in the last few years. I've been using unraid for several years now, and it's always been a battle with Unraid Connect and remote access. Most of the time I'll just remote in to one of my VMs, get on the local system gui using that, and reboot, that solves it, I get access to my gui again from remote. But now... it's literally killing my gui entirely. I have one server that has the ability (for dockers) to be rebooted using a discord channel command, and I know my dockers keep working without issue when the GUI becomes unresponsive. I know it's not docker doing it as 2 of those servers don't run ANY dockers or VMs of consequence or at all. I've tried shutting down docker/vm to see if it affects the issue. It doesn't. This week I got fed up with it because this has been happening for weeks, and decided to see if the Connect plugin is the issue I've been having with the WebGui being unavailable (again, I'm talking about locally mind you, not just remote). So, I rebooted my machines (like I have to at least once every day or so, never going more than 2-3 days before this happens at the most), and removed the connect plugin from 2 of my machines yesterday afternoon. The machines will show up green when this happens, but you can't get to their UI login page, no matter what URL you use, local or otherwise. Anyway, I'm rambling here... Long story short: I remove Connect form 2 machines yesterday after rebooting all 6 and verify Connect and local WebUI was working again. I get up this morning, and guess what... the 4 I didn't remove it from... no access to the GUI in any way. The two I did? Still up and running. Putty in and reboot, blam, back. I've removed it from my other four. Looks like I'm done with this plugin for a few versions. Oh, fyi, the problem doesn't happen with one specific version of Unraid. I've got machines from 7.2.3 on up to the new RC for 7.3. They ALL do it. It's not Unraid versions, it's the Connect plugin for sure.

I agree, this kind of solution makes way more sense. Your Unraid cloud account can have licenses and you just log in and say "assign to this machine" and it downloads a key that is tied to the motherboard or cpu serial, or even a mix like Microsoft does for their activation. Using hardware dongles for licensing is so 90's anyway (I'm 55 and even I think it's kind of silly). Using an internal drive for installed OS boot avoids all the durability/reliability/boot order/bios issues that USB drives cause. I've experimentally had unraid on a usb3 nvme drive and also a USB 2.5" sata ssd before and it booted and ran SO MUCH better. Unraid was literally ZOOMING. I always thought using Unraid and/or Linux was about the freedom, not condescending answers like "deal with it" or "if you don't like it, go elsewhere". Those kinds of answers really irk a lot of people. I get that Limetech has IP to protect, but seriously there's more modern ways to do it. I think the real solution for wear on the USB drives would be to install the plugins to the USB drive but then mirror it to cache and do redirects to the cache drive internally and not do any reads/writes off the USB during normal operation. If the cache fails, fallback to the usb.

FYI: I got 11 10tb drives (4 Seagate and 7 WD sas models) gifted to me from a fellow IT guy that I didn't know that they were from a netapp appliance, and after connecting them up and running those commands I was able to start formatting them. My setup is a Chenbro-Cleversafe-Slicestor-1440 (48 Bay SAS) with to a LSI SAS2008 Fusion-MPT SAS2 [Falcon] (rev 03) card in IT mode in my Epyc based server. I didn't have the drives in the Netapp enclosure but instead in an expander on one side (the other 24 bay side has the 17 10TB WD WD100EMAZ drives connected). At first when I connected them I had them mixed on the expanders and didn't realize until I realized they might be a) not able to mix right, and b)oddball formatted/firmware enterprise drives, and found them to be option b, they were Netapp drives. After putting them on their own side apart from the sata drives, I started looking for information on how to flash their firmware because I remembered that they might have custom firmware, but then I just tried the commands shown here and it worked! They are formatting without any other steps needed! Thanks for this writeup! It did the trick!

I wasn having the same issues that I looked at the logs and it was showing "update <mydomainname.com> N/y" so I added the following line to the config file after the domain line: UPDATE='Y' and boom it started working. # This is an email address USERNAME='MYUSERNAME' PASSWORD='MYPASSWORD' # Your hostname, group name, or a comma-delimited list of a mix of them. DOMAINS='MyGroup' UPDATE='Y' <---- ADDED THIS LINE AND IT GENERATED THE CONF FILE AFTER THE FIRST RUN # Examples: 5 m, 5 h, 5 d. Minimum is 5 minutes. INTERVAL='30m'