meep

Of course the confusion could have been abated by naming the current release Beta 5.3.1

Excellent I'm looking forward to getting my unRaid server doing more than just unRaid again and have taken a liking to VirtualBox recently. Many thanks. Peter

This looks great and your presentation is very clear. As someone who can follow directions well but sometimes lacks the Linux savvy to understand what's going on, a couple of questions; 1. Will this survive updates? Say there a 4.7.1 or 4.8. Will the whole things need to be done again? I had VMWare Server running under 4.5.3 but was locked out of upgrades as I'd need to go through the whole involved process each time. 2. Vanilla Kernel? Is this replacing something customised in unraid and if so, what features might be affected? 3. Implemented in unRAID? This is all implemented in unRAID, right? No need for a developer system? 4. v5 equivalents? What should I be looking for to do this on 5 (when stable)? What versions of what have been updated? Appreciate patience with Linux newbie Peter

Have come up with an issue that seems to crash unRaid or at least make UI and Shares unavailable. I had the problem with IDE devices not showing up in beta3. I have 4x 1GB SATA drives (1x Parity & 3x Data) as well as a 120GB cache drive. I was hoping to fill out my plus license with 2x 500 IDE drives. With beta4, the IDE devices now show up fine. After upgrade, I booted unraid, ran the slot update script and started the array. All was well. I powered down and attached my 2x IDE drives and booted. UnRaid recognised them. I added them to my 2x free slots and tabbed to MAIN where I see the message; "Start will record the new disk information and bring the expanded array on-line. All new disks which have not been factory-erased will be cleared first; and, the array will be available after the clear completes. This process takes time, but the array remains protected at all times. Caution: any data on the new disk(s) will be erased! If you want to preserve the data on the new disk(s), reset the array configuration and rebuild parity instead." I checked the box and hit start. "clearing disk4 disk5..." appears and the browser then sits there 'loading'. I cannot access 192.168.1.99 from any browser on the network and attempting to connect to the server shares fails via AFP or SMB (flash is accessible via SMB). I can still telnet into the server. Syslog attached. Peter syslog.txt

Have not run preclear Seeing 51 MB/s on parity sync and have an est. 6 hours to do 1x 1TB Parity & 3x 1TB Drives. Maybe this is as good as it gets. Was just thinking there might be a possibility of a shortcut :-( Peter

So, I'm setting up a quick n dirty unRaid to play with Beta 5. Wondering with all drives newly formatted, why I need to sit through a full parity sync. Is there any option that essentially says 'all my drives are newly formatted, just write zeros to the parity drive (and do it quickly!) ' Maybe I misunderstand what's going on but it seems a bit of a waste to site around hours several hors for unRaid to figure out all the drives are empty when I could just tell it. Maybe there's some bad sector voodoo going on? Peter

Hi I've had unraid running for a while and love it. However, I'm breaking apart my system as I really can't justify running several systems 24/7 and it's just too difficult to upgrade unraid with VMs installed. (moving to a single mac with rocketraid raid5 which will be my Plex media center, VM host and file server, if anyone's interested) So, I have my Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 PCI-X card for sale (details here: http://www.supermicro.com/products/accessories/addon/AOC-SAT2-MV8.cfm) It's about 6 months old and in perfect working order. Comes boxed with driver disk, SATA cables etc. like new. I'm looking 50 euro / 68 dollars / 42 pounds plus postage costs to where ever you are. I've also got an UnRaid plus on a Sandisk Crizer 8GB drive which (if allowed under UnRaid licensing) I'll also let go for 40 euro / 54 dollars / 34 pounds. Will be putting adapter up on e-bay soon but thought I'd give the community here first bite. Paypal payments preferred. Thanks Peter

I took a different approach to this: I set up unRaid to run Vmware server. Now, I can add virtual machines with all of the functionality I need without messing with unRaid config. For example, I have a TurnKey Linux VM that hosts a Joomla dev environment (LAMP) AND a SqueezeBox Server. Nice thing is I can reconfigure that VM as much as I like without worrying about unRaid messing up (or even going offline), or add additional VMs if necessary for other tasks. The downside is that I can't upgrade unRaid without recompiling VMWare into it - a not insubstantial task, especially for a Linux newbie like me Peter

It's even less than a beta. beta releases are typically feature complete and are used to identify and resolve bugs through iterative releases with no new functionality added. It's my understanding from reading these forums that 5.0b2 is far from feature complete and therefore should really be considered alpha level release. Buyer beware. YMMV. Batteries not included. The value of your investment may fall as well as rise. Your home may be at risk. Yada Yada Yada.

Today I upgraded my unRAID with a SuperMicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 8PortSATA2 PCI-X card and replaced 2x 500MB IDE Drives with 2x 1GB SATA drives and replaced my old 120GB cache with one of the 500s. The whole process was painless and easy and really reinforced for me what a great system unRAID is. Anyway, just for fun, I ran Xbench (http://www.xbench.com/) from my Mac on a user share across the network. I've reproduced the results below. If anyone else has a Mac, could they do the same thing, just to see how we compare? Results 30.18 System Info Xbench Version 1.3 System Version 10.6.4 (10F569) Physical RAM 4096 MB Model MacBookPro5,4 Disk Test 30.18 Sequential 16.99 Uncached Write 5.91 3.63 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Write 55.26 31.27 MB/sec [256K blocks] Uncached Read 27.72 8.11 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Read 83.28 41.85 MB/sec [256K blocks] Random 135.25 Uncached Write 69.41 7.35 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Write 103.33 33.08 MB/sec [256K blocks] Uncached Read 1064.42 7.54 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Read 219.74 40.78 MB/sec [256K blocks]

All Loving unRaid. Following lots of trial and error (and a good deal of fun), I managed to get VMWare running on my 4.5.4 server plus. (thanks to all who've posted guides & tips here). The various .vm* files and temp directories are located on my cache drive (.custom) and I've happily installed Turnkey LAMP (http://www.turnkeylinux.org/lamp) which gives me a full web dev. sandbox running on top of unRaid and has allowed me consolidate several machines into one. Happy days. Now, I have two issues that I could do with a bit of advice on. 1. My cache mover runs each evening at 22.00. Since adding the .custom directory to the cache drive, I note that the syslog is now filled with references to each file in that directory. eg. Sep 20 22:00:01 Tower logger: ./.custom/vmware/usr/lib/vmware/lib/libcurl.so.4/libcurl.so.4 While not a major issue per se, it's filling the log file and making it difficult to read. Any way to stop these 'hidden' files from being processed/logged? 2. I had added a cron job to my system that shuts the server down safely each night at 01.00. (power saving). The script checks to make sure each drive is spun down before doing so and aborts if a drive is spinning (likely in use for some reason). Now, since enabling vmware server, my cache drive is constantly spun up and the system therefore does not shut down. I suspect this is because vmware server is using/polling that drive. Any thoughts on a solution? My ideas are; A. Move VMWARE files to a different (non raid/cache) drive B. Ignore spun-up status of cache drive and shut down anyway C. Somehow configure VMWARE to shut itself down half an hour before unraid shutdown is scheduled I don't want to do A because it would require a recompile of vmware into unraid (shudders) B sounds fairly dangerous C I'm not sure how to go about - another cronjob maybe? Any advice? Peter PS Not looking forward to having to recompile vmware into 5.0 stable when it comes out :-(

Would like to set this up. With AFP around the corner in unRAID , should I just wait for that? Will that supplant nettalk? Peter

How about you click on the disk size readout and it toggles? Or you rollover and a tooltip gives you the other version? Looking forward to trying out 5.0 when I get time....

Many thanks for your speedy and comprehensive reply. I'll find a local supplier of that particular card and see what results I get. You're correct, of course, pointig out that I don't want to invest too much in the Asus board, however, it's hardware I have and is doing the job. Peter

Hi all I have an unRaid system built around a dual-xeon Asus PCH-DL (2x 2.8GHz underclocked to 1.6GHz). My drive config presently comprises 2x 500gb ata drives on motherboard channels 1 & 2 and a 1TB SATA drive employed as parity on motherboard SATA and a 120GB SATA Drive as cache, on a separate mb sata controller. I'm getting between 25 - 30 Mb/s. read/write I'm wondering if I add in something like an Adaptec AAR-1420SA PCI-X-133/66; 4-Channel RAID-0/1 and add on a couple of 3 TB sata drives, will I see improved performance? (will likely retire the 2x ata drives) If yes, and in this config, should I be adding my cache drive and/or parity drive to the card as well? Should I consider adding two of these cards and having all my SATA drives connected via pci-x and bypassing motherboard sata? Thoughts appreciated. Peter