RobJ

This thread is reserved for Frequently Asked Questions, concerning unRAID as a NAS, its setup, operation, management, and troubleshooting. Please do not ask for support here, such requests and anything off-topic will be deleted or moved, probably to the FAQ feedback topic. If you wish to comment on the current FAQ posts, or have suggestions or requests for the FAQ, please put them in the FAQ feedback topic. Thank you! Index to common questions Some are from the wiki FAQ, some from this thread, and some from the LimeTech web site. There are many more questions with answers on the wiki FAQ. Getting Started What is unRAID? What are the minimum system requirements? How is unRAID licensed? What counts as a drive against my license storage device limit? What are the current device limits for each license? How does parity work? How hard is unRAID to use if I don't know Linux? How do I get started? How do I know if I've configured my server properly? General Questions How do I get help? What causes unclean shutdowns? (Why does a parity check happen whenever I turn on my server?) Please explain how Linux permissions work! My VM or Docker created some files but I can't access them from Windows? Why can't I delete a file (without permissions from root/nobody/Unix user/999/etc)? Why is so much of my RAM being used? What are the requirements for the second parity disk? Does the second parity drive have to be the same size as the first? What is "Boot GUI mode", and how do I change to it? Can I reorder my drives within my array? Why is the webGUI not displaying any of my shares, yet I can see them over the network? Why can't unRAID find or add my SAS drive? I have a new SAS drive.  How do I get unRAID to recognize and assign it? I set a share to private, and created a user with read/write permissions for that share.  But on my Windows PC, when I try to navigate to that share, why does it say I don't have access when I enter that user name and password? I have software that requires using port 80.  How do I change the HTTP port that unRAID uses? Is there a way to create a Windows shortcut for shutting down the unRAID server? I have an unmountable BTRFS data disk, what can I do to recover my data? How do I search the forum? (No, its not always obvious) (obsolete?) Cache Drive/Pool How do I add a disk to create a redundant btrfs or zfs pool? How do I remove a device from a btrfs or zfs pool? How do I replace or upgrade a device from btrfs or zfs pool? I have two different size cache devices, why is the reported space incorrect? Can I change my btrfs pool to RAID0 or other modes? Can I use a cache, log, special, spare and/or dedup vdev with my zfs pool? How can I remove a subpool from a zfs pool using Unraid v7.0? How can I expand a ZFS RAID-Z pool? How can I monitor a btrfs or zfs pool for errors? How do I replace/upgrade my single cache device? (unRAID v6.2 and above only) Can you explain the Cache drive option types, and what is the difference between them? I have an unmountable BTRFS cache disk or pool, what can I do to recover my data? Why are files not being moved by the mover? Plugins Why am I unable to install plugins? Is there documentation for the unRAID plugin system? Maintenance and Troubleshooting I need help! What do I do? My Proxy is no longer working How do I use the Syslog Server? Why do I see csrf errors in my syslog? How can I stop mover from running? How do I know if I've configured my server properly? What do I do if I get a red X next to a hard disk? Why is my disk being marked as Read-Only? I have corruption in a file system, how do I fix it? I'm getting an error message " Failed to find user 'avahi' ".  What do I do? Why after upgrading to a 6.2 version is my webGUI so slow? Why is my webGUI taking so long between pages? Why is my GUI Slow and/or unresponsive? Why does ARRAY STARTED STALE CONFIGURATION appear at the bottom of the webUI? What are "Page Allocation Stalls?" Why do I see "Cannot open root device null" and unRaid will not boot? Fix Common Problems is telling me that Write Cache is disabled on a drive.  What do I do? How to reformat a SAS HDD to different block sizes (mainly 512) to use in UNRAID? How can I use ddrescue to recover data from a failing disk? I'm getting low read speeds from my unRAID server, is there a fix? How can I calibrate my UPS, silence alarms, change battery dates using apcupsd? What can I do to keep my Ryzen based server from crashing/locking up with Unraid? Where can I see what folders are taking up RAM? My system won't properly wakeup from S3 Sleep unRAID FAQ's and Guides - * Guides and Videos - comprehensive collection of all unRAID guides (please let us know if you find one that's missing) * FAQ for unRAID v6 on the forums, general NAS questions, not for Dockers or VM's * FAQ for unRAID v6 on the unRAID wiki - it has a tremendous amount of information, questions and answers about unRAID. It's being updated for v6, but much is still only for v4 and v5. * Docker FAQ - concerning all things Docker, their setup, operation, management, and troubleshooting * FAQ for binhex Docker containers - some of the questions and answers are of general interest, not just for binhex containers * VM FAQ - a FAQ for VM's and all virtualization issues Know of a question that ought to be here? Please suggest it in the FAQ feedback topic. ------------------------------------------------------- Suggested format for FAQ entries - clearly shape the issue as a question or as a statement of the problem to solve, then fully answer it below, including any appropriate links to related info or videos. Optionally, set the subject heading to be appropriate, perhaps the question itself. While a moderator could cut and paste a FAQ entry here, only another moderator could edit it. It's best therefore if only knowledgeable and experienced users create the FAQ posts, so they can be the ones to edit it later, as needed. Later, the author may want to add new info to the post, or add links to new and helpful info. And the post may need to be modified if a new unRAID release changes the behavior being discussed. Moderators: please feel free to edit this post.

Adding to his comment, the toggle for destructive mode does not seem consistent with the rest of unRAID. Would you consider changing it to be more consistent, perhaps require checking a check box with the text something like "Yes I want to do this", prior to making the Format button active.

Sounds like you hit the ReiserFS full disk issue. The Reiser file system is great most of the time, but becomes very inefficient if you fill the disk too full, causing long timeouts. The fix is to never fill it too full (too late!), or convert the drives to XFS.

Please excuse my OCD-like observations. When you first posted the lines above, there were so many typos, I didn't know what to say. I realize typos don't matter to some, but as a programmer, I can't help noticing them, because they are critical. So I can't tell if they were introduced by hand typing the error messages, or are actually correct quotes. If so, they do explain the error messages. I'll just list them, you can decide if they're an issue - * stat: cannot stat ' /mnt/disk2/Hi Def 2/The Big Bang Theory/Series 6/mymovies.ing : No such file or directory - 2 spaces after the leading apostrophe, can't be correct - file extension is .ing, is that correct? * /bin/md5sum: ' /mnt/disk2/Hi Def 2 /The Big Bang Theory/Series 6/mymovies.ign' : No such file or directory - 1 space after the leading apostrophe, can't be correct - has "Hi Def 2 " (extra space after the 2) instead of "Hi Def 2", both can't be correct - file extension is .ign, should it be .ign or .ing? Sorry, some of us are just annoying purists. But without accurate info, it's hard to help.

red ata7 sd6 sdb no smart p ata4 sd3 sda 197=33 d2 ata8 sd7 sdd ok Almost 5.5 hours after boot (so probably during the zeroing of the Red), write requests timed out. It retried and retried, then repeatedly tried resetting it, but when no response, the kernel disabled the drive, dropping it from the system. There are no other clues I can see as to why, so you cannot conclude there's anything wrong with the drive. In fact, typically this is almost never the fault of the drive, could be a port failed, a SATA or power cable fell off, loose backframe connection, bad power, controller failure, and very remotely a total drive failure. There are no SMART reports for the Red, so can't conclude *anything* about it. After the drive was disabled, you can ignore ALL errors that pertain to it, including those of your last post. Once you check all connections and reboot, please obtain a SMART report for the Red, and attach it for us to see. Your Parity drive has 33 bad sectors. I recommend unassigning it, and Preclear it at least twice, and look for a clean report after each. If clean, you can reassign it and use it. Both Seagates have some wear and tear, but are probably still usable, certainly not perfect though, should be monitored now and then.

Parity drives can be installed any where. The only applicable factor I can think of is performance, you'd want your parity drives on your fastest SATA ports. Motherboard ports are generally as fast or faster than the rest, but I don't think any of your ports are significantly different.

There are only 2 ways to accomplish that - by already having a copy of that file (which means having a full backup with copies of EVERY file), or an OS like Windows with builtin shadowing (detects an 'open for editing' and makes a 'shadow' copy first). You either have to have a full backup system with versioning, or the hooks into the OS to detect every attempt to edit. SAMBA is just a file transfer and access protocol, and the appropriate controls, to which has been added a delayed delete feature, popularly called a recycle bin. No way to stretch that into versioning or shadowing. If you really want something like that, you need to talk to the SAMBA people.

When I studied Joe L. code, I realized that the primary function of the original script was, for a long time, to detect malfunction in hard drives. Little coding is needed to clear and write the clear signature. In fact, it can be done with less than 40 lines of code. All the remaining code is to make a pleasant user output, retrieve and compare SMART attributes, generate reports, avoid wrong disks from being cleared, stress the disk headers etc.... Of course I'm open to any suggestions. We can easily add other methods to complement those in place. If you can point me the proven badblocks tests we could add, that would be great. But I would never add a disk to my array before I took a good look into it's SMART attributes, and that kind of awareness is not officially offered yet. These are my favorite versions of badblock commands - - Read-only method: badblocks -b 4096 -c 256 -sv /dev/sdX - Destructive read/write method: badblocks -b 4096 -c 256 -wsv /dev/sdX - Non-destructive read/write method: badblocks -b 4096 -c 256 -nsv /dev/sdX Each of the above use 4K blocks, in 1MB segments. Add an option for a SMART long test in there, and you are close to my proposal (last paragraph) a while ago. I still like my idea, for user controlled strategies.

One small comment about that 8TB drive - it's not yet in the SMART database (drivedb.h), so it didn't interpret Command Timeout correctly. It shows a RAW value of 65537, up from 0, which *looks* like a huge increase. But correctly interpreted, 65537 is 1,1,0 (or possibly 0,1,1) - a single command timeout, an increase of one.

*Something* happened at hour 158, but I don't know what. At least 5 of the 17 (probably all 17) occurred at 158, and they were UNC's but the message is the same for each, and the sector is unspecified (perhaps unknown?). It shows only as 0xfffffff, which is almost certainly not a valid sector number. If you did not see any other evidence of bad sectors, then I would ignore it. However, because it happened with the drive so new, it's certainly important, and worth monitoring closely. Just a comment about the BackBlaze work - they have been great to release so much data, and their findings and recommendations about drive quality are invaluable, absolutely worth relying on. Their SMART data though is not as reliable, and shows some issues. While I'm sure they have people that know what they are doing, the one(s) that provided the SMART charts and graphs did not fully understand actual SMART usage and made some embarrassing decisions. That has made it hard for me to fully trust *some* of their work, and the interpretations derived from it.

That's an interesting case, that falls in a gray area not specified by the standard. From a SMART standpoint, I don't even know what "Failing now" means when it isn't an attribute marked as a critical one. I took a look at how other drives handle it, and found many that don't have it, some that mark it as critical, a number of Seagates that handle it as non-critical but with a high threshold (like yours), and even some Samsungs that mark it as critical but with a threshold of zero, which can't be reached! The thing is though, if you want to add it, you would need to add a bunch of others that are associated with drive failure much more often than 'End-to-end error'. That would include all attributes marked as critical, and perhaps all attributes with a threshold. I'm certainly not an expert, but I've probably looked at a thousand SMART reports and yours may be the first involving 'End-to-end error'. I like the display better without all the 'Unchanged's. The Decreased should not have the negative sign ("Decreased '-2'" means it went up 2 not down 2). And they are numbers, should not have quotes around them. I think I would prefer the simpler Up 1 and Down 2 though. I don't expect everyone to agree with me on every point! But I do like where this is going.

* For consistency with every where else in unRAID, I would prefer the attribute numbers visible. * In my opinion, I don't think you need the Status column with changed/no change, as we can all see the changes or lack thereof. * Temps can be found in 190 or 194. Some drives only use 190, some only use 194, many use both. You could look for 190, if not exists use 194. * The over temp message "Failed in past" I've only seen a few times, seems harmless, just means temp hit high temp threshold at some point in past. I don't think I have seen that "Failed in past" on any other attribute, but I suppose it's possible. I don't think it's necessary to display it. * 4 Start_Stop_Count is quite unimportant. I don't think I have ever seen it associated with a single drive issue. If you want it, then you should probably add 12 Power_Cycle_Count, 192 Power-Off_Retract_Count, and 193 Load_Cycle_Count, so the user can see the relations between them. But these are all non-critical, won't fail the drive. * I know you've selected a set of attributes to open the discussion. I personally would prefer seeing as few as possible, keep it clean and simple, to avoid confusion. Showing 9 and 190/194 gives a nice time and temp history, and 5 and 197 display the most critical items concerning bad sectors. And it's always nice to show any significant change to 199, so you can warn them about SATA cable quality. But I think that more than that isn't necessary, unless the attribute is important and changes significantly. * The only critical attribute you have chosen is 5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct. Only critical attributes can fail a drive, those with a flag value with the one bit on, those that say 'Pre-fail'. I believe the ones most likely to fail a drive are 5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct, 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate, 7 Seek_Error_Rate, and 3 Spin_Up_Time. For all but 5, you would want to display the VALUE, not the RAW. * If you are sure you want 188, be aware that some drives have it as a single small number, but some Seagates have it as a set of 3 small numbers, a 48 bit value that should be treated as 3 16 bit values. If it's a huge number, break it into 3 numbers. * A number of those attributes won't exist on some drives. * Not used to seeing a drive go through multiple Preclear cycles and not age a single hour! * At some point, you may be asked for an SSD Preclear option, which could be just a zeroing plus signature plus SMART display and evaluation, no pre or post reads. The SMART attributes for SSD's are generally very different, and the age and wear level may be the most interesting ones (but very inconsistent attribute numbers). * 'ATENTION' should be 'ATTENTION'.

Both look fine. There's a bit of wear and tear on the Seagate, but not bad for 20000 hours.

The problem is, with those MCE's, it's hard to trust the machine, or anything it reports. Those MCE's really need to be resolved first, then see if Preclear works. I'd start with a long Memtest, and check the memory timings.

I don't know about whether there's a temporary file or what it's named (I've never had one), but it should have a current timestamp, as the last thing written. I'd use a file manager and view the destination folder(s), sort by date modified with newest on top, and look for the most recent file.

Some thoughts - * I've long wrestled with this, trying to find a way forward, to clear the air, to bring Preclear functionality up to date in plugin form, and I have to say your efforts here are wonderful, near miraculous, so unexpected, but greatly appreciated. I am absolutely positive that Joe never intended to hold Preclear functionality hostage, but that is what effectively had happened. Like most developers, Joe really wanted complete control over his code, and since he's a Linux veteran and command-line oriented, never appreciated the overwhelming desire for GUI style tools, visual plugins over scripts. Plus he got very busy with a new job, didn't have time to keep up with all the changes. Except for one small change for v6, he never even had time for changes with code suggested by various other users. * I had recently derived patch files (from diff -u, for patch), taking the original script of 1.15, first back to 1.14, then to the fast Preclear, then to the latest with changes by gfjardim, then include a small change of mine plus a prominent statement included that would say something like "Because script modifications by various unRAID community members are included, this Preclear script is not authorized or supported by the original author, Joe L." I had hoped that that would make it at least ethically acceptable, and provide a way forward, using a line of mods/patches for all the modifications to come. Thankfully, that is no longer needed, completely superseded by your rewrite. A cloud has been lifted from the community. * Joe didn't want changes that weren't his, that he couldn't support, but as a support issue, that never really held water. He was so good with sed and diff and bash scripting in general, he would quickly grasp any small changes from us. And besides, it's the whole community supporting Preclear. Joe hasn't had to support it in a long time. * There had been suggestions to rewrite Preclear functionality, but that was NEVER plausible, a complete non-starter. It would be completely illogical to rewrite something that works so well, and is well-tested, well-understood, especially with so many other things to work on. It was going to be a LONG time before it made sense for LimeTech to take time to write something similar, something that duplicated the current functionality. (That's why your efforts are so unexpected, delightfully illogical, near miraculous! We owe you a large debt of gratitude.) * The small section that reports drive issues at the close of the Preclear session has long had an error that causes confusion, see this example - ** Changed attributes in files: /tmp/smart_start_sdi /tmp/smart_finish_sdi ATTRIBUTE NEW_VAL OLD_VAL FAILURE_THRESHOLD STATUS RAW_VALUE Raw_Read_Error_Rate = 115 114 6 ok 94152625 Seek_Error_Rate = 52 52 30 near_thresh 1322898620909 Spin_Retry_Count = 100 100 97 near_thresh 0 End-to-End_Error = 100 100 99 near_thresh 0 High_Fly_Writes = 96 97 0 ok 4 Airflow_Temperature_Cel = 67 66 45 near_thresh 33 Temperature_Celsius = 33 34 0 ok 33 Hardware_ECC_Recovered = 49 43 0 ok 94152625 No SMART attributes are FAILING_NOW None of the 4 "near_thresh" lines should have been reported, and probably not any of the others either (others opinions may differ). They aren't a real concern, so listing them causes confusion to less experienced users. I'm not saying don't list real problems, but I would prefer to *only* list those of concern. This is a good example where we can now propose needed changes, and hope to see them happen! * I had long wanted to propose a 'strategy' feature, where the user could specify the testing and clearing strategy used. I had thought to add an option with perhaps "-p string" (-p for plan, couldn't use -s as it was already in use, before your rewrite). 'String' would consist of an ordered list of digits or letters representing operations, such as 0=preread, 1=zeroing, 2=old postread, 3=fast postread, 4=smart long test, 5=badblocks -n, and 6=badblocks -w. SMART reports would be obtained and checked before starting and after every operation. A Preclear (with fast) like the current default, would default to "-p 013". But you could now easily create your own favorite Preclearing process, such as "-p 613" or "-p 413" or "-p 046135313". Or you could do a quick zeroing (-p 1) or quick Preclear (-p 13), or if you don't need zeroing just testing (-p 46 or -p 45). Seems simple and intuitive for users. It's actually more complicated to implement though, as there are other operations, such as write signature, test for signature, reads with random head movement, test for all zeros (only after a zeroing or operation that preserved a previous zeroing, like reads and smart tests), etc. The current postreads are actually 3 operations in one, I believe. Just ideas for the future ...

I've never tried this, so can't guarantee anything. Manually edit your sensors.conf (/boot/config/plugins/dynamix.system.temp/sensors.conf), and add the line "compute temp9 (@-30),(@+30)" just below the line with the faulty temp. Replace temp9 with your raw temp name. I don't know, but you may need to reboot. For example, # sensors chip "acpitz-virtual-0" label "temp1" "CPU Temp" compute temp1 (@-30),(@+30) chip "k8temp-pci-00c3" label "temp1" "MB Temp" For more info, see the following links - http://linux.die.net/man/5/sensors.conf https://www.opennet.ru/man.shtml?topic=sensors.conf&category=5 Finally got a chance to try this out. Works perfectly! Thanks Rob! Excellent! You are precedent setting here. I'm sure others can use this too.

Everything looks good. The high fly writes *might* indicate a marginal mechanical issue some day. For now, it's fine.

The mount point cannot be changed from /mnt/disks/. So it is necessary to set "Enable disk shares:" to "yes" (ignoring all the advice not to do so) in order to access an ISO over nfs? The path /mnt/disks would not normally be a part of the disk shares. Are you saying that /mnt/disks is controlled by "Enable disk shares:"?

Try turning off the 'Complete' switch at the top. It will turn off all but the physical devices table. So that's what that 'Complete' switch is for! I've always wondered. Would you consider adding a note to the help? It does do practically everything I asked for, so thank you!

Are you sure this is true? From my online searches and experience I’m don’t think so, I posted somewhere on this thread that one of my disks redballed during the rsync copy, this resulted in a corrupted file, there was no error on the rsync operation. You would also expect to see some read activity after copying a file if rsynch was verifying it and it does not happen. But I do believe you don’t need to run checksums after copying unless a disk error occurs. Edit: I believe this below better explains it and why it’s only important to run checksums in case of a disk write error. http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/30970/does-rsync-verify-files-copied-between-two-local-drives That's similar to what I found. Actual read activity is highly unlikely because of caching, both in the kernel and on the drive itself. Which is why I added the 'almost' in my "almost redundant" comment, because it is not truly checksumming it end to end, all caches flushed, read after write (which would require a rotation on spinners, noticeably slower). However we can assume it's checksummed to the final write, then the busses have their own CRC and parity checking, then it's CRC checked over the SATA link, and then the drive adds ECC info to the write, all of which 'almost' completely guarantees its safety. Would you agree with that? I've actually been performing the extra verification, old habits and hard experience. But I agree that logically it no longer makes sense, and most users should not bother. It's *extremely* unlikely to help.

I didn't know that. I'm surprised that more users haven't caught on to this, because it saves a lot of time not having to New Config and reassign everything, and you don't have to worry about getting the Parity drive right. That's really odd, I wonder why it's different. Slot assignment is an arbitrary thing, a software thing, so it shouldn't matter.

I did the New Config the first time, but got to thinking, and tried the shortcut - and it was over and done so fast I couldn't believe it. But it checked out completely! And I've repeated it since. I first tried to figure out how to trick super.dat, to avoid having to reassign all the drives over and over after New Config, but it was going to be more work than it was worth, so I gave up on that idea, then hit on the simple idea above. But I didn't actually expect it to work! Especially so quickly! The changing the formats part I discovered the hard way, but it's easy enough to do.

A minor request, and I know you're busy, and I'll be fine with whatever you do or don't do ... You've added features that are very cool but do take up extra vertical space on the Main screen, requiring more scrolling now than in the past, between the array listing at top and the array operation buttons at the bottom. I was wondering if a little vertical compression was possible. At the moment, I don't have a single object of any of the 3 types, and probably won't use the ISO or SMB sections for awhile. Each section has 4 fat lines, and a slimmer white space line for separation between the sections. If a section does not have objects, could the header line be skipped, saving one vertical line? And the "Add [object]" button, taking up a whole line, could it be moved to the right side of the section title line, or the right or left of the "No [objects]" message (saving another vertical line)? And maybe the "No [objects]" message could be moved to the middle of the section title line? Or add options to turn off whole sections. Just minor ideas, you can do whatever you want. It's not that important.

I'm glad trurl gave you the help you needed. I just started myself converting drives to XFS, and found a few tricks to help. I wrote up a modified procedure just above, and I thought you might be interested in the swap procedure I found, in steps 10 through 14, for swapping back the shared files now on your Disk 3, and put them back to Disk 1. I think it's a safe procedure, but you do need to be careful. You're basically going to swap the drive assignments for Disk 1 and Disk 3, and their formats too if different, then restart the array. You should then be able to exclude your Disk 3 again, if you wish. Perhaps others already knew you could easily do this, but it was news to me.