Auggie

FYI, instead of updating BIOS, I went ahead and splurged on a new Broadcom 9400-16i HBA, upgraded UnRAID to v7.3.1 and all is well. I have to eventually use this board anyways if and when I switch out to a new SuperMicro 36-bay server waiting patiently in a ginormous box in storage. I may look at virtualizing my pair of UnRAID iron and consolidate into a single machine while swapping out the too-deep Chenbro 48-bay to a shorter WD Data60. Someday I'll try the BIOS and revert back to the embedded LSI 3008 and report my findings, but for now, I'm marching forward with new HBA.

I will mull over a BIOS update. Not really inclined to do one given how SuperMicro clearly went for money-grab when they arbitrarily imposed a fee in a BIOS update to access previously free features. Then again, the damage is already done unless they've restricted even more features for cash. I'm performing an overdue drive replacement but will probably do the BIOS update next week as I don't want to be left permanently stuck at UnRAID 7.2.7. Now, if the BIOS update does not resolve the issue, what further steps can be done? I think a bug report would be in order at a minimum...

The LSI3008 chip is embedded into the MB so can't switch slots. I'm loathe to update BIOS AGAIN on this SuperMicro board since upgrading it from its original BIOS introduced PAID or SUBSCRIPTION requirements to access features that I previously could access for free. But the question I should really ask: Did UnRAID make a change that requires updating the BIOS of a MB? Again, I didn't see any mention in the upgrade logs that would hint a BIOS update may be necessary. Or are did you mean do a FW update to the LSI3008 chip, which I haven't updated since I believe 2018 when I first got this MB and flashed it to IT mode FW.

Hmm... I'd rather not have to buy a compatible PCIe card to get around this issue, but because I just bought a complete 36-bay SuperMicro server as an eventual replacement for my Chenbro setup (this chassis barely fits my XRack Pro cabinet, can't find any slide rails for it, the drive caddy release buttons are all breaking off due to heat and age which Chenbro will NOT sell replacements direct to customers [which the chassis has now been discontinued], and it's just plain loud even inside the noise reducing enclosure, and I really thought the MB SAS ports may have entirely failed when I discovered the drives no longer showing up after the UnRAID upgrade), it came with an LSI 9361-8i MegaRAID card so I need to replace it, which will probably be the BroadCom 9400-16i. SO, if this issue doesn't get fixed any time soon (if ever), I may just go ahead and get the 9400-16i, which uses the SAS3416 chip; I hope this is not affected by the 7.3.x "upgrade."

Attached are 7.3.1 diagnostics, 7.3.1 syslog and 7.2.7 syslog. None of the drives attached to the LSI3008 show up in the 7.3.1 syslog but there are no errors. Drives attached to SATA and USB ports on the MB are unaffected. I reviewed the change logs for both 7.3.0 and 7.3.1 and there is no specific mention of changes involving HBA cards/chipsets, though are quite a few files that are updated and I have no idea what each of the individual files affect which hardware component(s). unraid-diagnostics-20260602-0634.zip syslog-7.3.1.txt syslog-7.2.7.txt

Will have to wait 3 days as one of my drives was disabled so have to do the ol' rebuild first...

I have two UnRAID servers, one was running v7.2.4 and the other something really old, like maybe 10-14 versions older (can't remember since the recent upgrade). I upgraded both to v7.3.0. One server lost access to ALL drives, the other humming along like nothing changed. The BAD: SuperMicro X11SPH-nCTPF with onboard LSI3008 with IT-mode FW. Upgraded to 7.3.0 and 7.3.1 and both versions all drives no longer show up anywhere after the upgrade, not even in the logs. Downgrade back to 7.2.4 and all happy again. The GOOD: SuperMicro X10DRH-iT with PCIe SAS card (I think either an LSI 9211-8i or IBM M1015). All drives happy as can be under 7.3.0 and 7.3.1 Both MB's utilize SAS expanders of the chassis' they're installed into (see sig) Before I go a hollerin' to LT and report these unacceptable BUGs, is there perhaps something I'm missing, a certain setting or something else? I'm thinking there has to be some sort of incompatibility with the built-in SAS controller of the first system. TIA! UPDATE: I upgraded the first server to 7.2.7 and all's well. So it appears to be the jump from 7.2.x to 7.3.x.

Hmm... I'm not sure the WOL solutions would work for these commercial-grade high-capacity server chassis as it appears the case fans are not controlllable by the MoBo? It's been years since I've assembled these servers but I believe there are no fan controller wires from the case that plug into associated header pins on the MoBo, so that would suggest the case fans are independently controlled (if that) by any logic boards organic to the case. When the chassis is powered on, the case fans run full blast constantly, no matter if all drives spin-down or the MoBo is in some sort of sleep mode.

I painfully discovered that my pair of UnRAID servers, one with a Chenbro 48-bay chassis and the other with a SuperMicro 36-bay chassis, both sporting SuperMicro MoBo's, use up a ton of electricity when kept running 24/7, even with the drives spun-down, because the chassis fans continue to spin full blast. I'm burning through approximately 2kW just during the night; I was told by the local electric company rep that the average is 0.13kW. With my huge electric bills paid off (and I have a 1400kW solar array), I'm now manually shutting down my servers when they are no longer in use. However, I do occassionaly forget as I leave them unattended during large file transfers and realize my mistake the next day. Are there any auto shutdown scrips or plug-ins that will power-down UnRAID after a specified period of activity? My Google-Fu doesn't appear to be up-to-snuff as I get old general answers and references with no verifiable working script or plug-in. And as the chassis's I use have independent case fans that can't be controlled by their MoBo's, S3 solutions would not appear to work for me.

UPDATE: It's been a couple days since parity finished and so far, everything is working normally, I can stop the array at wil, and the syslog shows no appeciable errors. This does bring up what I believe is a serious gap in UnRAID functionality: if there was indeed some underlying drive issue as reported in the log that prevented the array from being manually stopped, then this potential unsafe situation is not recognized by UnRAID as there were no other errors reported in the GUI or drive information and attributes sections, nor did UnRAID respond expectedly or provide any messages indicating something was amiss or that it couldn't handle the user request.

In the interim, I had simply selected Reboot and then after the reboot automatically went into Parity Check. FYI, prior to these issues, there was a disabled drive that I just replaced and had data rebuilt on the new drive. All seemed well after the rebuild until I tried pausing the array. Anywho, I will see how the Parity Check has any bearing on the disk errors you mentioned; the GUI otherwise shows all disks up with no errors.

I get the normal "Do you wish to Proceed" prompt when clicking on STOP ARRAY, but nothing happens. There are errors in the log (attached). It will reboot, it will shutdown, but it won't respond to stopping the array. I want to add a new cache drive into my pool Help? syslog-2.txt

Upgrade both of my unRAID servers, one successfully, but another boots immediately into an error. No getting around this so have to resort to backup

I probably would never have figured out these settings ("ether" and "net") unless I block out some time to do trial and error with every single combination (which I would not have the patience for). MAYBE if I saw these two words in adjacent drop downs, I might have went straight to that combo; but split across two different web pages, nah, I'm a little too dense to pick up on that when I'm in hurry!

I just got a 36" deep 12U enclosure and have now installed both of my 4U Unraid boxes in it. Due to the depths of both server chassis (SuperMicro 36-bay SC847 and Chenbro 48-bay RM43348), it would be really cramped having 2U UPS's to fitted in the enclosure along with a 1U network switch and a pair of 1U rack lights (one mounted in front and one at the rear of the rack). So I'm planning to install just one UPS, which would be one of the latest APC Smart-UPS X's with a Network Management Card. I've come across both an Unraid thread here, as well as a StackExchange thread that discusses setting up apcupsd, so I delve into the apcupsd online manual link provided within Unraid's web interface and I need to do a master/slave configuration, but the setup instructions discuss the use of a configuration file. Could this all be setup via Unraid's Settings->UPS Settings UPS Cable and UPS Type drop-down menus, and if so, what would be the appropriate selections on the "master" Unraid and "slave'' Unraid? Or do I have to get down in the weeds by manually setting up a configuration file?

2 UnRAIDs: Specs in my sig

I do understand the concept of what you are postulating, but can you provide any documentation on the statement, "They are mutually exclusive by definition." Where is that "definition?" A legitimate question. The quote I provided from the "unofficial" manual is explicity clear that we can set each setting independently and separately. So I'm genuinely interested in reading up on this "definition" you've referred to because it may not be working as you've stated. Remember, what we "think" of how it should be behave based on our individual paradigm of user interface design may not be the paradigm of the developers. The problem with software development is that we as a developer can write code to do whatever it is we want, regardless of interface guidelines and whatnot. I've been writing code since 1980: BASIC, Fortran, Assembly 6502, COBOL... and interface design can get real messy I will say when I initially added that drive to the array I noticed that a new sub-folder was created from another User Share which I forgot to "exclude" from it's settings; since adding the new drive to the "exlude" list of the other User Share I have not seen any unwanted sub-folders created. ANYWHO, an update to this situation: that recently "new" drive eventually filled to maximum capacity I wanted so I added another "new" drive. So far, with all the settings I've had for many years (allocation method High-Water, both Include and Exclude disks entered, Automatically Split), it's now working as intended: All new file transfers goes to the "new" drive. Of note: the first "new" drive was added to the "middle" of the array (disk 11) whereas the new "new" drive was added at the end (disk 24). Not sure if that has any bearing but so far, that's the only difference in setup.

Just to be redundant in forcing my expectations. The developer of uNRAID apparently added these two options individually, separately, with no dependancies between them, meaning you can mix and match to your heart's content. Which I've been doing now for 11 years with ZERO issues (of which this is not related to the issue I'm reporting on). That assumption is absolutely incorrect according to the unRAID's Unofficial Manual: SECOND SENTENCE: These parameters can be used separately or together to define the group of disks allowed for each user share. The design of which is obviously ambigious enough to cause debates, such as yours, as to the correct usage, but the above statement is crystal clear on the functioning of these two featues. I don't disagree that this is not a very well though-out presentation of these features, which is why I filled out both Include and Exclude to ensure it behaves according to my intentions.

I will reiterate, my experience does not indicate that that is what happens. If what you state happens, then all contents with the same parent folder (e.g. "My Favorite Movie" with contents of "My Favorite Movie (1984)" and "My Favorite Movie (Bonus Disc) (1984)," will both be on the same disk as the parent "My Favorite Movie," including any other files, such as poster art and fanart. But no sir, that's not what I see across two unRAID setups over the 11 years I've been using unRAID: individual files/folders can be split across multiple drives if copied/moved over in separate sessions. What I do see is that during a move/copy to the NAS, unRAID will keep all filers and folders in the move in the same disk during the same operation.

My experience is that this is not what actually happens: unRAID will still typically place the files/folder according to the allocation method, even if there is a same-named folder on one or more drives. I'm moving files and folders from a Mac (presently running Big Sur) through the Finder and the user share mounted on the desktop. I do notice a few empty folders here in there on one or more drives, while the actual contents may reside on different drive. Not often and not a deal breaker and so far that I can tell, not related to the issue I'm having because those situations with empty folders are not invovled with the current file operation causing my headaches.

I don't agree with this train of thought: I believe you can have both, so long as there is no conflict with disks in both exceptions, which I don't have any. But just to prove this theory, I removed all disks under "exclude" and just tried copying files to the NAS and nope, it still wrote to one of the almost-full drives versus the newly added drive with the most free. For years I had everything set to Highwater (in fact, all my other user shares are still set to Highwater); it's only when unRAID kept filling up the other drives until they had zero (0) free space is when I switched to Most Free in hopes of forcing it to the new drive, but nope, it kept behaving unexpectedly. IIRC correctly, I read somewhere, perhaps in an unRAID FAQ, to set Minimum Free to 0; I know when I started having this issue and bumped it to, say, 256GB, I couldn't move/copy any files to unRAID because it said there was no more free space, when in fact, the new drive had about 3TB free whilest the original drives were less than 80GB. I again set minimum free to 128GB in this similar situation and it still wrote to the other drives with less space. BTW, I don't use cache drives...

Hope this helps track down the issue... nas-diagnostics-20211002-2121.zip

I recently added a new drive to the array and assigned it to a specific share where all the other drives are almost full, but when I save files to the share, unRAID does NOT save the files to the drive I've intended it to (Most Free) and instead attempts to save them to the other drives until there's no more free space and I get errors (OS X). I've tried setting the Allocation Method to High-Water but same situation: it doesn't always send files to the most free drive. In the past, I've never had this issue when expanding an array and assigning new drives to a specific share. This is the first time I've done so under 6.9.2, so I don't know if there's a new bug introduced with this version, or something else. Sys log shows nothing out of the ordinary. In the meantime, I'm now stuck moving files from the full drives to the new drive to regain the ability to save files to the share again without encountering errors which stops file transfers to the NAS.

I got it all sorted out so this is to provide closure and hopefully help anyone else who expereinces similar networking issues. By default, UnRAID automatically activates and uses the first network interface it comes across, which may not be the physical first one (i.e. eth0, which is the case on my SuperMicro X9 board as UnRAID selected eth1 as the default), regardless of which port is physically connected to the LAN. All other network interfaces are then automatically set to inactive (shutdown). Since I didn't know the physical port order on the 2-port IBM NIC, I had plugged the ethernet cable to the most convenient one at the time of initial setup, which happened to be port 2 (eth1), which was the port closest to the motherboard PCIe slots. This caused all the problems I had experienced with no IP assignments and thus no network connectivity other than through the dedicated IPMI port. During my back and forth testing, I had by chance reconnected the ethernet cable to the other port (port 1 or eth0) when I had installed the trial UnRAID stick. This is why UnRAID network connectivity had become fully functional under that system, which I had initially attributed it to some configuration setting difference between my registered UnRAID stick and the trial; that was not the case here. It's all due to how UnRAID detects, enables, and disables the network ports it discovers. My recommended procedure for handling a new system and/or new NIC with multiple ports is to boot UnRAID into GUI mode (I had never before used the console GUI as all my UnRAID servers are headless) to determine which port had been assigned the default network port, and if it's currently active. If not, you can either switch the cable to the actively assigned port, or manually enable and assign the port you wish to use on the Network Settings page.