yannis

Depending on where you live in the world, you could run your server for nothing. A solar panel charging a battery (or bank of), and run the server off that via an inverter. You'd have to do the maths to see what the payback period is. This isn't really an option for those of us who live in the UK as it's always cold and wet Personally, I leave my server on 24/7 as the heat it generates isn't truly wasted - it helps keep my house warm On a slightly more serious note but not to be recommended if there are small kids around, is that my server is tucked away under a desk in my study so I leave the sides off. That way the case fans don't come on. It's mainly because it runs quieter like that but I guess it saves a small amount of electricity.

Thanks for that. For my future reference, how can you tell that the motherboard and card will be fine? I tried Google but couldn't find that info anywhere. Was there a clue in the syslog?

@garycase. Thanks - I take it you are in market for a hardly used 3TB drive Ok so syslog attached (from a clean power down and re-start as the server had been running continuously for many months). Motherboard is an Asus M4A78L-M LE but with a Netgear GA311 Ethernet adaptor. There is also a generic SATA II 2 port PCI Express card. All I can find in the limited documentation is that it seems to use a Silicon Image SiL 3132 controller. Current Unraid version is 4.7 but I understand that I would need to change this to 5. something. Hope that helps. syslog.txt

Ah OK. I thought there might be a really simple way to check. I can't lay my hands on the manuals for the motherboard and add on card so I'll have to dig around inside the case and get back.

I'm toying with the idea of upgrading my unraid server to 3tb drives and the first thing I came across in the Wiki is this "Note that your disk controller must also support drives larger than 2.2TB. (many do, some do not)". So my question is, how can I tell if my disc controller will support these drives? (Please bear in mind that you are talking to a 59 year old carpenter with only just enough savvy to build an unraid server, and not a 20 something computer wizard). Many thanks

Cooling bill? AC? Here in England we had an overnight low of 9 deg C and yesterday's daytime high was 14 deg C ( and of course it rained all day).

Um, far be it for me, a humble 50 odd year old carpenter, to pretend to have any sort of technical input, but the official Unraid manual, is very clear on what UnRaid does. It hardly seems appropriate to complain that it takes you days to try and get it to do something else. It seems a bit like wanting an all terrain vehicle, but then buying a family saloon car and complaining that it takes days to turn it into a fully fledged off roader.

Thanks Joe L - nothing to worry about then.

Hi. I just noticed these red error messages in my sys log. I copied a blu ray disc and transferred it to my UnRaid server which has a cache disc. The mover script then kicked in and transferred it to the main array over night. I checked the sys log via UnMenu and noticed the following errors, which show up in red a few times during mover process. Mar 30 03:40:48 Tower logger: ./AllDisks/dvd movies/PUSS IN BOOTS/BDMV/JAR/88890/imageErrorPanel.png (Errors) Mar 30 03:40:48 Tower logger: >f+++++++++ AllDisks/dvd movies/PUSS IN BOOTS/BDMV/JAR/88890/imageErrorPanel.png (Errors) Are they anything to be concerned about? As far as I can tell, everything is working OK (although I haven't tried streaming this particular movie yet.

This is probably a "Windows thing" and nothing to do with UnRaid, but I was wondering if one of you knowledgeable people could possibly have an explanation and better still a solution. I have no problem with the write speed to my UnRaid server. However, I use AnyDVDHD to make copies of my DVDs which are stored on my UnRaid server. If I rip directly to Unraid it takes forever, compared to if I rip to a local hard disc on my PC, then transfer the folder to UnRaid. I haven't put a stop-watch on it but I'd say that ripping directly to my Unraid server takes more than twice as long as the combined time it takes to rip to a local hard drive, then move the entire contents accross. Any thoughts?

Thankyou. I'll ignore all other advice I was given (no offence intended to anyone who tried to help). So the server is now back up and running normally. I can again access the "normal" web gui. However, I'm not going to mark the thread as "solved" at this time because I still have no idea what caused the initial problem, nor how to prevent it happening again. Also, cycling the power to cure it, may be normal practice on Windows based machines, but I'd hope that linux would have a more elegant solution.

Thanks for the help but like I said in post #1, I'm a 58 year old "chippy", not an IT guy so most of what you've said has gone over my head. I do my best but to me "putty" is something they used to use for fixing glass in window frames. I have an automotive background too, but that just makes matters worse as FTP means Federal Test Procedure. Every discipline has it's own set of abreviations which mean different things to different people. What I could do with is a simple guide which says "if it happens again, type xyz then cycle the power" but I guess in the world of computers, that's probably just not possible.

OK. As advised, I used UnMenu to stop the array. However, as soon as I did that, I could no longer access the server at all. I couldn't bring up UnMenu, nor could I access it any more using putty. So, again as advised, I entered the command "halt -p" by using a keyboard connected directly to the server. After that, I couldn't enter anything via the keyboard either. The only option I had left was to cycle the power. This was clearly not a clean shutdown as the server is now doing a parity check - just what I was trying to avoid happening. God I hope this hasn't screwed things up. On the plus side, I can now access the server as normal (i.e by simply putting "tower" into the web browser). All disks show "green". I'll know better if there are any problems in 260 minutes or so................... Assuming everything is OK and for future reference, I could really do with knowing the correct way to cleanly re-boot the server when the normal web gui isn't available. Better still, I'd like to know why the normal web gui died and what I can do to prevent it happening again.

Well OK (but as I've mentioned, I do have a keyboard and monitor connected at the moment). However, I've downloaded this putty thing but I've had to do a lot of trawling about to find what to do with it. I've finally discovered that I have to select telnet as the connection type and port 23. So, now I can access the console and login from a PC as well as the local keyboard and monitor. However, I'm a bit nervous about just typing "halt -p" because in my reading up on telnet and putty etc I came accross this http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=Console#To_cleanly_Stop_the_array_from_the_command_line which mentions all sorts of stuff about stopping Samba and unmounting discs first. Or as I've mentioned, I can access unMenu and stop the array. Are you saying that I should do this first, then use putty and type halt -p after the array has stopped? Apart from not being able to access the Lime Technology web gui, the server seems to be working fine so I'm nervous about making things worse by typing the wrong command.

Not a problem.. bored at work anyways.. As long as you can get into unmenu, Id just reboot the server from unmenu. see if that fixes it. I am sure it is fixable without a bounce. but i am a windows admin.. when i doubt, bounce the box.. LOL.. Sorry to be dumb but how can I safely re-boot the server from within UnMenu? I can see a button under "Array Mangement" to stop the array (which carries a warning that I must use the Lime Technolgy supplied weg management web page to start it). I can't see a button to shut it down. What I normally do in the Lime Technolgy main weg gui is to stop the array first then shut it down but as I can't get into the normal web gui, I can't do it this way.

Thanks everyone for all the help so far. @johnm, I can get into unmenu by using either tower:8080 or the IP address:8080. So that sort of works but I can't get to the "normal" UnRaid main from UnMenu. Also "tower" or the IP address without the ":8080" still don't work. @lionelhutz, I tried the command "/user/local/sbin/emhttp &" but that hasn't helped. I heard all the discs spin up but as far as getting into "tower", nothing changed. @One2Go, up until yesterday everything has been working fine since June 2010 and apart from accessing the web gui, everything else seems to be fine. The server runs 24/7 so I don't think the network connection is likely to be the problem but for info I use a separate GigE card (can't remember the make/model but it's one that is recommended). I've attached the latest syslog since trying the above suggestions. syslog-2011-11-11.zip

Yes all seems to be OK, it's just that I can't access the management consol. I've tried both "tower" and the IP address as you've noted. I've also tried it on 2 different PCs which are connected to the same network and I've tried both IE (std and 64 bit) and Firefox. I've accessed my router and it reports that the server is connected. This is verified by the fact that I can access any of shares (user as well as disk and also the flash) from any PC and also my HDI Dune media player. I'm not sure when the problem first manifested itself because I'd don't make a habit of regularly logging in to the console. It won't have been more than a few days as I usualy have a quick look once week or so, just to make sure there are no "red balls" or errors (which is what I wanted to do today).

Ok that's done. Took me a while to figure out how to attach a file to my post but hopefully I've done it right and a "zipped" syslog is attached. syslog.zip

I looked in the flash drive but the latest syslog files I can see is dated 9th October - probably the last time the server was shut down. Can't see anything current.

Ah, OK I'll give that a go. Also, as an update, it appears the keyboard I tried was faulty. I've found another so at least the monitor I've connected now shows the login prompt and I'll be able to enter commands here.

Just for background, I'm a 58 year old carpenter, not an IT guy. I managed to build an UnRaid server thanks to these forums. I use it primarily just to store my music and movies which I access through a media player. I can rip a movie and put in on the server but that's about it. I installed UnMenu and a couple of packages so that it does a monthly parity check and I have a the UPS package for my APC UPS. It's been working fine for over a year. The only slight glitch I had was when I upgraded my PCS to win7 and had to set the sever to local master to be able to see it (thanks to Joe L for sorting that out). All of sudden, I can't access the server at all. Well, that's not strictly true - I can't access the gui. Neither Firefox or windows explorer can find it. It doesn't matter if I try using "tower" or the IP address. I can access any of the discs and any of the folders on any of the discs, and the server shows up on the network just as it should, it's just I can't access the management utility. I connected a monitor and keyboard but this doesn't work either - the monitor just displays "no signal input". As I can't access it, I can't supply a sys log. The only information I can think to give is that as far as I recal, it's version 4.5.4. I have 5 data discs, a parity and cache. So I'm stuck. What should I do? What can I try?

I have one in my hand as I type. I'm fairly sure it's just a bead thermistor. In which case, you'd need to build a circuit which can "or" analogue voltages. I've only dabbled in electronics as a hobbyist so I'm by no means any sort of expert. I guess you could use a transistor as a comparator and check the output of each thermistor against a pre-set voltage (which would equate to 35-37degC). Then common the outputs of each set of 3 transistors to turun on a third which would start the fan. It sounds a bit complicated but if you have time on your hands and a soldering iron, it could be an interesting thing to do. Maybe an ideal project for a PIC microcontroller if you are into those?

Apparently, your XP machine is acting as your network's "master browser" You can try enabling "Local master" (set it to yes) on the unRAID server. Brilliant - that fixed it! Joe you are a star, thank you so much.

I'm fairly sure this isn't an UnRaid problem but I really hope one of you knowledgeable guys can help me out (I'm a 58 year old carpenter, not an IT guy). I've recently "upgraded" one of my two desktop PCs from Windows XP to Windows 7. When exploring my network on the Win 7 machine, my Unraid Tower will only show up if the XP machine is turned on too. If I turn off the XP machine, the Tower disappears from the network map too. I haven't changed anything with regard to the way everything is wired up and it worked fine when both PCs were on XP. I can login to the server using Firefox or IE - it just doesn't show up on the network map unless the XP machine is turned on too. I've spent hours on Google and got nowhere so any ideas would be much appreciated.

Yes. That's exactly how the "Scythe" controller works in Auto mode. For each channel, if the temperature is below the set point you have chosen, the fan is off. When it reaches 1degC above the set point, it starts to run slowly. If the temperature continues to increase, the fan runs faster. Conversely, as the temperature drops, so does the fan speed until the temperature reaches 1 degC below the set point when it stops completely. So there is 2 degC of hysterisis to prevent uneccessary cycling. In my set up, at idle with all discs spun down, all the fans are off. The exception being the PSU and processor fans which "do their own thing".