snowboardjoe

For capacity, I would spec a UPS where you don't push it more than 50% of its limit. That allows for plenty of shutdown time without significantly draining the batteries. Cyberpower and APC are good brands to go with, but try to stick with those with AVR that tend to have better electronics and more reliable. As for the pure sine wave, yes, many UPS's do generate a square sine wave, but that's only while it's running on battery. When on commercial power it's delivering the same sine wave to your host. There are certain electronics that don't like this square since wave, but most modern power supplies have no issues and it's not long term (as in hours). I'll let some others from the UK suggest models available across the pond from us. Here is one that I found (UK versions look different than the US versions)... http://www.amazon.co.uk/CyberPower-Value-800EILCD-800VA-Interactive/dp/B00BUJCERC/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1392930467&sr=8-2&keywords=cyberpower+ups

I used APC's for the past 25 years both at home and in business. The Back-UPS and Smart-UPS models were very reliable and I did make a point to change the batteries about every 3 years which is reasonable. About 5+ years ago I purchased some of the compact/desktop units that had no display or controls. They looked like an engorged power strip. Those started to fail me a year or two after purchase. New batteries did not help either. The electronics were inferior compared to the more heavy duty line. I switched to CyberPower and I've been pretty happy. They have good electronics and fit the budget better. I would still consider the non-desktop APC UPS's as good products, but CyberPower is excellent competition IMHO. When I purchase UPS's I spec out models that will not exceed 50% of its capacity. Unless I need to extend the time, I configure attached computers to shutdown after just being on batteries for 5 minutes (if power ain't restored by then, it ain't comin' back for a long time). Lead acid batteries are not intended to be drained and it will definitely shorten their lives after a few cycles of that. Several have mentioned heat which also plays a factor (our home sits at about 70oF year round here in Seattle).

How often do you get the DRDY ERR? Sort of sounds like a condition where the disk is spun down and an event comes along to trigger it to spin up? Just a guess at this point. Could be certain hardware just reports this. Do you see the error for other drives? Do you know if the disk was normally spun down before the error? Hopefully some others can chime in here on their experiences. EDITED: Also found this... http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php/The_Analysis_of_Drive_Issues#Physical_Drive_Issues That indicates it's a true error or interface problem. Could be a long SMART test is in order here.

If there is a red ball condition at boot time, will unRAID start automatically? I thought it would wait for user input before starting up.

Because your red ball happened immediately following your maintenance on the system (adding the SSD), I would shutdown your system and reseat the power and data cables for the one failed drive. It's possible (because of the type of error you are getting) that something just got jarred a bit during your maintenance. I would even go ahead and replace the data cable for that matter. Could be doing this will restore the drive back to normal and you can rest assured your problem was just the data connection and the drive is working just fine. If the drive comes back good, I'm not sure how unRAID handles that since there have been updates to parity (never dealt with a drive failure myself yet in unRAID).

Can you replicate the problem with different systems? Try to isolate and find a pattern with transferring files with different systems. That should help determine if the problem is with the unRAID server or your Windows workstation. Could be one of the systems simply negotiated a bad connection and needs to be reset/rebooted or something else more complex.

Looking to add a 3rd drive cage to my existing Antec Nine Hundred case (I assume it fits fine at the top).

This new 6.0 release is a major step forward and I don't want to see that momentum die. So, I'm also very much in favor of keeping 6.0 pure 64-bit right now. There is nothing to forcing people to move to 6.0 either. We've got 5.0, it's solid, you're still providing maintenance releases and it really has not been out that long. We have excellent solutions with 4.x and 5.x and there's no reason why people can't use those. We just need to be clear in the documentation for the masses on the critical differences.

Those Seagate drives as part of your build? Just saw this post they were on-sale today at NewEgg. http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=31356.0

I used to buy APC exclusively, but a few years ago after quite a few failures (batteries dying prematurely, unit not warning me when battery was bad, etc.) I switched. I should add the small/compact APC versions are the ones that failed me the most. The larger and slightly smarter units are still very reliable. Seems like APC got a little too cheap on components with their lower end units. I've been getting CyberPower and have been very happy so far. They've been very reliable and have almost identical features to APC. You can get them in pure sine wave too, but I don't have a need for that. Power in Seattle is very stable. It the power does go out, it won't be back for many hours. So, I only let my computing equipment run for about 5 minutes on batteries before they start performing an orderly shutdown (and I have unRAID wait 10 to make sure client connections are shutdown first). Apcupsd talks to CyberPower just fine. Get a unit that can provide you some good diagnostics on the front panel too. This is a good starting point (adjust for your power demands): http://www.amazon.com/CyberPower-CP850AVRLCD-Intelligent-850VA-Mini-Tower/dp/B000RZPK1W/ref=pd_sim_e_6 Costco sells them too and tends to have good deals on them.

It's likely unmenu related. I used to run unmenu, but I got away from it. I did install apcupsd though so it's there permanently. Keep in mind apcupsd is an add-on--not a core component of unRAID. Is there anything in particular you're concerned about with apcupsd, or just that it does not show up to manage in unmenu anymore?

I went from almost nothing to unRAID over the summer. I liked the fact that I could build my own system that suited my needs with the ability to expand as fast as I wanted to. It does not take powerful hardware, so someone on a budget can build a system quite easily. The design of unRAID is to conserve power (small CPU's, less RAM and spin down unused hard drives). I have 6 hard drives right now (4 data, 1 parity, 1 cache) and after 1 hour of no activity, all of the hard drives spin down consuming very little power. This is very practical for a system that primarily is a multimedia server. I did go down the plugin road, but ran into some complications. I decided to build a separate system that housed several VM's and ran my Plex, SickBear, sabnzbd and Transmission there. It allows me much more flexibility with the applications, easier upgrades and uncomplicates the unRAID server configuration. Setup of unRAID is pretty straightforward, but you have to be willing to get your hands just a little bit dirty to get things setup. Knowledge of Linux helps, but is not a requirement. Once you have it built, it's a very reliable system requiring little to no maintenance other than making sure things are in a healthy state and verifying your data growth. If had not been for unRAID, I probably would have built a system based on OpenZFS. While the performance and management of that would have been more sophisticated, it also meant I'm spinning all of my hard drives 24x7x365.

I'm serving up my shares via NFS and mounting them on my busier Mac systems as well as some Ubuntu VM's. The performance is much better than using SMB. I'm using the NFS automounter on my iMac (the Ubuntu ones are mounting it permanently). I still use SMB for browsing from Macs in general, but when I'm doing some major IO or ripping a bunch of stuff, I use NFS--very stable. What sort of setup are you looking for? Just how to setup the NFS serving side on unRAID? It's very easy.

Looking at your output from running snmpd by hand, it looks like it's having issues parsing your config. Be default is it looking in the right location? Try explicitly telling it where you snmpd.conf is? Taking stabs in the dark here. It looks like you're doing all the right things so far.

Also known as FakeRAID. Unless you're dealing with enterprise class hardware with a real RAID controller, it's probably a simple FakeRAID device. It will work or it won't.

Yeah, there's not much you can do about this. When the developers put Plex together, they did not plan on minimizing read/write access (nor should they). Plex (like most applications) is intended to run 24x7 and be able to read/write at any time. That's not a fault of Plex and I would expect any request to "fix" this would fall on deaf ears because that would not be normal. Because you are using the cache drive for one or more applications, the cache disk will never spin down. This is completely, normal behavior. The only way to get the cache drive to spin down is to either stop all running applications or run those applications on a system other than unRAID.

Would you attach the contents of /tmp/checkconfig? That error is just telling you there is a syntax error on line 15. It should not be serious though. I'm at work, so I don't have a copy of that file here to know what it should look like.

I have two 3TB reds and two 3TB greens for data disks (1TB red for cache and 3TB red for parity). I break my array up into two disk groups for my shares. My most active shares (CrashPlan data and TV shows) are on the reds. Movies and data archiving are on the greens, so they rarely spin up. With that said, I can see getting more reds and phasing out the greens and lifting the limit on what data goes where to be more flexible.

The temp space for Plex can remain pretty busy. If there are no updates to your library it's possible Plex will remain quiet and idle and not request anything from the temp space based on how you have things configured. However, normally, you should expect the temp space of Plex to remain quite chatty to serve up requests and maintain the library including library updates. All of those requests where there are any writes to disk will require an update of the parity disk. Having your temp space in the cache means no parity updates. Your media content should be under normal shares for the usual parity protection. When streaming content from that space, it should not generate any parity activity.

Regarding your flash drive question, you only need a small device. I have a San Disk Cuzer Fit 8GB flash drive and only using 300MB with several add-ons included. http://www.sandisk.com/products/usb/drives/cruzer-fit/ Very small and has a tiny LED for activity.

Regarding your question about green drives, for the kind of use you describe you should be totally fine. I chose some WD Red drives for my configuration since it's fairly active, but green drives would have been fine too. You said you only need it occasionally, so that is a good choice. If you have your system optimally configured and you're not actively accessing it, all of your drives should end up spun down perhaps for days at a time automatically until you fetch a file from it again. That makes your system really green. As for add-ons, if nothing is grabbing your attention, then don't worry about it. They can always be added later, or you may find other ways to have additional applications outside of unRAID that suits you. Regardless, the hardware you're putting together will have no problems handling several add-ons if you go down that path later (with the exception of a cache drive).

For DHCP, it should look like this... /boot/config/network.cfg: # Generated network settings USE_DHCP=yes IPADDR= NETMASK= GATEWAY=

I'm not seeing a secondary interface in your configuration--just eth0. The IP should be 192.168.1.3. Your log indicates it's up and alive... Sep 13 22:47:49 Tower ifplugd(eth0)[1368]: ifplugd 0.28 initializing. Sep 13 22:47:49 Tower ifplugd(eth0)[1368]: Using interface eth0/48:5B:39:3B:4D:0A with driver <r8169> (version: 2.3LK-NAPI) Sep 13 22:47:49 Tower ifplugd(eth0)[1368]: Using detection mode: SIOCETHTOOL Sep 13 22:47:49 Tower ifplugd(eth0)[1368]: Initialization complete, link beat detected. Sep 13 22:47:49 Tower kernel: r8169: eth0: link up Sep 13 22:47:49 Tower kernel: r8169: eth0: link up Sep 13 22:47:49 Tower ifplugd(eth0)[1368]: Executing '/etc/ifplugd/ifplugd.action eth0 up'. Sep 13 22:47:49 Tower logger: /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1: /sbin/ifconfig eth0 hw ether 48:5B:39:3B:4D:0A Sep 13 22:47:49 Tower logger: /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1: /sbin/ifconfig eth0 192.168.1.3 broadcast 192.168.1.255 netmask 255.255.255.0 Sep 13 22:47:49 Tower logger: /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1: /sbin/route add default gw 192.168.1.1 metric 1 Have you tried http://192.168.1.3 address yet? I should also add this address is hard coded and not using DHCP. Since you mention you have a new network after a move, it could be some other parameters have changed where you might have more than one device using the same IP, or your network address has changed outside the scope of your unRAID server. I need to lookup how to configure for DHCP from the command line since you won't be able to do that from the web interface (assuming you can't get to 192.168.1.3). Verify you can't get to that first. If you can't then we'll lookup how to modify it from the console.

I would leverage the advantages of using the share mounts (those under /mnt/user). One of the joys of unRAID is how you can dive into /mnt/user/ShareName and it does not matter what disk your content is on--unRAID maps to it seamlessly. If you want/need to restrict data to discs, then you can configure that at the share level. You can tell Plex the exact directories you want, but you will want to keep your content reasonable categorized (movies, TV shows, home videos, music, etc.). That helps Plex use the right agents for the content. You will not want to mix that content up in a single share for the sake of Plex.

I have Transmission, sabnzbd, Plex, CrashPlan and SickBeard installed. I created a cache only share of Applications. I then installed all of my applications under unique directories beneath that (/mnt/cache/Applications). That keeps mover from manipulating anything in that structure automatically. For Transmission, I created /mnt/cache/Applications/Transmission/data to store all of my torrent data. Until I get things more automated, I simply copy the completed torrents to a regular share on the array for permanent storage while leaving the stuff in /mnt/cache/Applications/Transmission/data for ongoing seeding. Most of the time all drives are spun down except for the cache drive (which I don't expect to ever really spin down). That's one of the nice things of unRAID of managing disk drives and their usage efficiently--keep drives spun down when not in use. I hadn't thought about file locking. Does that actually keep a drive from spinning down if an application has the file open, but is not actively reading or writing to it? There is not an option in Transmission to pre-allocate a file that I know if.