sonofdbn

Not directly related to unRAID, but I thought this would be a good place to ask. I have one 5 port network switch daisy-chained, if that's the right phrase, to an 8 port switch, and am running out of ports. (The current setup wastes two ports linking the two switches.) Would it be better to replace the 5 port switch with an 8 port one, or just go for a 16 port switch to replace the current two? Where I am, a 16 port switch is about 25% more than 2 x 8 port switches. Is there any significant speed or other benefit in having one big switch instead of one daisy-chained to another? If it's relevant, the current setup is (in part) Router -> 8 port switch (on another floor) -> 8 port switch -> 5 port-switch

@jang430, I also have a few Linux Mint VMs on my unRAID server, also no GPU and no sound hardware. I want to access the VMs from my Windows 10 PC, but I was unable to get any sound via any remote desktopping, but thanks to @itimpi I am now trying the ac97 emulation. VNC is, as you say, fast, but I can't get any audio. I managed to use Windows Remote Desktop (after a bit of fiddling around in Mint), but YouTube performance was a little choppy, although audio was fine (for me). Best was NoMachine, smooth video and audio.

You can check Corsair PSU cable compatibility on the Corsair website.

I'd be happy with an incremental parity check: for example, if I have an 8TB parity disk, I would be able to check 2TB every night for 4 nights (not necessarily consecutive nights). Alternatively, run parity check for x hours at a time. In both cases, resume where the last check ended. This seems like the simplest parity check feature to add, since no monitoring of the system is required for throttling. It's like an abbreviated version of the current parity check.

I managed to get my VMs back relatively easily. It seems that the error message "operation failed: unable to find any master var store for loader: /usr/share/qemu/ovmf-x64/OVMF_CODE-pure-efi.fd" refers to a missing nvram file in /etc/libvirt/qemu/nvram. The relevant file (which I had fortunately backed up) has a string of charcters in the front and then '_VARS-pure-efi.fd'. This string of numbers corresponds to the UUID in the VM's XML file. (A brief aside: one thing that I got stuck on for a while happened while I was using Midnight Commander (mc) from a terminal on my Windows PC. I wanted to use mc to copy the .fd file to /etc/libvirt/qemu/nvram. In mc the nvram files had an asterisk in front of the name. I've learned to be very scared of unusual things in Linux (so basically most of Linux for me as a Windows user). A lot of Googling only described filenames with asterisks after their names and mc discussions only mentioned colours of filenames. Worryingly, the .fd files in /etc/libvirt/qemu/nvram didn't have this asterisk. I took the bold step of just copying the file, and everything seemed OK. After a bit more guesswork it turns out that the asterisk represents an executable file, which is a bit weird for what I thought an nvram file would be. My guess is that this is a result of the backing up of the nvram files which somehow added the executable flags.)

I'm trying to understand what passthrough means on a VM, in particular for a graphics card (GPU). I get that the GPU can be assigned exclusively to a VM (while the VM is running). And my reading of various threads tells me that to get optimal use out of the GPU I should connect my monitor directly to the GPU with a cable. This would be my natural understanding of "passthrough". However, somewhere I got the impression that it's also possible to get at least some of the benefit of the GPU using remote access over Ethernet. So, for example, if I had a GPU passed through to a VM, and accessed the VM using Remote Desktop or Splashtop, would I see any visual improvement? By improvement, I mean snappier desktop performance (not expecting bare metal performance); gaming capability would be a bonus, but not essential. Also, would it be possible to get the benefit of the GPU audio out over remote access? Or do I have to be physically connected? (My motherboard doesn't have onboard audio.)

Thanks for the suggestion, but I think it's unlikely to be a full cache drive problem. I have around 200GB free on the cache drives and very rarely go below 100GB free. Fortunately I have backups of the VM image files and the XMLs and when I have a bit of time I'll work on restoring the VMs. I didn't have a libvirt.img backup, but I'll make sure I back that up in future. Still a bit confused about this file, as it seems to be recreated when booting up.

(I posted earlier in the Docker Engine forum, but I don't think that's the right place, as this is more about VMs.) I'm on 6.5.3 and have 4 VMs, which were previously all running OK. I was fiddling around trying to install virt-manager on my LinuxMint VM and when I rebooted the unRAID server I found that I had a blank VM tab (no Add VM buttons or anything else). Based on looking at many forum threads, I checked to see that all the paths in VM Settings were correct (including Libvirt storage location specifying the file, not just the folder). I don't think I had changed anything, so it didn't seem like an incorrect path could be the cause of the blank tab. But then I noticed that the Libvirt storage location was /mnt/cache/libvrt.img, which it has been all along (I checked previous diagnostics files). On changing this to /mnt/user/libvirt.img (note "user" instead of "cache" and spelling of libvirt), I managed to get the VM tab to show the Add VM and other buttons, although no VMs were listed. As an experiment, I tried to create a new Windows 10 VM, just using the default template. What surprised me was that my existing Win10 VM came up, even though I had made some minor changes to the XML file for that existing VM. Fortunately I had a backup of that customised XML, so I shut down the "new" VM and then overwrote the XML entries with the backed up ones. On restarting I got an error message: "operation failed: unable to find any master var store for loader: /usr/share/qemu/ovmf-x64/OVMF_CODE-pure-efi.fd". Unfortunately I can't recall exactly what I did after that, but I definitely didn't edit the XML file since I have no idea what most of the entries do. In the end I just restarted the VM (perhaps after rebooting the server) and now my Win 10 VM is working just as before. Now I'm going to try restoring the other VMs. But if there's a better way of restoring the VMs, I'd appreciate some pointers. (Also any suggestions as to why the VMs went AWOL in the first place - so that I can avoid this happening again.) tower-diagnostics-20190110-2122.zip

I have the same problem of not having the file /etc/libvirt/libvirtd.conf. A brief history: I have four VMs, which were working fine under 6.5.3. I tried to install virt-manager on a Linux VM following SpaceInvader One's video, which also requires editing libvirtd.conf. While following the video I was able to edit the file, which was in the expected /etc/libvirt folder. (I also enabled nc-1.10 from NerdPack, as set out in the video.) But after rebooting unRAID, my VM tab was blank. Sometimes it takes a few minutes for the VMs to show up, but after a long wait there were still no VMs listed. (I've checked the paths in VMSettings, and I'm sure they're correct - and everything was working previously.) I thought I had messed up the editing of libvirtd.conf, but when I looked for it, I found that the /etc/libvirt folder was empty. I saw that there was also a /etc/libvirt- folder (note the minus sign) and inside that folder there is a libvirtd.conf file (without any change to the "listen_addr" line). I have no idea why the file is in this other folder and whether this is expected behaviour. So @disruptorx, how did you get it working? tower-diagnostics-20190110-1722.zip

I don't recall doing anything complicated to get to my Win10 VM when I installed it. Go to the unRAID GUI VM page, start the Win10 VM and then click on the VM icon and choose VNC Remote from the menu. That should get you into the Win10 setup process. (If things aren't working, take a look at SpaceInvaderOne's video on installing a Windows VM on unRAID.)

Just saw this. Does this mean you're running a MacOS VM on your Threadripper unRAID box? If so, what's the performance like? And what software are you using on the Surface 3 for remote access to the MacOS VM?

Ah, OK! I see it's been happily logging stuff for over a year. Thanks.

I noticed that in my docker config path there is a file "access.log" which seems to be updated continuously. The docker is working fine, but that access.log file is now over 8 GB in size. Is this normal? I have about 100 torrents, but typically fewer than 20 are active, if that helps.

Sorry, perhaps not really a docker question, but I saw some odd behaviour when I used this docker to copy files from a Samba share to the array. I copied a folder with 10 files in it and on the array, four of the files had the "Modified" timestamp updated to the time of copying, while the others retained their original timestamp (all from the year 2002). The files are all photos or videos, and the biggest file is 1.1 MB. I would have thought that either every file or no file gets the timestamp modified. I'd prefer to keep the original timestamps. Is there any way of ensuring this?

To answer my own question from a few posts ago, I needed to use "abc" instead of "www-data". The occ command needs to be run from the /config/www/nextcloud directory, and I needed to add the username as a parameter for files:scan. (I initially got a message saying "The current PHP memory limit is below the recommended value of 512MB". Some quick googling and appending "memory_limit = 512M" to php-local.ini fixed this.)

I've installed this Nextcloud docker with the intention of replacing OneDrive. (Nextcloud doesn't have the same functionality, but it seems to be close enough for my purposes.) However, copying data from my Windows PC is taking forever because the PC first has to download many of the files and then they get copied to my unRAID server, and I'm doing this through the NC Windows client, which is also a little slow. I do have the OneDrive files backed up on a Synology NAS and I thought it would be easy enough to copy those files to the NC folders on the unRAID server and then use the Windows NC client to sync for the latest changes. However, it's now clear to me that NC doesn't just "see" those files and they have to somehow be made visible (which they would be if they were copied via the client). Digging around, there seems to be an NC command "occ" that would allow NC to scan the relevant unRAID folder and make the copied file visible to NC. Unfortunately I can't invoke the occ command. I went into the terminal for the NC docker, and tried to run "sudo -u www-data php occ files:scan", where www-data is the "HTTP user and group", according to the NC documentation, for certain Linux distros. My problem is I don't know what I should use instead of www-data for the NC docker (assuming I'm even on the right track). If I use www-data I get an "unknown user" error message. Can anyone help? (Plan B is to copy the files from the Synology NAS to the NC folders on the unRAID server, and then reinstall the MariaDB docker. But this is a one-time solution, if it even works.)

I stumbled across the new forum site on my Android tablet using Chrome, and had to log in, but of course had forgotten my password. So I tried to recover the password and found that I had also forgotten the email I signed up with. The frustrating problem is that there's a screen that allows you to enter a new email address, but a) the text is unreadable because it seems to be white on white and b) it seems - if I squint very hard, that the letters entered are randomly added to the text box. Now on retrying this morning, the text is a not much better very light grey on light pink, and squinting shows that the text entry seems to be OK. (I'm on the forum now because fortunately Chrome on my PC remembered the password.)

Thanks so much for the help. Ran an extended SMART test and the disk passed. So I shutdown, changed the cable and restarted. Now I get a nice notification telling me that "array turned good. Array has 0 disks with read errors."

While I was away there was a power glitch and fortunately the UPS shutdown the array gracefully. But on rebooting, I got CRC errors and disk read errors on one of my data disks. From reading around, it seems that CRC errors are possibly not too serious. However, disk read errors might be an issue. My diagostics: tower-diagnostics-20180624-2153.zip Should I replace the drive? If it's recommended that I replace the disk, which is 4TB, can I just swap in an 8TB drive and rebuild?

Same problem with my new MX500. Returned to normal after 30 minutes.

Well, I did some digging around and I came up with an inelegant way of putting ffmpeg into the container. My Linux skills are very limited, so I googled around and also read the Minimserver documentation about the stream converter (in my case ffmpeg) here. The first thing was to get a command prompt in the container. I opened a TTY window on my Windows PC and logged on to the unRAID server. Then I got into the docker container by using docker exec -it docker-minimserver /bin/bash I hunted a bit and found the minimserver directory under /opt. Under that minimserver directory is another opt directory, and I think I had to create the bin sub-directory under that. So that gave me the opt/bin directory I had to put ffmpeg in (/opt/minimserver/opt/bin). Next, I had to get ffmpeg, and found a static build here. I used the x86_64 build; initially I wasn't sure how to get it into the container, but since I had already mapped the /media folder to my music folder, I just needed to get ffmpeg into the music folder. So I downloaded the package ffmpeg-git-64bit-static.tar.xz and unzipped it (used 7-Zip) then copied ffmpeg into the music folder. Then in the terminal window I copied ffmpeg from the /media folder into /opt/minimserver/opt/bin. (I actually took a longer route, but this is the gist of what worked.) After that I opened the properties window from Minimwatch, went to System and entered ffmpeg for stream.converter and clicked Apply, and Minimserver found it (it appears as opt/bin/ffmpeg in my case) and now I'm happily transcoding flac to wav24. I'm not sure if Minimserver needs to be restarted for it to see the ffmpeg, and when I first tried, it didn't appear to find ffmpeg but after a few seconds I think the error message saying Minimserver couldn't find ffmpeg disappeared. No doubt there is a better way of doing this (and I'm not sure if this will survive a restart), but I'm happy it's working. Now I can shutdown my Linux Mint VM which I used only to run Minimserver.

Wow, I haven't been keeping track of this, and now things have moved on so much. Thanks so much, EdgarWallace. I've successfully installed the docker following your instructions. A wonderful Christmas present! Er, of course now I want more... I've installed Minimstreamer as well, as I normally use this to convert flac to wav24. But to do this I also need to install ffmpeg, presumably somewhere where Minimstreamer can find it. Any idea how this can be done?

OK, I think I get it now. I took a look at various N-gamers 1-CPU videos and I need to have the physical connections for the "real" VM, and not the remote desktop one, if that makes sense.

Thanks for the very useful videos. I'm not sure if this was addressed in the videos, but for the gaming VM, what are the physical connections? The second video still seems to show the VM running under Splashtop. Would the gaming be done via Splashtop? This seems unlikely to produce near bare metal performance. The way I'm thinking about it, for Splashtop or, say, RDP, I just need a PC that is on the same network as the unRAID server (or can "see" it over the Internet). But the monitor of the PC I'm using would be connected to whatever graphics device I use on the PC, and is therefore totally independent of any graphics card I have on the server. So if I want to use the VM for gaming, would I need a separate monitor, mouse and keyboard (both connected directly to the server via passed through devices)? I'm sure I'm missing something quite fundamental here, but I hope someone can explain what needs to be done.

With WD Data Lifeguard, you can also run two (and presumably more) instances. I've done it successfully with two 8TB HGST Deskstars, and doing it now with another two. I don't know if there is a performance penalty, but I suspect it still takes much less time than running the tests consecutively.