sonofdbn

I found that I could ping the remote server via its IP address, but not by its name. After some digging around I found that the unRAID system was using my router and Pi-hole container for DNS services. So I manually added the remote server name and IP address (it's static) to my Pi-hole DNS list and now everything seems fine. I don't know if this is the optimal solution, but at least it's working.

Sorry, should have uploaded Diagnostics automatically. A quick look shows that UD found that the remote server was offline, but that server is definitely running. tower2-diagnostics-20230602-0002.zip

I'm trying to add an SMB remote share; the source is on another unRAID server. Adding the share was very straightforward: the UD GUI found the server and after entering credentials it listed the various available shares, and I selected Movies. After mounting this share, my Plex container can access it. But although I set the share to auto-mount, after restarting the server the share doesn't get mounted and in fact the Mount button is greyed out. (The source server is on the whole time.) I've set network delay to 20 seconds, if that's an issue. What should I be doing to get the share to auto-mount? If I remove the share and add it back as a new share, it works fine. (I'm on 6.11.5.)

It's been a long time since I last looked for a PSU. Having looked around, I now realise it's actually a little difficult to get the lower wattage PSUs, at least where I am.

A little further digging around - the manufacturer seems to be Changwang and their website has BIOS downloads here and other things. I had to use Google translate a bit.

That's a very interesting build - maybe I should try something like this rather than trying to add some horrible homemade DAS to my current server. So tidy as well, compared to my cable mess! Do you need a 750W PSU? I'm running 10 hard disks off a 650W Corsair PSU. Not criticising - just budgeting 🙂

I found a relatively simple way of finding the GUID of a flash drive in Windows: 1. Get USBDeview (free) from NirSoft here. 2. Run USBDeview and find the flash drive. 3. Double-click on the flash drive and a Properties window will pop up with lots of fields. 4. My GUID comes as 4 digits - 4 digits - 4 digits - 12 characters - first 4 digits are VendorID - next 4 digits are ProductID - next 4 digits and the 12 characters come from the last 16 characters of Serial Number (which is ridiculously long) (This information can also be extracted from just the Instance ID field.) This is basically from looking at just one flash drive, so it's certainly not extensively tested, but this might be one way of checking for useable GUIDs before trying to flash unRAID onto the drive.

I appreciate the suggestions, some of which I was aware of, but it comes down to cost. While maybe not technically server level, these are expensive solutions, including the (very interesting) AMD iGPU transcoding thread you linked to, which requires DD5 RAM. I do admit I didn't know that Ryzen 7000 series CPUs included iGPUs. While I know that ECC RAM is not an unRAID requirement, I do prefer it, if only to give me a little peace of mind. But it does seem to complicate and severely limit the range of options. I did look at older used Xeons, but then (of course) they generally don't support transcoding. The tech gods truly don't like ECC and transcoding being done on one CPU. I would prefer to keep everything in one box, but one alternative suggested elsewhere is to offload Plex onto a used small desktop PC with at least an 8th gen Intel CPU to do the transcoding (while keeping the media files on unRAID).

I'm planning a second unRAID server, and ideally I'd like to have ECC and be able to handle some Plex transcoding from 4K. But it seems incredibly difficult to find a straightforward solution that doesn't involve server level hardware and expense. If I want ECC, seems like an AMD CPU is the way to go, otherwise I have to go with Xeon CPUs. But Plex hardware transcoding doesn't support AMD CPUs, and Quick Sync on Intel seems to be the optimal transcoding solution. (Partly for noise and power reasons, I'd prefer to avoid getting a separate GPU just for transcoding.) Are there some good solutions to this? I rather hope I've missed something obvious. (I do have some other things I might want to do with the server, but I'm trying to tackle things one at a time.)

My 2 cents as a non-expert: If you want to reduce the risk of data loss as much as possible, then ECC RAM will help. How much it will help is the big question. I haven't seen any empirical evidence of the benefit of ECC RAM. I believe it's entirely possible that you could run your server for years with non-ECC RAM and never have an issue that ECC RAM could have avoided. It's a bit like travel insurance - you could fly many times and never have a problem. But if disaster strikes, you (or at least your beneficiaries) will be very glad you had travel insurance. If you have the budget and if you can get the components, then I would say go with ECC RAM. Personally I do have ECC RAM, but am not sure I would get it for a new server. But that's because where I am it's difficult and/or expensive to get motherboards that support it. And honestly I got tired of trying to work out which AMD CPU/motherboard combinations actually officially support ECC RAM. OTOH, Intel solutions seem to be very expensive.

Unfortunately I lost the network connection again. Running my untrained eye over the syslog, It looks like the same problem. I've attached a truncated syslog. Both VMs, Win 10 and Win 11 were running at the time. I'm going to try running just the Win 10 VM, which I've been running for a few years (without this problem). If the cause of the disconnect is indeed the Win 11 VM, the next question is how do I fix it? syslog-192.168.1.14.log

I think I was running two VMs at the time, one Win 10, the other new one, Win 11. Do you mean try with no VMs at all, or just one of the VMs? And if so, which one was the cause? (I should be able to identify by CPU number?) In any case, touch wood, hasn't happened again since rebooting.

Tonight I suddenly lost my network connection to my unRAID server. First time it's happened, and I haven't touched the hardware for at least a week or more. Only significant change over the last week was adding a Windows 11 VM and isolating some CPUs. I had to reboot to get the server back online. I've attached syslog and diagnostics. Would appreciate any suggestions about what went wrong and how to fix it. syslog-192.168.1.14.log tower-diagnostics-20230506-2305.zip

In the GUI only a few torrents were listed, but I have many more that should have been seeding, and on the docker page the container was showing some percentage of CPU activity (2%-3%), not consistent with no/minimal activity. Anyway, getting a bit desperate, I tried installing the libtorrentv1 version as a new container. I started the new container but although I had changed the GUI port I didn't get any login screen. Then I realised that the original container (4.3.9-2-01) was still running, and perhaps illogically thought that might be the problem. So I stopped it and went looking for differences in the appdata folders. There I found that I had messed up because although I changed the container name for the new version, I had forgotten to change the appdata folder; so it used the same appdata folder as my current problematic container. So I stopped the new container, gave it a new appdata folder and restarted. Same problem, couldn't get to the GUI. So stopped it, and started the old container to see what had been damaged by installing into the same folder. But miraculously the old container was now working! So problem solved, but no idea what fixed it. I realise there's zero interest in this from anyone else, but I leave this here in case it helps @binhex in some way.

I've done that a few times and the ports have always matched. Thanks for checking the log file. But there's some other weirdness going on that I've just noticed. Getting late here, will post later.

Having recently lost my cache drive containing appdata and VMs and struggling to restore them (largely my own fault), would be nice to have an official built-in backup system. While VM snapshots would be ideal, for my purposes I could live with having to shut down the VMs. Rather that than nothing at all.

Yes, that's what I meant to convey. Since I'm on PIA and using STRICT_PORT_FORWARD, I shouldn't need to do any port forwarding on my router (and I haven't). So I'm struggling with what else I need to do to fix my setup.

I'm having some problems with restoring the container. I copied back to appdata a fairly recent backup that was working fine, but now no torrents are running and I think the connection icon at the bottom shows no connection. (Symbol is an underlined orange flame?) What are the necessary ports that need to be mapped from router to server to container? I'm using PIA with STRICT_PORT_FORWARD set to yes. I thought that no ports needed to be forwarded from router to server in this situation? The VPN incoming port number in the log matches the Listening Port in the Web-GUI. Add: I'm on version 4.3.9-2-01 supervisord(edited).log

Thanks for the explanation. I think I've been (and remain) a bit confused about appdata, templates and containers. Haven't had a chance to fix things yet, though.

I used "previous apps" because a) it had worked before and b) it was what was suggested by @Squid in the pinned guide at the top of this section. (Also seems to be a commonly suggested approach in my googling and some Youtube videos.) I realise that the "previous apps" approach doesn't necessarily restore everything - some things have to be done with custom networks and reverse proxy configs. I don't think I have a very complex setup. The only network settings I have that are not "bridge" are a "proxynet" and "br0". Take for example Plex. The paths to my media were exactly as they were before, but no media shows up and Plex offers to set up a new server. This is what the Plex container log shows: **** Server is unclaimed, but no claim token has been set **** ##################################################### # Login via the webui at http://<ip>:32400/web # # and restart the docker, because there was no # # plex token found in the preference file # ##################################################### My suspicion is that the container can't reach the Plex (corporate) server, so it's not recognising my Plex media server. All the restored apps were already installed apps.

My cache drive with appdata on it died, so I installed a new one and then tried to recreate my dockers using "Previous Apps" from Community Applications. I'd done this before, so I didn't think it would be a big deal. Again as before, there was some manual work to be done with setting up some custom networks and the reverse proxy. This seemed more troublesome than before, so I might have messed up something here. Bottom line is that a number of containers are acting as if they're brand new, although the template parameters seem fine. For example, Plex offers to set up a new Plex server; Calibre is essentially empty, and Nextcloud also offers to set up a new server. I suspect it's something to do with my custom networks and how I setup Letsencrypt/Swag, but I don't know what's wrong. Any suggestions would be appreciated. tower-diagnostics-20230409-0124.zip

I wanted to update this in case my post sends the wrong message. If you're experienced in administering corporate remote access services, you're not going to learn anything new here. I, otoh, am a complete newbie to this sort of thing. All I've ever done is RDP from my Win 10 desktop into my Windows VM that's running on unRAID. I thought that a thin client was something that would simply run RDP, which is sort of quite true. What I hadn't anticipated was the struggle to get this done smoothly. My hope was that it would operate just like a desktop PC - switch on the Wyse and it would automatically launch Windows. Also, it would sleep (seems to do this OK) and wake via USB - like a shake of the mouse or hitting some keys on the keyboard (so far, no luck). Currently I have to enter an IP address every time the machine boots and click to ignore some security warning. Now, I'm in no doubt that these obstacles can be overcome; it's just that there's a lot of stuff to get my head around. I've fiddled around with setting up an FTP server, looking at Windows Server, trying to export certificates, updating BIOSes and a whole lot of other stuff. There's no shortage of documentation - possible even too much, but lots of it assumes prior knowledge. I do hope to make a triumphant post one day of how I got things working, but it's not going to be soon 😉

I took a chance and bought a used Wyse 5070, which had the bare minimum specs (Celeron J4105, 4GB RAM and 32GB eMMC). Since it was replacing a really old PC and monitor, I had a slight problem with the DisplayPort video out, but eventually repurposed another old monitor and cable. (We won't mention my attempt to hook up a VGA cable to the serial port.) The unit came with Windows 10 but there wasn't a lot of room left on the eMMC. Performance was surprisingly acceptable, at least with basic browsing and email. After a huge amount of hair-pulling, mainly around the truly horrible and temperamental Dell Wyse USB Imaging Tool, I managed to get ThinOS installed and RDP'd into the Win 10 VM on my unRAID server. Performance is fine, at least for my purposes (no gaming). I still need to tidy up a few things - like trying to get into the VM automatically and waking on USB, but so far it's looking good. For anyone going down this route, the Dell documentation is horrible for newbies, or at least it seems to be (quite justifiably) aimed at administrators who are managing a herd of thin clients that need centralised control. (For anyone wondering, yes, I did think about leaving the original cramped Win 10 installation and using RDP from there to get into the Win 10 VM, but that seemed a bit too weird, and prone to generating much confusion.)

That's a great-looking enclosure, but I'd have to get someone to print it commercially for me, and I can't see myself needing an additional 24 drives. (Famous last words, I know.) I can live with my recycled old PC case - it's more the HBA/SAS cards and connections that I'm worried about. I'm looking at some possible cards: how much practical difference does PCIe 2.0 vs PCIe 3.0 make, or 6Gbps vs 3Gbps, assuming I will use only SATA hard drives, no SSDs?

I'm looking for a way to add storage externally to my current unRAID setup. My case is pretty full and I think I've maxed out my SATA capacity, which includes 8 drives running off the two SAS ports on a Dell Perc H310 HBA. I'm thinking that my best bet is to attach a DIY JBOD enclosure. One significant constraint is that my motherboard, a Supermicro X10SDV-TLN4F, has only one PCI-E slot, currently used by the HBA. However, the motherboard does have an M.2 socket if that offers other avenues. From the manual: "The X10SDV series deploy an M key only dedicated for SSD devices with the ultimate performance capability in a PCI Express 3.0 X4 interface for native PCIe SSD support. The X10SDV M.2 is mux with the I-SATA0 port for legacy SATA SSD devices." I'm not in the USA, so some pre-built or pre-owned solutions are terribly expensive once shipping is added. I found this thread very useful: Also, this website https://techtellectual.com/sas-expander-vs-hba/ had some very helpful articles. After reading around a bit, my plan is to connect the server to the JBOD case via external SAS ports on both. Plan A was to replace the current HBA with one that has both internal and external ports, but such HBAs seem to be very expensive. So Plan B was to add a SAS expander to the server. But this means I have to use one of the two HBA ports to connect to the SAS expander, so either I get an HBA card with more ports or I get a SAS expander with at least two internal ports and one external port. One internal port would be for connecting to the HBA card, and one effectively to replace the "lost" HBA port. The external port would be used to connect to the JBOD case. I'm assuming that the SAS expander card can be powered via Molex or at worst some sort of PCI-E riser. For the JBOD enclosure, my plan is to use an old case + old motherboard (with CPU) + maybe new PSU. Then I add a SAS expander with an external port for connecting to the server's SAS expander external port, and enough internal ports for the hard drives in the JBOD enclosure. How does this sound?