Calvin

Just wanted to say thanks for this Docker. Works great. I do have a couple notes coming at this as a newbie. While I've used unraid for many years I don't often use telnet or a command line with it. Keep in mind I've upgraded from v5 to 6. Discovered what dockers even are and played with unbalance all within the last 2 days. I have a couple small things you may wish to consider. It took me far to long to figure out why unbalance kept telling me there was nothing to do. I know the example given is a movie dir or something, but i was looking to move an entire disk. Nearly all other boxes during this weekend upgrade have been clickable and when I clicked on yours and nothing happened I made the mistake of assuming that blank meant all. Once I put a / mark in there unbalance finally started doing something. This of course is my fault. I should have started with a small example and it would have likely made sense to me faster. But when I saw it could do a dry run without actually touching my data I naturally tried the big job instead of the little one. None of that is the fault of unbalance but making the setting box clickable or perhaps different wording on how things work might help. Of course now that I know how and what its trying to do it all makes perfect sense when I go back and reread it. But it might be confusing for new person looking at it for the first time. Its also possible its just me. Another thing to consider is putting in some sort of notice that "yes" the program knows I clicked the "calculate" button and its currently working on it. As I had an entire drive selected for moving it took a few min to come back with its calculations. In the meantime I had stopped it, restarted it and played with the settings trying to figure out what I was doing wrong. It was not until I looked at the cpu usage on the server that I realized that yes... unbalance was actually trying to do something and that I should give it a min to come back to me. Once I gave it more then 20 seconds after clicking the calculate button, it of course worked fine. Last note. I've done a few test and in one occasion it failed to move a few files, or so I thought. Turns out it they are dupes. I don't know if unbalance caused that or if they were like that already. I did note however that the log file showed the duplicates as the reason. But in the email I got, it said all was good and it was done. You might wish to include the details in the email notice when something does not go fully as planned. Overall. Very nice. As for unraid v6 itself. Wow. What an upgrade. There is lots of new stuff to figure out. The only bad thing. My hardware is to old to support the VM stuff. Guess I need to stick with the docker stuff and I have to wait till I get a new server for the VM side.. I'm just amazed my 8 year old hardware still works and its not having any issues with the new ver.

I do like the AVS-10/4 but I'm not sure 10 reg drives is enough. I suppose its more then enough If I switch to bigger drives but I intend to keep using my existing ones where possible then replace them with bigger drives when they die. Shameless plugs are fine. Nice, I see a couple of possible units there I'd be interested in. Any with SSD drives for virtual servers? Granted I've not yet looked at v6 so don't know how things run or what the requirements are for various tasks. I can see lots of possibilities just from my brief reading about v6. Up till now my box has been strictly storage. But I assume I'd want some SSD and a bit more memory then default if I was doing more then just storage. Those look good. I'll have to upgrade to v6 and start playing, then decide what I want this new box to do and what the requirements would be. Then I can look a bit more closely at the greenleaf site. I will be buying from someone. I'm not building. Thanks for the info.

This is my question too. I want to buy some hardware from Limetech. I bought my current system about 8 years ago. Its getting pretty aged and I've had to rip it apart to fix a couple things. I'm down a slot that no longer works and all the others are full. Its making weird noises again so I may need internal repairs again. I told myself I'd wait for ver 6 before I bought anything. I see it is now out. Kinda hurts that the Canadian dollar is down. I've got no complaints about the current box. Its been running all day every day for 8 years. Its done its duty great. The only time I've lost data is when I took a stupid risk and did something I knew might bite me. (and it did) Just had another drive die. But thanks to unraid I lost no data. This time I chose to shrink the array instead of buying a replacement drive. I'm a mix of of 500GB, 1, 1.5, 2.0, 3.0TB. I want to get a new system and start with three 4TB drives. Then I'll move data over and start moving the existing data drives over as I empty them out. The current box has a 3TB parity drive so It was either buy another 3TB or shrink it. I shrunk it as I want to be buying nothing smaller then 4TB drives in the future. I have no interest in building a system from scratch. Those days are behind me. I just want a system that works. I trust Limetech. They sold me a great box years ago. Time for another. Is there any word on when they will have stuff back in stock? In the meantime, it looks like I need to upgrade to ver 6 and see what this new stuff is all about. lol. Just checked. I'll still have one 320GB Original drive left in the box. Thats left over from when I first bought it.

Hourly status emails stopped coming so I took the home pc over from work to check the server. Looks like it completed the check this morning. No problems. All is good.

Thanks for the info. The check was started yesterday. No issues so far. I expect it to be done by tomorrow night assuming it goes normally.

?? ok. Is it possible for it to rebuild but NOT show errors in the syslog? Everything seems fine. I've never done a check in the past after a rebuild. Should I? I've started the check.

Preclear completed without issues. I let the drive rebuild. Its now Completed and all is good. Thanks everyone. Now to go further explore the ideas given above.

I completely agree. I'm not around often. Its the regulars that make this a great forum and help make unRAID what it is. Thank you. Cal.

Here is the page I used to figure out how the batch file should be setup and run. http://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/Latest/Backup/Backing_Up_A_Windows_Network_Drive Here is my batch file with username and userpassword replaced but so that you can still see were they go. Set it up with your ID and according to the notes in the link above. This only works on boot. You can't just run the batch and have it work. It will fail. It must run as "system" before you login. The above links shows hows thats done. You may not need the map delete command but I found it works perfectly everytime if I do it this way while I had some issues once in awhile if I did not delete them first before resetting them. After you boot, it does take a minute or two for them to show up. You end up with mapped drives that look like they are disconnected. But you can still navigate them fine. Depends on what your doing it will ask you stuff if you moving a file that it would not otherwise ask if you were using a standard mapped drive. So... I don't use these drives myself. I just use shortcuts to the UNC path instead of the mapped drive letters when I want to access the shares. The mapped drives however are used seamlessly by crashplan as its running as a service itself. echo %date% %time% : "%cd%\mapdrive.bat" >> C:\tools\bat\Crashplan\mount.log net use * /delete /y net use X: "\\tower\Avi - Keep" /USER:tower\username userpassword >> C:\tools\bat\Crashplan\mount.log net use Y: "\\tower\Backups" /USER:tower\username userpassword >> C:\tools\bat\Crashplan\mount.log net use Z: "\\tower\Share 3" /USER:tower\username userpassword >> C:\tools\bat\Crashplan\mount.log Hope that helps. Cal. Edit. Ironically. I used Crashplan at work to recover that batch file from my home pc backkup so that I could post it. lol. I could have taken it over to grab the file but this was easier.

lol. I know that comment is not directed at anyone but I feel like I fit the bill. I've had several drives fail in the last year. But... I love unraid. Keep in mind that my server was bought directly from Lime Tech in 2007 and its only now after 7 years of continuous running that I'm having issues. I had zero issues for many years. The drives that failed are very old as well. I think I have about 3 left from that age group. I have one bad slot as well that failed a couple months ago. All others are full. The only time so far that I lost data was when I did something stupid one time and got impatient. All that said. I still love unraid. I was considering a brand new setup bought fully from lime tech to act as a backup to this server till I saw the cost in Hard drives alone would kill me. I guess when you add a drive or two at a time it really adds up over 7 years. Current plan. Wait till they have an official final ver 6 out. Then buy a new server from them with about 3 very big drives. Then I'll migrate my data over from the larger drives across the network. As each drive gets emptied I'll move it over as well. I doubt the last 3 orig small drives make it over. We will see. I'm also doing Crashplan now to backup offsite. I don't run it on the server but rather my desktop. A simple batch file called by the scheduler on bootup uses system to map my unraid shares so that Crashplan can access it. Normal mapped drives don't work. It works great. I don't have unlimited bandwidth so it will take awhile before that is fully in place. As far as maintenance. Using unmenu for easy access to some of the plugins you can sched a monthly parity check to find issues with your system so you can find that failed drive and replace it before a second one goes. Cal.

Bought a replacement drive last night. Tower is up with array off currently doing a preclear on the new drive in slot 2 where the bad drive was. Installed virtualbox last night to play with it. Installed a VM of windows7 since thats what I had thats currently unused. Worked great. This is pretty slick. I'll have to see now if I can get unraid running within it. This would be handy for disk checking as I have no free slots. I'll report back once the preclear and rebuild are done. Thanks guys for the info and suggestions.

Yes. Current plan is to preclear the new drive in the slot where I will be replacing the drive. I'll do this while the array is not started. I know I can start the array and leave this slot unassigned and then do a preclear with the array running but unprotected. But I'd rather leave it not started while doing to the preclear so thats the plan. New drive has been reserved and is ready for pickup after work. Thats a great Idea. I've never even considered that. I can't give up my main box. The other box is connect to the TV and Home automation stuff. But I do have a netbook thats mostly unused that I could use. Hm.... I think that only has one usb slot on it. I'll have to check tonight. I should have an extra usb hub around somewhere and I have a kit for connecting any drive to usb. I wonder if I could boot from a usb stick in the hub and see the drive also in the hub. I'll have to try that. Garage sale. Well. I do have a couple carcases left over. I might be able to put enough together to make a bootable system without buying anything. Hm... VirtualBox. Another good idea. I like that idea even better. My main box has a slot on top built specifically to slide an internal drive into it for temp access without opening the case or plugging into USB. I've used it a few times. Its handy. If I could access that with unraid running in vituralbox. That would be perfect. Great Ideas guys. Thanks.

Thank you. According to my records I think that may be disk 2. If so its one of the old almost original 500GB drives that has been in use for years. Now that I know what I'm looking for I can pull the drives and quickly find it and confirm the serial number. Guess I'll drop by my local store after work today and buy another drive. I see they still have a sale on so thats good. Does anyone know of a windows program that can preclear a drive for unRaid? I suppose I'll preclear the new one I buy today in this slot but I have a couple other drives I'd like to test. I have no free slots on the server however to let the other drives sit and do a preclear. If there are no win programs that can preclear it. Then what do you guys recommend as a program that can fully test all the sectors on a drive?

And I'm back again. Tower is currently cleanly powered down. Before I proceed I figured I'd post my syslog and see what the problem is. The tower started its monthly parity check (uncorrected) and I noticed today that it was only at 4% after running a full 24 hours. It did not show any parity errors but the syslog was full of red lines. It cancelled the check without issues. I rebooted it without issues and it came up fine. Syslog looked good so I restarted the parity check. It started throwing the same error as before right away. Again I shut it down without issue. I've reseated a few drives but I have no idea what drive its complaining about. Again it boots normally and begins to show the errors as soon as I start the check. Here is the syslog from the last boot. parity check start and a normal cancel. It keeps complaining about ata13. How do I tell what drive that is? I think I've replaced 4 drives in the last 6 months. Last months check completed normally without errors and in normal time. So this problem is recent. Also for history's sake. Last time (a couple months ago) I discovered that slot 4 was bad. So disk4 is currently in slot 14. All slots are full other then the unused known bad slot 4. Thoughts? syslog-2014-12-02.zip

disk 12 finished rebuilding this morning without issues. Now I'll have to check the old drive and the cabling on slot 4. But the array is back in a protected state and working normally so I've marked this as solved. Thankyou.