MrCrispy

I remember years ago when I was learning about this stuff, I would google for things like which HDD to use for builds, SMART etc, and find links to the unraid forums because the posts here had the most indepth technical info. Sadly many of those posts are now gone or are relevant for older versions only. Its true that online forums these days have become more toxic, you see this everywhere. People have smaller attention spans and are more willing to complain. I still feel this is an extremely valuable community, it is one of the big pros of unRaid frankly. Without the active members here, a lot of the cool stuff in unRaid wouldn't exist and many have had an active part in influencing newer official features.

This is something I want to get as an alternative to commercial NAS like Qnap/Synology for my family. Don't need more than 4 bays. It needs to be of similar size, power/noise levels and I don't need ultra fast cpu. If there is some SFF pc which comes with a motherboard/cpu combo (like NUC's do) and has 4 drives, that I can just buy, I'd really prefer that. I am under time limits as I'm traveling this weekend, and I cannot ship parts where I'm going.

Yes I will give them local content, their Internet speeds are not great. For streaming clients my plan is to buy 2 FireTv sticks, it seems like the easiest UI to use. Needs are very simple, just a tv and no speaker system. I have used FireTv/stick myself with both Plex and Kodi, Plex has a much easier UI IMO, but it does transcode many formarts like avi. Do you have a suggestion for a prebuilt box I could buy, add ram/hdd and unraid key and be done? Also this is going on a flight with me, which is why I said the SFF. A mid tower is not going to work.

Going to visit family for holidays in about 1 week, and decided to get them setup with a file server and Plex streamer. My main consideration is to have a simple always on server that they never need to manage, which is why initially I thought of commercial NAS, but Qnap/Synology are really expensive. I have big loud servers I use myself, but I need suggestion for something I can purchase which will run unRaid, have at least 4 drives, and be able to transcoding, in a small form factor and low power/noise. Is there any such device? Something like HP Microserver comes to mind. I dont have a lot of time as I'm travelling next week!

Sorry I am not a Linux expert, let alone a kernel dev, and I read a bit more about inotify and take it back. It seemed at first glance to provide a callback for every file operation but its only for specific folders. I don't know if Linux itself has this capability. e.g. NTFS has a journal - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USN_Journal - which can be easily queried by apps and is used for this kind of functionality. Its used by many programs for things like versioning, file history etc. I believe OSX had similar features which were used by Time Machine, and the new APFS is probably much more sophisticated for this feature. This seems like a pretty basic Linux feature - e.g. how do iotop/lsof etc operate? I am not asking for something to intercept file read/write calls, examine the data etc. That would be a very low level filesystem driver. Just a way to get notified when a file is created/moved/deleted - basically whenever its metadata has changed. which is a LOT less frequent operation.

How is this a core change? In fact it'd be no change at all if the right api hooks exist. I looked into this a bit more and inotify seems to provide this info, and its part of slackware. Are there any unRaid authors on this forum or is it just users?

Thought no one had seen this. Can I get some input from the regulars/unRaid authors if this is possible, and what it'd take. Yes it'd be more powerful than cache_dirs. Also this kind of info is very well suited to be kept in memory for instant access. The more I think of this the more uses I can come up with - e.g. you keep a history of the catalog and you have an instant view of how your server usage has grown over time.

What it'd do: maintain a catalog of all the content on the server - files, folder, shares etc. The catalog would be built on initial install. After that it would hook into the unRaid filesystem and get updated automatically on any file modification/access, without needing to run a separate script on schedule. Thus it'd be like updating parity in realtime vs doing it on schedule. Features it'd provide to the user - - instant search of any file/folder on the server: would list the locations (disk, share) where its located, without having to search - if a disk goes offline, can generate a report of all missing content and all affected shares/folders - various stats such as most used, age, size map, distribution - possibly a realtime view of shares/disks with file access lighting up sections The key to all this is automatic updates of the underlying catalog by hooking into the file system, which I believe is shfs. IMO this would be a very powerful addon. I don't know if APIs exist to enable this, I've never written a plugin, but am interested.

You should disable parity on the target server in any case. Then enable it back when all the data is there. If possible, you could also look at installing 10Gb cards in the 2 servers, they are not expensive (~$20) and this is the perfect use case. 20MBps seems really slow to me in any case, is that the read speed you get as well?

Agree with everything. If I have a backup server with frequent rsyncs, parity is not that essential and may in fact be not preferred. Its the same tradeoff you make when choosing to have a non-mirrored cache, which many people also have. I know everyone says you need 3 backups with 1 offsite, but in practice very few can afford that with large datasets.

With that much data does it really matter if its 1 or 2 parity drives? You need to have backups in any case. There are plenty of users with >15 drives an donly 1 parity drive, 2 is a very new feature. And the drives were not the same batch, they got it in 2 shipments. Even if they were I very much doubt it makes any difference. In fact if all of them got damaged thats a good thing as you'd be able to replace them immediately.

These are probably the most reliable drives you can buy, and they have data recovery service on these. And of course they didn't pay for any of this. I wish they'd covered more details.

Linus is famous for knowing very little making stupid decisions (like running his main server in a crazy undafe RAID config with no backups which he then lost), he is entertaining which is why he's popular. These guys get all kinds of hardware for free so companies can get some free advertising, meanwhile a lot of people with real content and knowledge are unknown. Its the culture we live in.

i think the params to limit log file size should be default when creating a container, or at least can be added automatically in CA plugin? This seems to be a common issue.

Did you get the newer 256MB cache version (WD80EFAX) inside, or the regular 128MB one (WD80EFZX) ? I think its luck of the draw.

I'm also debating buying these drives. On the one hand the price is the lowest its been and the deal is still alive. But 10TB drives are definitely coming this year, may even be affordable, and we'll probably have a price drop for 8TB. But also we can't be sure if the enclosure will still contain Reds? With unRaid I'm not even sure NAS rated drives are needed or make a difference.

Wondering if these will keep dropping in price as the 10TB models are about to come out and we will soon have Black Friday sales.

Still new to Linux but am enjoying finding cool stuff. I found jdupes/fdupes to find duplicates. I think there is a script/plugin for this somewhere? Is there a docker which gives you a minimal Linux shell? But it wouldn't have access to the main OS right? e.g if I want to run htop.

I'm not a Linux expert, but I don't think Slackware has a traditional package manager like Debian/Arch etc based distros. Is installing other software supported and if so how? The other option of course is not to clutter unRaid and affect the OS, and use a VM or Docker for this?

Docker containers should not contain any data, they are supposed to be static images and all data should be on externally mapped paths. At least that's my understanding. So if container size is growing something is wrong. Even with log files they should be getting pruned periodically.

You are right. I am an idiot

I thought this release would have the fix for the single threaded GUI hang issue, it was said in one of the other threads.

That's a good point. But I still think more often than not it would be an error esp for a new user.

But its still possible to add a conflicting port. This should be pretty easy to do and show a warning since the list of all ports is already known.

Was unRaid unstable when it was using ReiserFS by default (before v6), I'm sure it wasn't. So why is it an issue in 6? Just curious.