cowger

Update: I found that WINS was enabled on my Windows server, pointing at my NAS box (192.168.1.111). I have no idea why this was there or if it's needed. In any case, I deleted that WINS server address from the TCP/IP configuration on the Windows server and that seems to have stopped that error message. Time will tell if other things now stop working as a result of this... hopefully not...

If I may, I'd like to resurrect this thread as one of the problems listed above has yet to be resolved. I have the following configuration: 192.168.1.110 - "MLSERVER", a Windows 10 server running some automation software from Cinemar (now Allonis) 192.168.1.111 - "MLDATA", running UnRaid 6.10.3. 192.168.1.112 - Dune HD video player All connected through a Cisco switch I'm having occasional access issues where my UnRaid machine ("MLDATA") disappears for short periods of time from both MLSERVER and the Dune box. I continue to receive these error messages on 8-minute intervals and am not sure if this is the root cause or not: Sep 15 07:45:34 MLData nmbd[2637]: [2022/09/15 07:45:34.432049, 0] ../../source3/nmbd/nmbd_incomingrequests.c:173(process_name_refresh_request) Sep 15 07:45:34 MLData nmbd[2637]: Error - should be sent to WINS server Sep 15 07:45:34 MLData nmbd[2637]: [2022/09/15 07:45:34.440577, 0] ../../source3/nmbd/nmbd_incomingrequests.c:170(process_name_refresh_request) Sep 15 07:45:34 MLData nmbd[2637]: process_name_refresh_request: unicast name registration request received for name MLSERVER<20> from IP 192.168.1.110 on subnet UNICAST_SUBNET. MLDATA is set as the Local Master Browser. From that, I would think that receiving a "process_name_refresh_request" from the Windows machine would be expected, but obviously that is not the case. I clearly don't understand WINS and why it's necessary. From googling it, it seems to be a now outdated protocol relating to name resolution. Is it necessary? One of the functions of this NAS box is to serve movies up to my Dune box via SMB... is WINS a necessary part of that protocol? Attaching a couple of log files in case that helps. Thank you! mldata-diagnostics-20220911-1040.zip syslog

Great, this is exactly what I was looking to understand. Thank you!! It seems like this is really a necessary feature to enable. I wonder why they label this "not recommended":

Got it, thank you very much, Frank, for getting me through this!!

Okay, so with my new understanding of bitrate, I searched through my various movies and found one with a bitrate of 43Mbps (which seems to be one of the highest in my library). Along with trying to play that file, I also was curious about the "Fast SMB access" setting within Dune: I have always kept that disabled, as enabling it comes with a strong warning about "you shouldn't do this if you don't know what you're doing" (which I clearly don't!). Curious, though, I tried enabling it... with good results: The cluster of network traffic above 14:42 is with "Fast SMB access" enabled. The right cluster is with it disabled. And video playback is correspondingly great with it enabled and unwatchable with it disabled. So, I will now enable this, needless to say. Does anyone know what "Fast SMB access" might mean? As mentioned previously, their documentation is pretty poor.

Got it, thank you. I just checked the "total bitrate" for this problem movie ("Rio", if it matters), and it's 36.8 Mbps. What's the effective "max" useable bitrate that can reliably go across a 100Mbps interface?

It is currently connected at 100Mb/s (I confirmed that it's not 1Gb via the Cisco switches lights). As I mentioned earlier, Dune has a "enable experimental 1Gbit Ethernet support" but that doesn't seem to work: This Dune box is ~10 years old and perhaps their LAN port just can't handle 1Gb. (Their documentation says nothing more than that the RJ45 connector on the rear panel is their LAN port.) I'm a little confused, however... isn't 100Mb/s fast enough to keep up with streaming a 1080p movie? I do agree that it's getting buffered within the switch... could that buffering algorithm be part of the problem?

Update: I don't believe that the WINS name registration request is the source of the problem (though it certainly IS a problem). It is happening on 8-minute intervals, and the stuttering / performance dropouts are more like every 30-45 seconds.

That device is a Windows server, something I purchased a decade ago as part of an overall movie server solution from a company called Cinemar. It also runs much of my home automation stuff, security cameras, etc. It is Windows 7, which I realize is ancient, but I haven't upgraded anything for fear of breaking things. Honestly, the whole "WINS server" thing to me is very confusing. I'm not a software expert by any means, so if something is broken because of that, I would not be surprised at all. I will look into the logs and the stuttering events and see if there's a correlation.

First, how do I get to the INTERFACE statistics screen above? I can't find that. Next, I don't know how to tell about the network port speed on Dune. Today I turned on "experimental 1Gbps" mode on Dune, but that doesn't seem to have had any effect. VLC: I downloaded VLC on a server attached to the same Cisco switch and played the same movie. Video was not smooth; I'm assuming that the server was having to do some soft transcoding. Here's the storage traffic during that time: For comparison, here's the storage traffic during a copy of a different movie from UnRaid to Dune's local HDD. Note similar dropouts in performance: Here's the network traffic during a subsequent play of the same movie right after the VLC play. Note the significant dropouts: And here's the associated storage traffic. I'm assuming that the NAS box was sourcing the movie from cache, since it just played on VLC 5 minutes before: And here's storage traffic playing a different movie (to get past the caching issue). Same (or worse) stuttering problem:

Here's the diagnostic file. Events: 1) ~8:45am (today) to ~9:30am - Copy file from UnRaid NAS to Dune HD local HDD 2) ~9:32 to ~9:38 - play movie from VLC on local server 3) ~9:40 to ~9:45 - play movie on Dune HD via network (note: appears to be cached - no storage activity) 4) ~9:47 to ~9:52 - play a different movie on Dune HD via network mldata-diagnostics-20220103-0953.zip

Thank you, Frank. 1. Rebooted everything: Dune, Cisco network switch, and the UnRaid NAS box. No apparent change. 2. Will attach to next post. 3. Not that I can see. All traffic appears to be just Reads. 4. Yes, straight stream of the *.M2TS file to the Dune HD player.

Thanks for the help. Disk4 does have some issues, but I don't believe it is related to this issue. 1. Cleared, then played this movie. All reads with this particular movie coming from disk5 and only that drive. Zero on all other drives. 2. Network copy of that movie is about 73-74 MB/s. 3. No WiFi in the path for either playing or copying.

I'm having a consistent problem streaming ripped BluRay videos from my UnRaid setup, and I'm not really sure where to start. This has been an issue for some time now but seems to be getting worse since installing the latest UnRaid OS. It has mostly been simple audio dropouts in the past but now the video is stuttering which has made watching movies unacceptably bad. My setup is an Intel i3-2100 dual core box with 8 drives connected via a Cisco switch to a Dune HD player. UnRaid OS is 6.9.2. When I copy a movie to the Dune's local HDD and play it from there, it performs flawlessly. Via the network, however, the stutter happens about every 20-40 seconds (fairly random), corresponding with the dropouts in performance shown on the bottom two graphs: Obviously the Network and Storage graphs are highly correlated, and I'm assuming that the Storage is causing the poor performance, but I' not sure. For storage, I have a mix of WD and Seagate drives, including two of the Seagate ST8000DM004 8TB drives. I recently discovered that these are SMR, and I have one as the parity drive (I now realize this is not good), but from what I've read on SMR, it shouldn't be a problem for playback. (I have a new 8TB CMR drive ordered to replace the parity drive, but I have a feeling that this won't solve my video playback issue.) Thank you for any help or ideas on how I can diagnose this issue.

I just tried connecting as a guest, and that seems to have worked! Kodi is scanning through my NAS box now for movies... definitely progress. Thank you!!

Sorry for not being clear on this. It's an Android T95 box for TV: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0897QCBF7

I'm trying to set up Kodi (running on an AndroidTV) in order to create another way to watch movies from my personal collection on my UnRaid NAS system. But before even trying to start Kodi, I'm using the My Files app on AndroidTV to try to reach my Movies share. I click on Network Neighborhood, it finds my UnRaid system's IP address, I click on that, it finds my shares (e.g. Movies, Archives, Music), so I click on Movies and it asks me for an Account and Password. (I don't understand why this is, as my Movies share is set up as Public, but I've also found that to access these shares via a PC, I've had to set up a User with a password and then it works.) Unfortunately, this process is not working on the AndroidTV -- a little box pops up at the bottom saying "login fail". So my questions are: Why won't UnRaid let me access a "Public" share? Why won't UnRaid let the AndroidTV login? I've tried creating a new user on UnRaid just for this and am careful to type in (case correct) the username and password. No luck... Thank you...

Thanks, guys, this all helps. Regarding not touching a working system, I agree, but occasionally the reality of the situation is that you need more capacity, hence the new drive. I'll continue trying to figure out why the sudden instability, but with this advice, I'm now not in a rush to replace the server hardware. Cheers, Bryan

Hi - I have a somewhat random question concerning the longevity I should expect from the motherboard within my UnRAID NAS box. I powered it up in early 2013 and it's been running 24/7 for over 6 years now. I have the system loaded with 7 HDDs plus an SSD cache, and recently upgraded the parity drive to 8TB. The rest are a mix of 2 and 4TB. Running 6.6.7 since 2/22 of this year with no problems until I swapped out the parity drive with the bigger one very recently. During the rebuild, the server started hanging, sometimes after just a few minutes. There were no useful logs nor screen outputs; it would just stop responding to anything, including the console. I pulled everything out, reset the SATA adapter card in its slot, ensured that all cables were fully seated, and ran a memtest (no issues). It still crashed twice after that but then mysteriously ran fine after the 3rd try. Now the system has been running for three days with no hang, and thankfully the rebuild finished, but after a half dozen or more hangs within the last week, I'm no longer confident that a problem isn't still lurking. So, to the title question: Am I running on borrowed time with a 6 year old server? Or should a server run for 10 or more years without issue? I'm not dissatisfied with the performance; only the uptime and reliability of the box at this point. Thanks for your thoughts. Bryan

One final post to close this thread out. In summary, everything appears to be fixed and now working as expected. I've converted all disks over to XFS and enabled cache for writes to my Movies and Archives shares. As a final test, I ripped a DVD to the array (to generate inbound traffic) while streaming out a movie last night and it worked just fine with no stutter events. You can see the writes to the array as the 30-odd spikes in the Storage window below, while the movie streaming progresses without interruption. I want to thank everyone who took the time to walk me through this. I now have a much better understanding of my unRAID system, where before it was unfortunately just kind of a black box to me. Cheers! Bryan

I'm starting through the long process of moving data around and converting to XFS. After moving everything off disk 6, I went to stop the array and it seemed to hang on "sync filesystems". I gave it about 45 minutes and then gave up, resetting the array, and am now paying the price for that with a 38 hour parity check. I tried to google why "sync filesystems" might have hung, but didn't find anything that seemed to apply. For my future "stop array" commands, should I do something before I hit "stop", or just give it more time? I guess my question is: Did "sync filesystems" likely hang, or can it take that long?

Thanks, good tip! Mine was indeed set to power save. I think my plan at this point is: 1) Disable BlueIris writes to this array (for now) 2) Systematically update each disk (one at a time) to XFS 3) Re-balance the allocation of each disk at the end of that process 4) Re-enable BlueIris writes to the array 5) Play around with CPU scaling at that time, too Thanks, all, for the help to this point. I certainly never would have gotten anywhere this quickly without your help. Bryan

Okay... but unfortunately this is where I get in over my head. Can you provide me an idiot's guide on how to check / affect this? If it helps, attached is some information about my BIOS settings, but I don't see anything in there about ACHI...

Okay, I collected some interesting data last night. I am still able to re-create the stuttering playback issue, but this time I was looking at the activity within the array and captured the image below. The array is ingesting a burst of data (a single file write operation, typically between 10 and 80 MB, sourced from the security camera app), and approximately one minute later, there's a huge amount of HDD activity and the movie playback stutters. This phenomenon is repeated very reliably each time such a write to the array takes place. So... a workaround to this is to simply not have BlueIris write to the array, but I'm wondering if there is anything that can be tweaked in unRAID to solve this problem more elegantly. My 2nd main question now is: Did something change from 5.x to 6.x to cause unRAID to be more sensitive to this inbound stream of data during movie playback? As I stated in my initial post, this problem only started happening after my upgrade to 6.3.5 from 5.0.6. Bryan

Yes, date ranges from 10/3 to 10/7. (I believe I had wiped the primary repository (on MLServer) clean back on 10/3 when I started this whole upgrade adventure...)