jeffreywhunter

I use Sandisk Cruzer Ultra Fit for my Flash Drives. Works flawlessly and also works in the USB 3.0 slot (not all do). The Fits are a bit older, but pretty sure they would have a usable GUID. itimpi has the right idea. Just try it. You'll know faster than you can do the research!

I ran the command line preclear and it ran without issues. So must be a script issue? The command line is a script. The plugin uses whichever version of the script you set it up to use. Right. For the command line, I'm using the preclear_disk.sh dated 4/5/2014. For the WebGUI, I installed the preclear_bjp.sh. Duh, I should have used the BJP from the command line instead of what I usually use. Didn't connect the dots. I'll have to give the BJP version a try from the command line next time and see if the problem persists.

I ran the command line preclear and it ran without issues. So must be a script issue?

Quoted from: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=39985.450 Reposting the original issue here as recommended by gfjardim. If you guys have a moment, could you take a look at this related post. Looks like 2 of us have the same problem with the preclear plugin hanging on the boot record. Is there a diagnostic or log we can check? I've looked in the preclear log directory on the flash drive, and there's not entry for this disk. http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=46501.msg444428#msg444428

'grats! If you guys have a moment, could you take a look at this related post. Looks like 2 of us have the same problem with the preclear plugin hanging on the boot record. Is there a diagnostic or log we can check? I've looked in the preclear log directory on the flash drive, and there's not entry for this disk. http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=46501.msg444428#msg444428

When you use your ASUS router, which client are you using?

Great plugin! Is there a way to access this remotely? i.e. a better method than port forwarding (hackers...) or paying for a VPN?

Google is your friend. A quick search found this site: http://www.binarytides.com/linux-command-check-memory-usage/ As I read it, you have quite a bit of overhead available. I had done free and cat /proc/meminfo (hence info above)... but I also found the caches didnt clear. Have cleared them and have free memory now but the web interface is still very sluggish. Maybe best to let this 1st pre-clear finish and then stop. Reboot server and do passes 2 & 3 ... I have found that using Screen is the best way to do many (I've had 4 or 5 going simultaneously on 24G system) pre-clears at once. Interesting thing is they show up in the webgui! So you can monitor them from the browser.

One quick thing. Double checked that you do not have an ad blocker running or some other software/browser-setting to prevent pop-ups. You may have to whitelist your unRAID server. Of course, that's probably the problem. I put my server in the exceptions list and will give that a try... It does not take an IP address (tried :80 and :8080 too) that I can figure...

Sooooo... Where can we find the new blissfully wedded Nerd Pack?

And I add my thanks to you gfjardim as well. Great bit of "usability". Well done. Can't wait for your next addition.

Nice Manual, THANKS!

I completely agree with you. It is the hardest and most difficult/expensive thing to do in software development. That's why few do it well - for all the painful reasons you describe. And the crazy thing is customers really do appreciate good support...mostly because they don't get much of it! That said, there is a way and the good news is we don't have to create it from scratch. We just need to incorporate the strategy, tactics and technology others have built for us - and that combined with the amazing braintrust that the Lime community already enjoys. What I'd recommend is a three pronged pathway... 1. Knowledge capture/refinement; 2. Best practices in online troubleshooting guidance or wizards and development standards (aka Squid's efforts)...and 3. (and most important) enable the community to make money off the technology. 1. Knowledge capture >> Current Status: This, in a rough form, is already being done. As a (more than the average) technical consumer, I know enough about hardware/software and OS's and can use Google and keywords to find/recognize answers. Usually "unRaid [description of error message or problem]" almost always comes up with a number of links to find answers. And you guys do a great job of working problems out. >>The Problem: However, that knowledge is not curated and it ages quickly as new versions come out (I see lots of WARNING: DEPRECATED in various places...good to know and A answer, but makes finding THE answer hard). As a new user, I've been frustrated by that mass of information that is no longer applicable (i.e. Wiki's are great - if they are maintained! Have you tried to verify if a motherboard or hba is supported lately?). >>The Challenge of a Solution: So the challenge is, how to capture that knowledge in a 'newbie friendly' way. I believe the best least-cost, easiest to implement successfully manner is a three layer support strategy. Most technical/developer types HATE documentation/support. It slows them down and wastes their time. And that is a critical truth. So part of the solution is to isolate the braintrust from the frustration and challenge of documentation/support and build a layer of trusted second layer of support. This second layer support team are the ONLY ones who have access to the brain trust. The point being that 2nd level support is presumed to have enough knowledge to handle most of the customer interfaces (the old 80/20 rule reigns supreme!). Actually, because of the quality of the individuals involved, unRaid is probably more like 90/10... So that leaves us with first line support. This is where technology comes in. 2. Best Practices/Tools >> Best Practices in Customer Support: Knowledge based systems have really matured in the last 5 years. I believe that if Lime-Tech were to invest (and I'm speaking of time...) in one of the many open source knowledge management/trouble ticketing systems (for escalation), after a short time of pain (i.e. you have to capture the knowledge and package it/manage it, etc), the payoff would be huge. Some of the new systems are really sophisticated and designed to capture knowledge at the point of support, turning emails/support tickets into knowledgebase articles, and so forth. I'd look closely at some of the support tools put in place by other community based products like Joomla, Wordpress, etc. >> Development Standards: Making support easier starts with standards. When many of the open source software started to appear, it was fraught with many issues regarding how people developed - and created support nightmares - and actually killed a few developments. They finally woke up and built standards committees who guided the process with input from the development community and actually created something beautiful. Its been done, we just need to capture that knowledge/tools/methods and implement. 3. Support created through Monetization >>Monetizing the community: I think the most important key to the long-term success of Lime-Tech/unRaid and the growth of the unRaid product/community comes from enabling the the community to make money. If Lime-Tech can grasp the concept of allowing others to make money from their technology, nearly anything can happen (capitalism is alive and well!). If you look at some of the parallel open source communities, they have had and beaten the same issue (little market share, no money, no support). Essentially, Joomla/Wordpress (for example) have built massive support infrastructures which the "common user" can take advantage of. Plugin providers provide 'free' and 'paid' versions of their plugins (I'm sure you're aware that Plex charges for some of their apps/services), and some companies provide development/support services for systems fee-based (in addition to marketing services/business development strategies, my company does just what I'm talking about, once we build a business strategy for a customer, we use Joomla/Wordpress to create websites, then provide outsourced hosting/support services on an outsourced retainer basis). All this can work, just needs someone to build the strategies/tactics and for Lime-Tech to 'get' the concepts and support the communities ability to make money from the technology. In the end, this would provide Lime-Tech with the ability/funding to focus even more on making the unRaid technology even better than it is. This is actually something I'd be interested in discussing with whomever would drive such things... I see a significant parallel between Joomla/Wordpress (etc) and unRaid. Thousands of developers/companies WORLDWIDE contribute to the core product (Joomla/Wordpress, etc) and don't get paid a cent, but most if not all of them make a good living using their expertise combined with an intimate knowledge of the core technology to create cool things that excite/envision customers to the point of paying hard cash to have access to working product.

Just an observation - and no comment on the last response intended. It appears to me that unRaid wants to become more mainstream in order to reach a broader market/increasing sales - and in doing so, things (i.e. documentation and tolerance of the less educated) have to become more self explanatory. "Clear Drive Stats", while perfectly understandable to a seasoned IT guy, has little if any meaning to noobs and the less educated. I would encourage everyone to write the level of documentation and terms that reach the level of customer you want to attract to and grow the community. That said, unRaid will not probably be a consumer level product - especially since most folks want to build and explore the technology - all cool stuff. But I do see a lot of posts from semi-technical (or less)folks on the site from reaching up from the "consumer cloud". There's a lot of revenue to be made in the "consumer cloud", but much more handholding and anticipation of difficult-to-understand concepts/noob questions are required. And don't get me wrong, I've personally experienced an unbelievable level of support from this community. Amazing really and a testament to everyone involved. So I said all that to say this (and for the benefit of other less experienced folks coming along)...documentation and usability are key components to success. Up until the last couple of posts, I, a 30 year veteran in the tech industry (although on a management track for the past 15 years), did not understand that "Clear Drive Stats" meant the mechanism through which I could "Clear the PreClear" off a drive. In fact, in my most recent experience, I actually had this same problem (ergo my question), because it was a new server, I just hit "new config" to allow me to run PreClear on the drive again. I'm not one to randomly click on buttons without knowing what they actually do. Now I know, I can "Reset Preclear (allows Preclear on a previously precleared drive)" by clicking "Clear Drive Stats". I'd love to see a new standard/practice in UI development with unRaid that would incorporate the power of browsers to imbed knowledge and understanding into the UI. It would be very easy to put a question-mark icon after each field which then converted techno speak into noob-speak. So a little question-mark after the red X (or the hover comment) could say, "Clear Drive Stats (clears PreClear drive statistics so that the drive can be pre-cleared again)" would be ever so helpful. And I can personally think of several dozen places in the unRaid GUI that would be the perfect place to do this. Is there a sub-group in the community that focus on UI development for unRaid? I'm aware of such groups within other communities (i.e. Joomla, Wordpress, etc), whose sole purpose is to guide the development of the UI to reach the "consumer cloud"...

You mean to click the Red "X"?

Is there a writeup somewhere that discusses what each step does? I.e. if you skip that initial Read step, does it then not do something important?

Ok, looks like we're chugging along. Putting it through its paces doing 7 disks simultaneously. Appears to be working pretty "fast" 202MB/s on one of the drives... We'll see if it continues to perform well... Just FYI, this is on the MOBO Sata III ports on an ASUS M5A97 EVO R2.0 board with 16GB memory and AMD FX-4170 Quad-Core @ 4200.

*sorry* for the chase! But thanks for chasing! Yep, I needed to copy the file... I should be in bed too, I guess I misread putting the file in the root... Regardless, its working now! One quick follow-up. There's an option to skip the pre-read. When would you want to skip and not to skip the pre-read? Again, thanks for chasing me around while I found the right place. Love this forum!

Just followed the instructions to install fast preclear, but I'm not seeing the options show up. Here's the layout of files. Pretty clear the files are in the right places (?), but I'm not seeing the options as advertised. What did I miss?

unRaid 6.1.4 Fresh preclear and plugin as of last week. Dug a bit further into my earlier experience with the plugin not working. To recap, when I load the plugin, I see the drive, but the "Start Preclear" link does not work (Red Arrow). It appears there is an error in the javascript (Blue Arrow) but that is for the SEMRush extension which is not loading because the URL is local and not a website (as far as I can tell. I disabled the extension, but made no difference). Also appears that the HTML contains "nothing" (Yellow Arrow). This prompted me to take a look at the HTML source. I see the javascript there for the start preclear function. But its not loading thus the link has no value. Tried to load in IE9, nothing displays: Tried to load in Waterfox, same thing: And finally in Safari, same thing: Any further thoughts on what could be wrong? When I do a traditional preclear via telnet, then I can see the update from the manual preclear that I initiated... Thanks in advance! Happy to do any diagnostics that would make sense...

Just confirming that I have this card, have updated to 6.1.4 and appears to be working with no problems. From a performance perspective, I ran a bunch of tests some time ago. Here's the post... http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=39345.msg367375#msg367375

I'm running this card on v6.0.1 without any issues at all? Was just about to upgrade to v6.1.3. Given your statement, should I wait to upgrade?

Even when done via a windows PC over the LAN? Is that a special feature of linux? If I do this (a cut/paste from a remote PC to another drive on that remote pc) on a windows directory from a remote PC, all the files get copied from the first PC to the second (temp in memory I think), then again over the net to the destination drive. Effectively copying the file twice...

In the original post... Wouldn't cut/paste from windows cause you to move ALL the files twice - and over the network? Seems like you'd want to do all the operations disk to disk on the server?

HAH! It was a PEBCAK. I looked at the command line and I had a strategic extra space... mount -o remount, size=256m /var/log should have been mount -o remount,size=256m /var/log It was patiently waiting for the rest of the command! *duh*