webrob123

Yep, it was set to Yes. So I need to treat that setting as ephemeral by the sound of it. That is it won't be lost, but it can't be guaranteed to stay on the cache drive all the time as it might move to the array? So I should either use No, which will put data on the array or cache only, which would persist it on the cache. With the last option leading to no protection?

Not sure why but the contents of my Dropbox folder were deleted last night. I'd actually just cleared it out a few days ago using the web client to reclaim space. So it was pretty much empty apart from a few folders and a couple images the desktop client had grabbed from my phone. I use 2-factor auth for all the desktop and mobile clients that I connect to Dropbox. When I connected via unRaid I used the link and no 2-factor was required, which was a new one for me. So just after my desktop notified me that all the folders and images in my Dropbox had been deleted I decide to check the unRaid share. It was late, but I'm 99.99% certain that the Dropbox Docker data folder had disappeared off my cache drive. I decide to stop the unRaid Dropbox Docker until I could figure out what had happened. I was then able to restore the deleted files and folders via the web client and they all appeared back in my desktop dropbox folder. The unRaid Docker instance has remained off since this point and today I checked the appdata folder where the Dropbox data folder had disappeared from yesterday and it is now back there again. I think this is something to do with the fact that it ended up being on my cache drive. Should the cache drive not be used for Dropbox data and be considered ephemeral. I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that the appdata folder should be on the cache drive. Somehow I think my misunderstanding of this is why the folder disappeared. Can anyone shed any light on what they think I'm doing wrong. I followed these instructions to the letter to get it up and running: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=46401.msg443278#msg443278

Just a note here. I'm guessing that your laptop still has an integrated GPU in the processor as well as the standalone 980 GTX GPU. If so then I think you could get UNRAID working, but you'd need a few drives in order for everything to run correctly. Perhaps you could use an SD card for your cache drive. On your original question, I don't think you'll have as slick a way to tab between VM's as you do with Qubes and AFAIK your GPU can only be assigned to one machine at a time. I'd never heard of Qubes before. Might well be worth looking at for my Macbook Pro. Could be a way for me to run OSX and Windows and Linux side by side. Going to try it out. Think my hardware stacks up and has all the right extension. Thanks to OP for alerting me to its existence.

What motherboard do you have and what CPU?

Thanks Jon. I did a bit more research and I think you've hit the nail on the head. Thanks for the tips! Lesson learned - make sure every single thing supports VT-d not just the proccessor. Good to know that you have what seems to be the exact same 970 (i.e. vendor id exactly the same), working with passthrough. In anger I actually gave up on the B75M machine before your reply and bought unRAID with the plan to set it up on my other machine which has this motherboard: http://www.asrock.com/mb/intel/h77m/ The good news is that I'm now starting to see how unRAID could really work for me if I can just get a few things sorted out. Sadly I realised almost immediately that my other 2nd machine has this processor which does not support VT-d and so no passthrough! http://ark.intel.com/products/65527/Intel-Pentium-Processor-G2120-3M-Cache-3_10-GHz For those following along, from my other thread too, I think this now means that there is good chance that my GTX 580 might work if I pair it with a compatible motherboard and processor. This page lists other H77M from Gigabyte as being compatible with VT-d (i.e. Looks like the H77M chipset supports it unlike the B75M). Slightly worried that the Intel comparison page for H77M does not say 'Yes' like for the B75M but it does not say 'No' either. I guess blank space could mean that no news is good news. I'm hopeful based on the report of the H77M from Gigabyte working here: http://www.overclock.net/t/1338063/vt-d-compatible-motherboards When I go in to the bios on my H77M Asrock board and go in to the CPU setting it only says VT-x supported. But I guess it's just listing what the CPU can do - and I know the G2120 is a no go for VT-d. When I go in to the North Bridge part of the bios I get a line that says 'VT-d Capability' on the far left and then on the far right it say 'Not Supported' So I'm guessing if I swap processors and put my Xeon in that box I'll be in business and the 'VT-d Capability' flag will switch to 'Supported'. Only one way to find out I guess! But it'll have to wait until after an important meeting I have next week. My Xeon is in my portable VR demo rig. Thanks again, will report back when I get round to trying it out. Anyway now I've got to figure out why xfce4-panel works fine and loads through the native noVNC implementation for unRAID but fails to load when I try and access the guest VM directly using turbovncserver. Thus leaving me with a borked half working XFCE4 desktop. See separate post on this issue, anyone reading who has lots of experience working with VNC I'd love some help! http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=41521.0 For those wondering why I don't just use the default VNC implementation provided via unRAID. Well the answer is I need more speed for 3D and turbovnc is the only way I know how to get this done so it feels like I'm sitting in front of the actuall workstation. Turbovncserver should allow me to get super fast VNC with realtime 3d via unRAID once I manage to pass through a GPU. I already have this working on AWS and it rocks on their GPU instances. It really feels like you're sitting in front of a beefy GPU machine providing you can keep your pings to the data centre below 70ms and you have at least 5MB download via DSL. AWS is expensive though and hence my foray into the world of unRAID!

I'm just checking here if anyone knows if the native noVNC implementation in unRAID could be interfering with the turbovncserver I've installed separately in an Arch linux guest VM? I'm assumed it wouldn't due to it being at the Dom0 level..? So the issue is that I'm able to login in to the desktop session via the unRAID webgui and also in to that same session directly from my chosen OSX VNC client. I use the host ip for unRAID and port 5900 in my OSX client. I can switch between web/native vnc client and confirm that it's the same session. Everything seems to be working fine and as expected in my Arch Linux/Manajaro install. I guess this sort of VNC is kind of like logging in to the monitor port as I get to see all the startup stuff. So I guess it's not strictly the same as vnc servers that I've been used to using at the Dom1 level in the past. Correct? So anyway once I get to the terminal in the guest I start up the turbovncserver session on port 5901 like so: vncserver :1 -nohttpd -geometry 1440x900 As mentioned Manjaro and xfce4-panel works fine and exactly as expected using the unRAID VNC session. However xfce4-panel fails to start when I try and access the turbovncserver vnc session via the guest ip on port 5901 (i.e. vnc in the guest Dom1) - I use the same OSX vnc client (turbovncviewer) to try and access both the noVNC instigated (DOM0) and guest instigated VNC (DOM1). So problems arise with the tubovncserver session on :5901. I can see the XFCE4 desktop load and I can right click to get to the installed apps but the taskbar at the bottom does not load and I don't get pop up windows to authenticate when trying to update my machine using the pacman gui in Manjaro. Various other windows seems to close as soon as I open them too. If I try to start xfce4-panel from with the vnc session via the terminal I see it briefly flash up and then disappear. This is the first time I've used Manjaro instead of plain Arch, so perhaps that is the problem. If anyone has any ideas feel free to let me know. If it's not noVNC and unRAID interfering, which I'm 99% certain it is not, then perhaps it's a permissions issue, because if I start turbovncserver as root instead of as my user everything seems to work fine.Obviouslly running my VNC sessions as root is not a good solution :-) Here's my error log from the turbovnc session started as a user from the command line: i.e. vncserver :1 -nohttpd -geometry 1440x900 http://pastebin.com/8eDJTnKh and as root i.e. sudo vncserver :1 -nohttpd -geometry 1440x900 http://pastebin.com/7eCMtVLC I know it's a bit cheeky to ask for help here when I'm almost certain my problems have nothing to do with unRAID, but if anyone can see where I'm doing something obviously dumb them please feel free to enlighten me. Thanks!

Did you guys ever figure this out? I just picked up unRAID again as I got a new card. I've just upgraded to a KFA2 GTX 970 EXOC and I'm getting exactly this behaviour. lspci -n gives me the exact same vendor codes as expressexcess reported. Even tried stubbing out too with same result (used - append pci-stub.ids=10de:13c2,10de:0fbb initrd=/bzroot) I do have another data point which is that I was getting the same behaviour with my older GTX 580 in the same box - as described in this thread http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=40155.0 My motherboard is this one: http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=4405#ov My processor is this one (note that there is no IGP on these Xeons): http://ark.intel.com/products/65730/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E3-1240-v2-8M-Cache-3_40-GHz Any ideas? About to give up after another day spent trying to get unRAID to work. Guess I've been unlucky twice now as many seem to have had great success first time around! P.S. Thanks for jon for updating the docs after my http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=40155.0 post, makes things clearer and I've also tried all those steps with the new 970 card to no avail. Sadly I didn't see you'd updated the docs in response to my thread until today and so am now unable to test it out with the old GTX 580 :-(

Sparkyballs: of course you're factually correct here. I am going off instinct to some extent and feel that a not far off doubling of size on disk compared to the original data is something I've never come across before. This is the first time I've used XFS for any volume and so I wondered if that had anything to do with it. I must have copied at least 1000TB from disk to disk over the course of the last 20 years a so my instinct should play a part here when something is a bit different. Wish I had another spare 3TB drive as I'd format it to EXT4 and copy the data over and compare. Is the block size smaller by default on these other file systems? There are a lot of small files, source code, within the data that I've copied over. I'm starting to wonder if the default 4k block size of XFS is responsible for this unexpected increase and that I should have gone with 512 bytes instead. Sounds like I need to do some more reading and testing. Thanks so far for those that have tried to help. P.S. Just realised that I posted this in the v5 group rather than the v6 group. Mod feel free to move to correct part of the forum.

I'm aware that block sizes on disk can cause a discrepancy. But over 300GB extra is being used here, I've never encountered anything near this sort of difference on NTFS, HFS+, EXT2 or EXT4. Have I just been lucky so far or is it something to do with XFS. Me thinks it is the latter, but I'm happy to be proved wrong. Also any ideas why XFS seems to have triggered a maximum directory depth issue that I've never had on any of the above formats? Good be unlucky here as it was an extremely long path - sadly one created by a UE4 project and so I can't really change it.

Hi Jon, Thanks for replying. Yep I read through what I thought were the relevant parts of manuals multiple times - could you provide a link to the bit you think I perhaps missed. From what I read I got the impression that the GUI should take care of everything for me now and I shouldn't have to manually edit any config files. After this did not work I took to the forums where there was lots of advice on how to modify the xml and the syslinux.cfg. I tried lots of stuff from the forums, probably should have just stuck with the GUI config, and none of that worked either. I think it's perhaps a case of a bad/old GPU/Motherboard combo. Sad because I know that others have got the 580 GTX passing through via KVM on their setups, just no reports of it working with the 580GTX working unRAID yet. I know it doesn't work on Xen under any circumstance from what I've read. Final suggestion. Worth mentioning in the docs how passthrough manifests itself. I was kind of expecting some sort of menu on the locally attached monitor that would let me switch between various VMs. But when I got a black screen I started to wonder if I needed to access the VM using TurboVNC and VirtualGL or something. Also I think I read somewhere that the ability to switch between VMs that share a GPU was not possible. Is a reboot required in this case?

I've installed unRAID rc3 and I'm having problems. Size on disk is way to big. I copied some files off an NTFS disk over the network from a Windows 8.1 PC. I had a problem where it seemed like my directory tree was too deep for the target drive and so I had to cancel and start again. I told Windows to skip the files that had already been copied. Apart from the fact that I'm concerned that the directory depth issue caused the copy to stall (can someone explain if another format would avoid this?), why am I seeing the following on the disk I've copied to in unRAID: http://imgur.com/N4d1PIH I went with the XFS defaults when formatting 3TB WD Red disk that is in the drive. See screenshot for details: http://imgur.com/zpumInX Keen to get things running with unRAID, but with this and my GPU passthorugh problems I'm starting to doubt if unRAID is a good choice at the moment. P.S. I should also mention that I'm running without a parity drive or a cache drive at the moment (i.e. just UnRaid OS USB and the 3TB as disk1). Will add SSD cache drive and larger 4TB Hitachi parity drive if I can get things running smoothly.

This is very frustrating - I know it's nobody's fault - just that's the way it goes sometimes So I've been at this all day now and still no joy (when I say all day I mean nearly all day - 20 hours straight). So I attached the .vdisk to a second newly created VM and included VNC for primary and 580GTX as secondary passthrough. Appears that you have to have VNC first followed by the 580 GTX, no option to have passthrough first. When I booted up in to this second VM I ended up getting an error like this from windows: system thread exception not handled - nvlddmkm.sys Seemingly no way to repair or install nvidia drivers from the recovery command prompt because the vdisk was locked and inaccessible according to Windows. So I went back to the original VM I created (without passthrough) and logged in via VNC, set windows to startup so that it would give me the option to Safe Boot and quickly killed vm1 so that I could get the safe boot option on vm2. Switched back to and safe booted the 2nd VM with passthorugh, no exception on boot this time and sure enough I was then able to to see the 580 GTX in the device manager. Installed latest Nvidia drivers from the Nvidia site succesfully and then restarted. Now I get blue screen of death on startup with this message: SYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION My syslinux.cfg looks like this: default /syslinux/menu.c32 menu title Lime Technology prompt 0 timeout 50 label unRAID OS menu default kernel /bzimage append initrd=/bzroot label unRAID OS Safe Mode (no plugins) kernel /bzimage append initrd=/bzroot unraidsafemode label Memtest86+ kernel /memtest I also tried one like below and booted in to the newly created KVM option and got exactly the same results as outlined in my description above: default /syslinux/menu.c32 menu title Lime Technology prompt 0 timeout 50 label unRAID OS menu default kernel /bzimage append initrd=/bzroot label unRAID OS Safe Mode (no plugins) kernel /bzimage append initrd=/bzroot unraidsafemode label KVM/unRAID OS menu default kernel /bzimage append intel_iommu=on vfio_iommu_type1.allow_unsafe_interrupts=1 pcie_acs_override=downstream initrd=/bzroot label Memtest86+ kernel /memtest Any help on troubleshooting this would be great. P.S. Just to clarify - should I be seeing something on the local monitor if things are working correctly for passthrough? It's not clear to me in anything that I've read that my local monitor should spring to life once passthrough is working correctly. I'm assuming this is the only way highly performant local VMs can work for gaming/3d etc...?

Yep I already tried to install the latest Nvidia drivers via VNC but the installer said it couldn't find a compatible card. I think it's because I set the 580 GTX as a secondary card. Also I switched PCIe ACS Override to yes whilst trying to get things working earlier. I'm going to switch on Remote Desktop via VNC, shutdown 1st VM and attach the .vdisk to a fresh second VM with just the 580 GTX configured for graphics - i.e. the vdisk I just installed Windows on to on. Hopefully I can then install the Nvidia driver via remote desktop. Seems I need to switch bridging on too in order to get the VM on the same network as the host and the rest of my network. I think I do this by simply switching it on in the Network settings and then selecting that as the networking interface when creating the second fresh VM.

I have successfully installed Windows 8.1 via VNC on Unraid 6 rc3 - I'm assuming it defaults to KVM. The thing is I don't want to access the VM using VNC via the browser - that's just too slow. I assumed that the Initially I assumed that I did not need to use VNC at all and that by selecting my Nvidia GTX 580 for passthrough I would then somehow be able to access my windows VM using the local keyboard, mouse and monitor. Sadly I don't seem to be able to figure out how to do this. When I did try there was no obvious way to do the initial Windows install. When I started the VM manually via the webgui the screen on my local monitor (which formally would show linux login prompt for unRaid OS) would go black and keyboard would not respond to anything. As far as I could tell the VM was still running and so was unRaid as I could still access it as normal via the webGUI on another computer. I'm actually setting up a VR development environment for use with Oculus Rift. Hoping the VM overhead does not cause me too much latency and that the Rift will still be usable - obviously accessing the VM via VNC is not going to work for the Rift. I think I'm missing something really obvious or have something mis-configured, despite having spent most of the day reading the various docs, wikis, and guides here on the forum. Really I'm looking fro some clarification on how to get access to the VM in order to get the best performance. Should my local VM just appear on my local monitor when I start it up as I originally assumed? Any help shedding light on things would be most appreciated.