S80_UK

This is probably unlikely, but did you ever enable Remote Desktop Connection or anything similar on that machine? That might include other remote control tools such as TeamViewer. They have legitimate uses, but only if you're in control of their use. You mentioned a power failure. Did that PC start up by itself afterwards? Another safe guard would be to check that PC's power settings in the BIOS. Unless you need it to power up automatically (if the PC was unused then it probably isn't) then I would set it to not power up when the AC power is applied. The behaviour on restoration of AC power is generally configured in e PC's BIOS settings. Normally you would have most machines set to stay powered off at that time, although a reasonable exception would be on machines such as your Unraid server that you might want to restart without supervision.

Tom @limetech provided a link to the docs for this... https://wiki.unraid.net/Unraid_OS_6.9.0#SMART_handling_and_Storage_Threshold_Warnings There are changes to the way that drive specific data (such as SMART) are stored, and the utilisation thresholds are also affected by this.

I have a couple of them although I have not yet gone with the front-loading approach - my 4 in 3 cages load from the inside. I just don't bother with the drive screws and use old business cards to wedge one side of the drives so they don't rattle around. It's just a shame they don't make this case anymore - it would still be pretty good for home server use.

Updated main server OK last night, but on restart had I five notifications that each of my drives that was above my 85% utilisation of capacity threshold were now back at "Normal" utilisation along with the accompanying emails. Obviously this is not a critical issue - maybe a consequence of the fact that I don't use the default thresholds? Nonetheless, the update is much appreciated. Will look to update backup server shortly. Edit: Backup also updated. No spurious notifications, but that server is using default capacity thresholds.

Meanwhile, back on topic... Thanks for this - I shall test accordingly and let you have my feedback in the coming days. I will start by uninstalling and clearing out any old files so that the new plug-in has a fresh start.

A couple of comments if I may... This plugin does not do the scheduling that you describe - that scheduling is a standard function of Unraid, as is the automatically run parity check after any unclean shutdown. This plugin allows a standard check to be split into parts with controlled suspend and resume timings as needed to help limit the effects of system slowdown. If the automatic check after an unclean shutdown is an issue for you, you should perhaps ask Limetech about it, although I suspect they would be reluctant to make it possible to disable the check from starting under those conditions (it kind of defeats the purpose). As noted above, you also do have the option to cancel a check, and with the plugin, you have the option to pause it. As for not worrying about dirty parity, that would depend on the value of your data and the frequency of your scheduled checks, as well as the reliability of any backup scheme that you might have. Don't forget that dirty parity will prevent Unraid from correctly recovering a disk if it fails before the parity error is detected and corrected. Personally, I would prefer to have the automatic check run after an unclean shutdown and restart. Then I can make an informed decision on whether to abort or let the check complete. As @jonathanm has commented - a UPS may be a better approach if you have frequent unscheduled restarts (unless they are due to causes other than mains power).

Two free tools spring to mind... One is Windows own Backup mechanism - you can configure it to back up to a mapped drive quite easily and to update the backup on a regular schedule. Just type Backup into the Windows search bar to get started. Another is to use the software called FreeFileSync which includes a utility called RealTimeSync which can be set to watch specific folders, and you can then use that to back up to a share. I have been using the manual version of FreeFileSync for some years - it's quite powerful, and allows some filtering to be applied to include / exclude particular file types or folders as needed. It's my also go-to software for backing up from Windows to removable media. I even sometime use it to move files between two Unraid servers, although it will not be the fastest method due to the doubling of the network bandwidth at the Windows PC. FreeFileSync is also well maintained and frequently updated with fixes and enhancements.

Thanks for the latest update - from the change log it looks like there was a lot of work on that one. I don't use this plug-in that often, but when I do it's great to have a tool such as this that "just works". Much appreciated. Thank you.

@Janus This is also why you have the "Minimum Free Space" setting for a share. It causes Unraid to write to another disk if the first does not have enough space for the file. It also looks at the disks allocated to a share (if set) and the allocation method to determine when to start writing to different disks.

Ok, cool. I look forward to the next update - take your time. Thanks.

Hi @itimpi So, last night I ran a manual check with the threshold temperatures set higher to avoid any temperature related pause. That worked up to the point where a pause would be expected for a scheduled check. At 08:00 the check was paused, even though this check was manual and no paused was expected. Currently it is paused at about 73%. I am attaching the files requested. Also attached is a diagnostics capture (just now). Please let me know if you need any more info. parity.check.tuning.cron parity.check.tuning.progress parity.check.tuning.scheduled parity.check.tuning.cfg tower-v6-diagnostics-20210221-1146.zip

Understood - I will grab what I can.

Thanks for the reply. The resumed check completed without errors. I may try to repeat the process tonight, but with the temperature threshold set a little higher to avoid an unplanned pause. I can then try again after that with a lower threshold to see what happens. I shall let you know how it goes.

Hi! I am happy to give a little feedback after a couple of passes through the process with this new version. I set up a scheduled check earlier in the week which paused and resumed perfectly. That was a couple of days ago. Yesterday, I had an unplanned user created hardware issue - my HBA went off-line taking six drives out of the array at once. This was a mechanical problem caused by the card not sitting properly in the PCIe slot. I shut down the array, powered down and attended to the mechanical issues. Everything came up OK, and since I had shut down first, the array seemed good - Unraid did not try to run an automatic parity check. But due to the nature of the problem I felt that a parity check would be a good idea. So I started a check just after midnight. I did not have pause/resume enabled for manual checks. Two things then happened. At 01:28 the test paused due to an over-heating drive (it was at 42 degrees - a bit hotter than normal). At 02:00 it had cooled and the check resumed. By chance, 02:00 is also when I have the test start and resume if it's a scheduled check. The test then ran OK until 08:00 when it paused. However, the settings were such that it should not have paused for a manually run test. I manually resumed at around 10:35 this morning - I am just waiting for that to finish. So, all went well, but the manual parity check paused at 08:00 when it should not have (set to no pause for manual checks). I am wondering if this may have been a consequence of the pause and resume caused by an over temperature event several hour earlier. Perhaps a "pause enable flag" or something got set by this? From my point of view this is not a critical problem, but it looks as though something in the logic is still not quite right. I did not have test or debug logging running for this - I was more concerned with checking the array after my HBA issue earlier the previous day. So far, it appears that my hardware issue did not cause any disk corruption. I will be happy to try again if it helps. Cheers.

I always keep a print out (or a saved PDF) of the web UI Main page with all drives listed as a handy reference. I also recommend the "disklocation" plugin. It takes a few minutes to assign the drives to specific locations, but once done it's a great help when it comes to future maintenance.

For what it's worth, I see it more when I zoom out and the t is then clearly being rendered strangely. Having spent years overseeing the production of user manuals and the like where layout was important, this one would bug me like hell. Fortunately at my normal zoom level in Chrome (100% on a 2560x1440 monitor) I am not noticing it at all. If I go out to 75% zoom - yuck... Edit: Damn! I am now noticing it at 100% too... 🤪

I tested the new version over the last couple of nights with a scheduled parity check with one pause. Everything worked correctly and the start and end notifications were as expected. Emails for start, pause, resume and finish were also sent. This is looking very good. Many thanks for the improvements. (I am running 6.9.0-rc2 btw.)

@hoff - I noticed that you asked about 6.9.0-35 - the current test release for 6.9 is 6.9.0-rc2 which is a couple of versions newer. I and many others are using 6.9.0-rc2 without issues. As for uptime - it seems every bit as stable as prior major releases, so I am running it for weeks at a time without any issues, only limited my my need to reboot due to hardware changes such as adding disk drives.

It's not impossible. You could just try this which is a simple reversible modification that I and others have had to perform on similar cards... I had to do this on a Dell H310 card (same chip set I believe) after changing to a Gigabyte motherboard from an Asrock of a similar age. You can try just masking the two pins on the top side of the LSI HBA board and see if it makes any difference. If it doesn't help, then there's no harm done.

I shall PM the cfg file to you. I had not enabled for manual checks, but this was not a manual check - it was a scheduled check run at 2am in the morning using the regular parity check scheduler, so I would not have expected to need to enable the scheduler for manual checks for that purpose. Have I misunderstood how it works?

@itimpi So my parity check is still not pausing. Last night I did a run with test logging enabled. Syslog is attached. This was after a fresh install of the plugin, and after a fresh reboot of the server to try to eliminate any effects of earlier activity. The critical point is at line 4386 when the log shows the pause attempt like this... Jan 17 08:00:01 Tower-V6 parity.check.tuning.php: TESTING: ----------- PAUSE begin ------ Jan 17 08:00:01 Tower-V6 parity.check.tuning.php: TESTING: disk2 temp=*C, status=cool (drive settings: hot=42C, cool=35C) Jan 17 08:00:01 Tower-V6 parity.check.tuning.php: DEBUG: Pause request Jan 17 08:00:01 Tower-V6 parity.check.tuning.php: TESTING: disk3 temp=38C, status=warm (drive settings: hot=42C, cool=35C) Jan 17 08:00:01 Tower-V6 parity.check.tuning.php: DEBUG: ...action not configured for manual Non-Correcting Parity Check (check P) Jan 17 08:00:01 Tower-V6 parity.check.tuning.php: TESTING: disk4 temp=*C, status=cool (drive settings: hot=42C, cool=35C) Jan 17 08:00:01 Tower-V6 parity.check.tuning.php: TESTING: ----------- PAUSE end ------ The pause was configured for 08:00 - I have highlighted the obvious error report, but I have no clue as to the cause. The pause was then immediately cancelled and the parity check resumed and ran to completion nearly four hours later. Please let me know if there's anything else I can try. syslog.txt

I am on -RC2 as well, but I have not seen that error, although my parity check run is not pausing as expected.

Thanks. It's not an improvement in my view. It may depend how one uses the Unread Items list, but I use it just to quickly scan for any topics that I am interested in or where I may be able to help out. The new arrangement just makes it very much harder to spot things, and if one only looks every two or three days then the list also becomes unnecessarily long. I can see that for someone actively supporting a number of threads, the new method may be useful in tracking the levels of activity and determining where to focus.

Even if you could (I am not sure) I wouldn't recommend it. Specifically, if you have any parity drive in your system then the speed of transfer of files is going to be limited anyway by the need to read both the destination drive and the parity drive before the data is written and the parity updated. If you run two instances, then the parity drive will spend a lot of time moving the heads between the two areas that are being updated when you are unBalancing moving data to two separate data drives. The time lost would be much greater than when running the two sessions separately

OK - understood. Just thought I should check. That almost certainly was the case. Thanks again. OK - I will see how it goes. I can do some further testing after the weekend. (I am still doing disk upgrades at present and I'm letting the parity processes run to completion to get though it as fast as possible.) Thanks for the plug-in by the way - it is genuinely very useful.