Johnm

if the cache drive is an older slower sata1 drive, it could perform slower then if you did not a cache drive at all. just a thought, I didn't look up your exact drive.

That is a good point about the IRQ. I had just assumed it was the lack of VT at 2AM. Perhaps the OP should also try disabling everything in the bios that is not needed. Audio, onboard nic, Etc.

Hrmm.... I'd be interested in seeing your ESXi usage when you have this issue. I never use more then 20% of my total ESXi CPU except when I have handbrake running. these screen shots are are with several guests running. the newsbin and torrent guests are downloading at about 50Mb/s straight to my unRAID from the internet. I am streaming 3 Blurays and Par/Raring files on the array.. as you can see nothing (I am hurting bad on ram though)... ill wager it is your hardware or bios. If i had to guess.. the problem is a result of the low end desktop without "Virtualization Technology" along with a low powered CPU. Looking through the spec sheet it looks like that board does not support AMD's I/O Virtualization Technology, "AMD-Vi" or "IOMMU". By not having VT, ESXi is using a binary translation of the hardware (emulating the hardware). That and joined to a lower end dualcore CPU without hyperthreading is resulting in ESXi burning a lot overhead.. Again, I am only guessing at this point... This same thing would happen with a Celeron CPU or even a P4. It is like taking a scooter onto the autobahn.. you cant keep up with traffic... It is hard to find a desktop that runs ESXi. the HCL list is small.. and once you do. you want it as beefy as possible.

you could try pinging gmail.com from the console/telnet

i should ask if your workgroups all match. it should not make a difference. but you never know. if the win7 box is set to use homegroup and the unraid to workgroup... set them all to match.

intresting, but seems to lack a lot of features. analog only audio and the proprietary video chip scares me with 3rd party media players and driver updates. the pci is a bit oldschool now... price is nice tho..

if you update your packages in unmenu, the new example on the config page is correct. also make sure your unraid has the correct dns and gateway ip's to get to the net.

franken server... well.. without looking at your syslog i can see some possible red flags. that PCIe card looks like a single lane with a built in port multiplier. I would assume it would be pretty slow. i would put the cache and parity right onto the motherboard. as far as the redhot drive. is it that hot to the touch? try it on a motherboard port to see what it reads. it is possible that is a result of the port multiplier.. i had a brand new seagate do that to me once. it tripped the smart for life and flagged the drive as bad. i had to RMA it to get a new drive. in the end, the port multipliers will slow your server down considerably. edit... quick look at your syslog... your network connection is only at 100Mb/s that will slow you down a lot you have a sata error (i dont know if it is fatal or normal? i am not an expert at that sorry) you also seem to have an unmenu authentication error also?... again. i cant help there. sorry.

if you made a backup of your thumb drive before upgrade, you could just restore that.

if you look at that guys personal pictures, he obviously works at datacenter/co-loc and has servers at both locations. those of us that do work in these data centers tend to get server parts dirt cheap.. manytimes free or close to it. otherwise we have to pay to have the units removed.

for hotmail, it is smtp.live.com:587 the login also used to need [email protected] to work I'll also mention that all 3 of my unraid boxes lost SMTP to hotmail in early october. the existing settings changed. I'm not sure what it changed to. I tried 50 settings before I just sent all my mail to my gmail acount that in turn bounces it to my hotmail account. it was not worth my time to research it right then.... if you go the gmail route. set it all of the settings to your gmail account but leave the first line you hotmail account. I also believe there was an update to this package a few weeks back? (that didnt help with hotmail issue)

it sounds like a netbios issue.. did you change your server name? if so, use that name..... did you recently change the servers IP? is so, clear your windows cache. try from a cmd line in windows "ping -a ip_address_of_server" see what it spits out for a hostname. on your unraid box. in the SMB settings, set it to master browser (local master). see if that helps. when in doubt, reboot everything.. windows admin trick.. not really serious.(lol)

I was going to post this one earlier, but this is one of those customer loyalty codes that often don't work for a lot of people. it is a good deal though.

Super sized Case or DAS boxes. Three nRAID VMs, and 1 desktop= 1x Server Board with VT-d (plenty to choose from) 1x low end to mid range Xeon (I5-I7 (non K) would do the trick if your board supported it) 8+ gigs of ram (16+ would be recommended but not needed) 3x HBA's that support SAS expanders 3x SAS expanders. 4x Flashdrives. 1x datastore hard drive. storage drives = more drives than i care to count... 1x Big UPS (optional but highly recommended) It would all run really smooth. I bet you could even run all 3 parity checks at once and not have issues... or even tax the system. as far as the 11 drive HP... I can see pros and cons for it... I just cant see it being cost effective to use the laptop drives (1 for cache is fine) I know the whole heat vs power thing... but what is the power draw and heat of 4x laptop drives vs a green 3.5" drive? probably not enough to offset the cost. if you had the drives already. nice... sdd's when they come down in price.. sweet... if you have no budget... dropping an areca 12xx card into the PCIe slot and then the 4 to 6 2.5" drives (or SSD's) as a hardware raid 5(or6) cache drive would be massively awesome. you would have killer throughput (disk IO) and decent amount of space for cache drive only use. in a 2 tier storage solution similar to what Raj was thinking. before this hard drive shortage, I was picking up 500GB 7200 RPM laptop drives for $45. 6 of those in raid 5 = 2.5TB with 500MB+ read/write... your bottleneck would be the network. you then have the unraid drives for the bulk of your storage..

Build it! Toss 2 unraid servers in one box with ESXi. See if you can top it with a 42 drive build..

unRAID is not secure. I would not put it in a DMZ... that is asking for all kinds of trouble.

2 things to look at. 1 check for an updated bios, it might have been a known bug and fixed. 2 check your memory. it might have incompatible timings, voltage or speed with that board.

in unmenu under "user scripts" there is a "power down" button... never tried it. but I know it is there.

Use a pico psu for htpc. I just saw Of these in my local craigs list for $20 with the extra 4 in 3 cooling bays. All new. It was tempting.

you mover kicked off at 3:40 in the am, the default time. Nov 11 03:40:01 Darryl_Jacksons_Tower logger: mover started and it is still going since you had so much stuff on it.

thanks I was looking for that little snippet, i had lost that command. PS i think you meant Telnet not FTP. you can see by his syslog he is using the shares just fine.. Not a problem.. bored at work anyways.. As long as you can get into unmenu, Id just reboot the server from unmenu. see if that fixes it. I am sure it is fixable without a bounce. but i am a windows admin.. when i doubt, bounce the box.. LOL..

It sounds like the webgui is just hosed up. if you have unmenu installed, try the ipaddress:8080 to get into unmenu. With 7, i usually just type my server name in the address bar, once in a great while i had to do http://tower or IP. If you do get in, I would probably reboot it. that might be all it needs. as far as checking for red balls, you could install the smtp and the "unraid status email" package. then it will email you if the server is happy or broken.

do remember you will have to run the latest betas with the SAS2LP-MV8. they are not supported just yet.

thats the dynamic-dns-unmenu-package, that has nothing to do with the SMTP package. I actually get that also. I don not use the dynamic dns package so i never followed up on that error. what is the full error message you get? it sounds like you have the correct one installed...

I didn't have time to tear your syslog apart. At a glance, it looks like the server is in good health and still running. it is at IP 192.168.1.50 the mover kicked off yesterday and moved your photos off the cache and all 6 drives are still up and working.. it ran the monthly parity check on the first. The issue will most likely be minor. You said you tried to connect to the IP (192.168.1.50) itself in your web browser?