SteveRay

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  1. Thanks for the input johnnie.black! Yeah, I came to the conclusion this morning that this Iocrest PCIe SATA 6G Controller would make a far better Frisbee than a SATA controller... So I packed it up and hit the 'return to sender' button. I did some research on supported chip sets and came to the conclusion that an LSI 9201-16i SATA/SAS HBA Controller will do me just fine. I was at first a little concerned about the PCIe 2.0 interface and only having 4 lanes, but since I only have spinners and no SSHDs in the system, I'm sure it's going to be more than adequate! Anyway, I think it's time to wrap up this thread, because I'm relatively certain my next post will be over in the v6x forums when the equipment arrives on Tue and Wed. And to be perfectly honest, with how well behaved this unRAID is, I don't anticipate a whole lot of problems! So thanks, and see you guys over 'on the other side'! Mr. Moderator - Please mark this thread as SOLVED!
  2. OK, I read every scrap of information that I could find regarding upgrading from v5 to v6. And when I felt extremely comfortable that I knew exactly what I was doing, I took the plunge. Of course, the very first thing I did was back everything up on both of my flash drives. On the first go, I formatted the Sony flash drive, downloaded and installed unraid v 6.6.3, ran make_boot, and copied my Pro key from the backup to the config directory. I then went back and carefully copied the network.cfg, ident.cfg, share.cfg, and shares/*.cfg from the backup into the config directory on the Sony flash drive. I then plugged the flash drive into my unRAID server and hit the big red switch. The system came right up initially looking pretty sweet, but then towards the end of the boot process the screen started barfing all kinds of stuff about problems with all the HD drives. Screen after screen after screen of it. In fact, so much of it, I thought for sure maybe the SATA controller had gone south. But the Ethernet came up and was working fine! I brought up the unRAID web page on another machine and took a peak at the array configuration page to see if any hard disks had shown up. Not even one. Then I used the web page to do a graceful shut down of the system. I knew all the HDs were working fine previously, so just to do a sanity check, I re-flashed the Sony flash drive with the backup of the v5 system that was installed this morning and lit it off again. Just like before, the system booted right up to the prompt, with all HDs present and accounted for. So obviously, the SATA controller card didn't take a dive. (Still no Ethernet with v5, of course, but we knew that...) For the last test, to make sure it wasn't one of the files I was moving between v5 and v6, I re-formatted the Sony flash drive and reinstalled v 6.6.3 just as before, except this time the ONLY file I put on it was the Pro Key. Of course, it now calls itself Tower, and it knows nothing about shares or users, but other than that, the system booted up exactly as it had the first time, puking one message after another about bad HDs, interfaces, slow data, etc. (However, this time, I captured the syslog - It is attached) My call is that this SATA controller card is not compatible with v6. (I think you and Squid may have both cautioned me about it.) So I think I'm in the market for a controller card. (If you look at the attached syslog and something else jumps out at you, please let me know.) Do we have vendor and part numbers for any known PCIe 8 or 16 port SATA controller cards that would work? syslog-2018-10-20.txt
  3. Well, Jonathanm... To say you've really piqued my interest would be a wee bit of an understatement! I mean, this system is about as "vanilla" as it gets. There is absolutely nothing on the flash drive except Lime Tech's original v 5.0 rc 11 unRAID operating system. (I wanted the system as clean as possible because we were, at the time, Beta testing v 5.0.) So, what I'm trying to say is, there is nothing on this system to complicate things. It is just your basic NAS and the only thing it has ever been used for is as a media server. If I'm understanding you correctly, jonathanm, what I think I'm hearing you say is that I can simply do a back up of my flash drive, format it, install a virgin copy of Lime Tech's latest 6.X unRAID system, make the flash drive bootable, and then copy my Pro Key for this flash device back to the flash drive's config directory. That first part I think I understand, however, it's the next bit I am a little vague on... I mean, doesn't this system also need all kinds of additional information, like the server's name, what shares are set up, what user's are authorized to use the system, what permissions the individual users have, etc? It looks to me like this info is possibly contained in the files in the "config" directory on the original flash drive. What "config" files do I need to bring across from the original flash drive? Are all of these files that we would need to bring across compatible between v 5.x and v 6.x? Sorry to ask so many questions but I want to be sure I'm getting this correct!
  4. Thanks guys... I think, deep down, I'd already come to the conclusion that it was probably v5 being so old and more-than-likely, not having the driver in it, when I had looked for and didn't find a way to recompile the kernel. Guess, I have two rebuilds ahead. One to go back to an older system with a supported NIC so I can do the upgrade to v6, and then once v6 is operational, rebuild the system with the new mobo. I think I still have an old mobo with a NIC supported by v5 laying around here, somewhere. Since it's new and I haven't seen it written up yet, I'll do another post to let everyone know what I think of this Supermicro X11SCQ/L motherboard once I get it up and running. Thanks again Squid and Johnnie Black!
  5. I keep trying to submit this in v 5.0 and older forum but your web page won't accept it. Please help me post this. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hello to the group, I bought two pro keys back in 2010, thinking I'd eventually put a second system together to back up the first. However, the first system turned out to be so reliable, I never built the second. I was actually participating in the beta testing of unRAID version 5.0 when I retired in 2014 and moved to Florida. In fact, v 5.0 release candidate 11 is STILL what was installed and running continuously on this server until just recently when, in the middle of getting ready to bring the software up to the most current version and possibly upgrade the hardware, another motherboard failed! Believe this or not, in the eight years have passed, and despite the fact that this unRAID system has gone through two failed motherboards and six hard disks, to date I've never lost a single bit of data from the more than 40 terabytes of data kept on it! However, I think all that is about to change... I'm trying hard not to panic, but this time, I think I am definitely in over my head. I sure hope there is someone out there who can help. (btw, please be gentle with me! - I'm 70 years old!) Anyway, I ordered a new Supermicro X11SCQ/L motherboard, a new i5-8400 CPU, and 16 GB of DDR 4 memory. I also ordered an IOCrest PCIe SATA 6G 16 port controller card. During one of the brief interludes that the old motherboard was working, I managed to get a screen shot of unRAID's drive assignments and the HD serial numbers. (Screen shot is attached as "2018-10-07-03-06-00-Prep_for_Mobo_Replacement".) I then made a complete back up of the entire contents of the unRAID flash drive after verifying that parity was correct and doing a graceful shutdown of unRAID. When all the new parts had been delivered, I put everything back together and hit the power switch, unRAID booted right up to the command prompt, I logged in as root and typed dmesg | grep disk to verify that all 14 HDs had been discovered and imported. All HDs were accounted for. I then typed dmesg | grep eth to verify that the mobo's 2 Intel Ethernet interfaces had been discovered. NOTHING. No Ethernet. (The mobo's literature says the on board chip set is the Intel I219LM / Intel I210AT.) I doubled checked the mobo's strapping to verify that both on board Ethernet ports had been enabled. Both were set to "enable". I double checked the BIOS, but there was nothing about the Ethernet ports in it. In order to substitute an out board PCI-e Ethernet interface, I set both motherboard straps to disable the on board network interface , and installed a Rosewill RC-411v3 NIC and rebooted the system. Still no Ethernet. I don't know where to go from here, so I've attached the most recent syslog to this posting hoping someone smarter than I can figure this out. I can't get an Ethernet connection to the machine no matter what I do! Does anyone have a way to get these network interfaces working? Now, I'm going to go take that Vallium that Tom recommends before I panic! (I know "Don't Panic", HHGTTG) Best regards and I'm looking forward to hearing from someone! Steve Ray syslog-2018-10-18.txt