olssy

I've been using iperf to debug my network issues, you should give it a try. Install it on both machines(UnMenu offers it and it is available for windows and linux), run one as client and one as server iperf -s iperf -c {ip of server machine} It will at least let you know if it is a netowrking issue or a samba issue as it takes samba out of the equation.

I was getting 60+ when I tested UnRaid, now I get 40 BUT I found out it's my desktop driver in Ubuntu. Seems to limit the maximum speed to 536Kb for some reason. Kernel 3.1 should have a new driver so I will retest then. Windows is sometimes giving me over 100MBs to the unRaid box so I am very happy with that. No parity drive yet as I am waiting for hard drive prices to go down a bit. On to the subject of Network bonding, I'm going to give it another go this weekend and see if I can't bypass my switch and use my router or play around with the modes that don't require a managed switch. I am getting a bit of packet loss now and will need to fix that before attempting to bond the NICs again.

Hmmm, good question about the cooler! The fan spins so slowly I can't tell without removing it but my suspicion is I put it on backwards! I'm gonna need to fix that the next time I shut it down. Thanks for noticing that!

Ok, here goes, I only took these quickly with a small point and shoot, maybe later I'll get more artsy and take out my DSLR and a nice prime lens As for my networking issues, they have gotten better and worse! I tried setting the MTU of one of my windows machine to 9000k and I got a burst of 130MBs!!! then it stabalized at around 100MBs. I was so happy that I changed all the MTU settings of my machines to 9000 but Ubuntu clients weren't seeing much of an improvement, maybe 25% better. So I messed around with a few settings, buffer sizes, window size and alot of wierd stuff. Well, now my Ubuntu clients aren't any better and my Windows client is only getting 80MBs but the worst of it is I am now getting dropped RX packets on my UnRaid server... All of this is my fault of course, gonna be a great learning experience to fix it now Now, the one thing that would make my machine even cooler is an Icy Dock cage in front, just for the aesthetics

Try your syslog again, I noticed you did a typo when you tried to put a tail on it, I think you typed lg instead of log in the path. The log should show some information about why the USB drive isn't being mounted. It seems your BIOS has no trouble booting from the USB drive but then the linux kernel can't mount it or something. To be sure if it's mounted or not do: mount -l And get that syslog

Might sound like a stupid suggestion but did you try booting your USB key off a different USB port? Yesterday I changed ports on my UnRaid machine and everything seemed normal at first but I kept having weird behavior with udevadm until I moved the key back to were it was before. Also, do you use DHCP or a static IP? If it is static, you can try and force it like so: ifconfig eth0 down ifconfig eth0 xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx netmask xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx up Depending on your network this might give you an IP. It seems that the real problem is what you found in your logs, it can't read the network.cfg file. Like I said, it might be worth changing USB ports and giving it a try.

Thanks for the reply, I think you are right that it's probably my network and not the NIC as I had a great suprise yesterday when I set my MTU to 9000 on my windows machine and got 130MBs speeds Unfortunatly the difference in Ubuntu was less, giving me about a 25% increase to 50MBps. But I think the Jumbo Frames are hiding the real issue because with iperfs, when I use a window size of 2MB (-w 2) I also get those insane speeds. I'm going to try some more stuff today to see how I can get my Ubuntu machines transfering at those speeds but thanks again for your response.

I've been having curiously slow network speeds on my UnRaid server since I built it last week and was wondering if anyone else experienced this with the Intel 82574L NIC controller. I found this post about a possible issue here: http://communities.intel.com/thread/21870 Anyone else have this controller chip and experiencing any speed issues? I am getting about 40MBs with it but the same drives on my desktop with UnRaid gave me over 50% faster speeds. My motherboard has a second NIC with an Intel 82579 PHY controller so I'll try switching NIcs tomorrow to see if that helps.

Read up a bit on switches and I think you're right Mani, the slow speed was probably due to a ton of errors because my switch got confused or something. But, I found out there are two other modes that don't require a special switch, I'll be trying them out later tonight or tomorrow morning, they are: balance-tlb and balance-alb Unfortunately, I still have some kind of issue with my server as I only get about 40MBps and got between 60-80MBs when I tested UnRaid on my desktop with the same drives.

Success at last! Ok, not the prettiest way to get this to work and have to redo it upon rebooting but for anyone wanting to give it a try here is what I did. Modified network.cfg to try and get a static ip like so: IFNAME[4]="bond0" IPADDR[4]="192.168.0.191" NETMASK[4]="255.255.255.0" USE_DHCP[4]="NO" That ip was the one the server had before and is reserved on my router. That said, when the server booted it didn't have the bond0 up. So I did the 2 modprobes, then ifconfig bond0 up and enslaved eth0 and eth1 to bond0 but I still didn't have my ip. Tried a few things like restarting rc.inet1 and rc.inet2 and ifplugd.action down then up but nothing worked. So I looked at the ifconfig man page and saw I could specify an IP when I brought an interface up so I tried it like so: ifconfig bond0 down ifconfig bond0 192.168.0.191 netmask 255.255.255.0 Then I checked with ifconfig and I had an IP! Then I tried pinging machines on my network from the UnRaid box and it worked! Then tried to browse from an Ubuntu machine and saw my flash drive! While writing this I put my array online and an going to see if my throughput changed... Oh, the Web interface seems to be loading much slower now... and voila! 1.7Mbs transfer speed with bonding! Who knows what went wrong but something sure seems to have. And now for ifperf, I was getting around 590 Mbs before and already wasn't satisfied with it and now, with bonding, I get 78Kbs. I think I'll give up for bonding right now and concentrate on getting one of my NICs functioning at top speed instead. Hopefully this will help others to test out bonding and with a bit of luck and sweat, get better results than me.

Well I tried once and restarted network services but nothing happened and I couldn't manually put bond0 up This lead me to believe that there was a typo in one of the scripts I modified... I started double checking and my machine locked up, had to reboot twice for it to come alive again but no luck with the bonding. If I knew a bit more about UnRaid I think I would have gotten this to work quite quickly but I have no idea how to circumvent the fact that most everything but /boot/ gets restored on rebooting. I mean it makes sense that UnRaid is made this way I just wish I knew how the go script ties in with everything else... Ok, tried a few things to no avail, the last thing I tried was a simple network.cfg that looked like this: IFNAME[4]="bond0" IPADDR[4]="192.168.0.195" NETMASK[4]="255.255.255.0" USE_DHCP[4]="NO" After booting up I then did my modprobes, brought bond0 up and enslaved eth0 and eth1 to bond0 but I still don't have an IP adress... Then I did the same thing trying to use DHCP like so: IFNAME[4]="bond0" USE_DHCP[4]="YES" ... Abnd still no IP. It seems I am doing something wrong if I don't have an IP even when I specify a static ip... I also wonder if the router and ARP tables might not be confused if the IP changes but the MAC address is the same... or vice-versa... I'm getting a bit tired of doing this, I'll take a little break and then get at it by looking over the logs. As for my switch, its a Belkin F5D5141-8 v3 8-port gigabit switch. there is no management console, it's one of those cheap budget consumer switches. If anyone has any suggestions what else I should try then go ahead and post them, I'll try them later tonight.

Nope, just started at it again... but I can't find documentation for my switch to see if it supports bonding. Next step I'll try and boot up with nothing in my network.cfg, then I'll try and modify the rc files as in that tutorial for slackware and then I'll issue a /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1 restart Hopefully when the network services go back up I'll have an IP... From what I read the bond0, eth0 and eth1 should all have the same MAC adress and ip if it works, I'll post back in 5 minutes to let you know if it worked. Does anyone know if I can put BASH scripts in my network.cfg? I'm so new to UnRaid and unfortunately I lack the time to hack away at it like I'd like to

Been working on this for the past hour but so far not much success... I'm using this link from the release notes as "inspiration": http://www.sgvulcan.com/network-interface-bonding-in-slackware-version-13-1/ I put this in network.cfg: IFNAME[4]="bond0" IPADDR[4]="XXX.XX.XX.XX" NETMASK[4]="255.255.255.0" USE_DHCP[4]="" DHCP_HOSTNAME[4]="" And gave it the same IP it already had(static). Then I launched these commands: modprobe bonding mode=balance-rr miimon=100 modprobe tg3 ifconfig bond0 up ifenslave bond0 eth0 ifenslave bond0 eth1 And now ifconfig shows bond0, eth0 and eth1 all with the same HWaddr and eth1 and bond0 both having transmitted 4KB with a total of 105KB received from both eth0 and eth1. All that to say some network activity seems to have taken place but I'm too tired to fire up wireshark tonight to see what it was. I'm going to try one more time tonight by enabling DHCP, if it succeeds I'll post before going offline.

Well, changing USB ports fixed everything! Sorry if this post wasted anyone's time and hopefully it will help if someone else has this happen.

I did a mistake today and ended up with my USB key being formatted. I set up my key again and booted into my server locally and everything seemed to be working but when I went to the Web management GUI it would time out. After searching the forums and trying a few things that were suggested it still wouldn't load in my web browsers and I noticed I have this error message on my unraid terminal for every try to connect: udevadm[xxxx]: error sending message: Connection refused So I tried debugging this for a while to no avail and now it seems that if I reload the Web GUI repetitively, it will eventually load without that error message appearing in the terminal. Could this be because of a faulty hard drive? Is udevadm used to access devices and the device is refusing the connection? Makes me wonder if changing the usb port the key was plugged into might be a solution... If anyone has any suggestions about how/where to debug this issue it would be greatly appreciated, thanks.

No parity drive yet and have tried using a cache drive but didn't see any real improvement in speed... I'll try changing network cables and things like that to see if it helps a bit, I can also try my second LAN port as it doesn't use the same intel controller(52874L and 82579). I'd really like to figure out how to test the maximum network speed between the machines without using any disks, I thought of maybe doing an ssh file transfer with dd supplying the data from the UnRaid box to see what kinds of speeds I'm getting. Or maybe I should boot to a live CD and see what kinds of transfer rates I get with it, that would possibly confirm if it is a network issue... Thanks again for the help.

Well I listened to both your advice and went for the Kingston memory and no hard drive cage. Got everything up and running pretty fast as I had already pre-cleared my drive and installed the Plex add-on(took me a while to realize AFP needed to be enabled for Bonjour to start broadcasting...) I got to say the Fractal Design case looks great and the whole machine is inaudible with cool temps, hard drives around 30degrees and CPU was in the mid 30s last time I checked. I wonder if I can't run this passively cooled with no fans at all... My one disappointment is the network speed, before I built this server I tried UnRaid out on my desktop with the same hard drive and got close to 80MBs and now, with my new build, I'm "only" getting 40MBs. I've benchmarked the disk on the UnRaid server and it can get over 130MBs internally. I'll play around with it this weekend and try to see what is limiting my speed. Not a big deal in any case as apart from photos it won't need to much bandwidth.

I'm about to upgarde my unraid server and before buying the components I'ld like to see if anyone has any suggestions or sees any problems with my build. Money is a relative concern but seeing how I am building this for work I'm not going for the least expensive components. Here is my list: Case: Fractal Design Define Mini 100$CAN Motherboard: SUPERMICRO MBD-X9SCM-F-O 205$CAN CPU: Intel Core i3 2100T Dual Core Hyperthreading Processor LGA1155 2.5GHZ Sandy Bridge 3MB 140$CAN Memory: Micron 128MX8 DDR2 SDRAM PLASTIC FBGA 1.8V 8GB 92$US + Duties OR Crucial 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM ECC Unbuffered DDR3 1333 (PC3 10600) Server Memory Model CT2KIT51272BA1339 80$CAN OR Kingston ValueRAM KVR1333D3E9S/4G 4GB 1X4GB DDR3-1333 ECC 240PIN CL9 W/ Thermal Sensor Memory 80$CAN PSU: Seasonic X-460FL ATX 12V 24PIN 460W Active PFC 80PLUS Gold Fanless Power Supply 150$CAN OR SeaSonic X series SS-400FL Active PFC F3 400W ATX12V Fanless 80 PLUS GOLD Certified Modular Active PFC Power Supply 120$CAN Drive Cage(optional): ICY DOCK MB453SPF-B 3 in 2 SATA I, II & III Hot-Swap Internal Backplane Raid Cage Module 105$CAN Which give me prices between approximately 550$ and 800$. I will start by using my 3 old hard drives and will upgrade to WD Green drives or the equivalent when needed. I chose the memory based on these forums and also the Supermicro web site though it seems like the Kingston or Crucial will work as well as the certified Micron. If no one has any feedback I'll probably go for the Kingston as it has the thermal sensor(got a feeling this is a gimmick). For the power supply, I'ld really like something fanless as I hate fan noise. I'm not planning on having more than 6 low power drives in the server so doews anyone think the 400W is not enough and I should invest in the 460W? Do I really need a drive cage? I've read through the forums and understand why I don't "need" one but that it will be very practical. I still haven't made up my mind about it so if anyone wants to share their opinion here it will probably make me decide I'm confident the case is what I want, I gave into the good looks of the Fractal Design cases Same for the motherboard, it seems ideal except the lack of USB3, but it's a NAS server so I doubt I'ld use external drives ever(especially not with the drive cage) Only thing missing is the CPU heatsink/fan, anyone think I can pull off a passive cooling solution for this CPU? It's only a max TDP of 35 watts... I'm guessing I will need some kind of fan just to move the air a bit... Also, the reason for me wanting this CPU is that the server will also be hosting Plex and most probably Squeezebox on it and I don't know about squeezebox but I do know Plex needs to transcode all video it seends and that's pretty CPU intensive. Thanks to anyone who reads this and special thanks to anyone who has anything to say about the build.