jakev

Thank you, I'm not sure what the issue was... but restarting the unraid box seems to have fixed it. When I restarted it, the old share was gone, and when I re-added it, it allowed me to actually make changes to the settings! I didn't try that before due to being in the middle of a parity check, and of course didn't want to throw hours away restarting that.

Hello... I had tried messing with user shares a while back, and had the same issue. Since it was for my home, I didn't care (nobody else accesses files). Well, now I'm setting up a different box on a network with multiple people (domain) and am wondering if I'm crazy, or if something isn't working right. When I added my first share, "backup", it went fine... or so it seemed. The Backup share is visible to my server... but the allocation method changed from what I assigned it (I had put "most free") to the default "high water". I can't seem to make any changes... no matter what they are. I tried to add/change valid users, allocation method, comments... hit the apply button, and it's back to where it started. So I think... hey, I'll just delete it and start again. Nope... can't see any way to remove/delete the share in order to try again. Using 4.4.2, Accessing from Win2k8 server (but that shouldn't matter...everything seems to be working fine other than share page). Should I be seeing this behavior, or is something wrong here?

Well, I've managed to temporarily get my hands on a 2k8 trial on a machine that supports hyper-v. So far, I've not managed to have much success with any of the linux OSes I've tried... haven't even tried unraid since it appears we'd be limited to the trial/demo version (since no USB drive access). I've tried to create a CentOS/cpanel/WHM setup to no avai (can install the OS, can't get Cpanel/WHM to install/udate)l... I've tried to get FreeBSD up and running without any success(can't install properly)... I have managed to get SOME version of linux runing (don't recall which one) as a desktop machine, but I think my lack of linux experience is really holding me back. So I think I'm going to abandon this idea... man, I had my hopes up! Thanks for all the input, everyone!

I'll take a look at it sometime this week. Off the top of my head, I'd say that you can't actually setup permissions, because unraid does not use NTFS. BUT... you might be able to setup shares on the windows server that point to the unraid shares... you could set filesharing permissions (but not security) this way, if that would work. I think you'd want to only have the crossover cable connected directly to the win2k8 machine, otherwise anyone could get into the unraid tower and just bypass the win2k8 system by connecting in to the other NIC. For some reason I actually THOUGHT that unraid had shares that were based on users... but I never actually tried to use that, so I could be way off.

http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=101451&eml=050508&email=050508&ref_id=5262&ref_t=Z&originid=95241420 Doesn't include free shipping, tho.

If you don't mind paying... Vice Versa Pro is what I use. Mainly because of its ability to automate, and its ease of use. I backup many GB of photographs, and it will check both the source and destination to see which files have actually changed. So I don't spend all day backing up everything, when only 2% of the photos have been modified.

Well... my plans are at least on hold for now. I guess you have to have 2k8 server (64 bit) AND have specific hardware that supports this (from what I gather, all Xeon processors work). While I do have two servers with the proper hardware (and one already running 64 bit 2k3), I don't want to experiment with this in a live environment. So, until I have something a little nicer to experiment on... I'm sittin this one out for now. ::edit:: Looking into the VMware option now... although with 4 drives I don't think it will be all that useful.

I am going to give this a shot soon... I have two locations that have both win2k3 and unraid, so it is a worthwhile investment of time to setup a test server to see if this can be accomplished. One location is already in the process of upgrading to 2k8, and I'm considering it for the other (my personal home business). MS is generous enough to allow a long testing period without buying a license for 2k8, so I'm downloading the ISO and going to test it out soon. If anyone has any experience and wants to give me any suggestions... I'm all ears! I have never used any form of virtual machine/server previously, so this will be a fun experiment. Thanks, -Jake

Ideally I'd use one of our builtin NIC's solely for unraid... but what I was hoping for was the ability to bypass the network transferring to/from the server to unraid (since they're both in the same machine). But I'm not sure that is possible. Also, the biggest issue I see is something you bring up... can unraid see all the drives (and have access to them) as a virtual server or not? But if this would work... I sure do have a lot of fun ideas to try! I would LOVE to not bottleneck things with gigabit network connection (the main thing unraid used for is backup of data). It would also be nice to bundle everything away in one box, rather than two (or more). Also, I would consider this as an option for a streaming media server for our website (unraid within 2k8).

I have been looking over win2k8 server and noticed that by default it can run Sever Virtualization (virtual machines/servers). Is there any reason to think it would (or wouldn't) be possible to have unraid running as a virtual server on 2k8? More info here: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/test-drives.aspx

Now they are $112.99, limit of 20 (still no free shipping).

And as usual... actually asking someone else/posting on forum/attempting to contact support leads to (a possible) solution. I managed to get the devices back to how they were on my original post... by plugging in the second power supply. I can't quite figure out how having both PSU's plugged in would change the device ID's... unless somehow the cages for the removable HD trays make the system change how it behaves (even without any drives in them). I actually have about 3 hours of a parity sync that needs done, and then I can THINK ABOUT trying to confirm this issue/problem by restarting with only one PSU. As of now, this is my theory... FWIW. Also, I think I may have stumbled upon a solution to another possible "issue" with the prebuilt unraid servers... These have no power switch, as that is removed to make room for the 12 HD trays. Soooo... in order to turn on the system, you have to unplug both PSU's then plug them back in, so that the system thinks you "lost" power... then it will start up when it "regains" power. Well, that's all fine and dandy until you do like I (think I) did, several weeks ago and tweaked the settings in the BIOS. I am fairly certain I managed to change the "on power loss" setting in the BIOS to "last state". Which I did because hey... I was going to be out of town for a while and I didn't want the system to power itself on if it REALLY lost power... Well, my oh so smooth self powered down the system (see where this is going?) to leave for a few days... and when I get back, unplugging/plugging in the PSU's caused them to start up for half a second, then go dead in a blaze of glory. Ahhhh... After cutting up the pretty wireties holding all the molex cables in place... I found the new PSU does (almost) the same thing. So I decided to drag an empty case over next to the unraid case, and use the power switch cable to connect it to the mobo, and viola, we have a system running again. This is also a theory, as I'm not going to go back thru the hassle of putting the original PSU back in place, plus I actually like having a real power switch, so I won't be doing the old fashioned "unplug/plugin" dance to power on the unraid server. If anyone else would like to test this theory out... make sure you have a power switch you can plug into the mobo before you try it! Don't say I didn't warn you. Man... what a hassle. hopefully SOMEBODY can learn from my mistake(s).

Well... I seem to be back at it again... After a week of the system being down (PSU problem?)... which I'm still working out the solution, ugh. I went to startup the system after the outtage, and now my devices have changed... again. Before I go and make any changes or try to set things up, I wanted to list my old "devices" page settings, and then I'll start to post the new settings. I have no idea why this changes back and forth. Actually, I noticed that my previous post has the settings I was using... so now, with only the parity drive installed, I have as my only option: /dev/scsi/sdh5-5c0i0l0 (sdb1) SATA:ST3320620AS/(ser#) So, essentially, everything stayed the same, except the "9's" turned into "5"s"... pretty much making everything screwed up. I have yet to figure out why it seems to change... or how to make it stop changing. Does anyone have any idea what the problem is, and how I can get it to stop?

On one of our unraid servers, we hae 6 WD 120JB drives... of which 3 of them don't want to display temp settings. ::shrug:: Every other drive (that works) I've put in both of our servers shows the temps... I just blame WD. Combined with the fact that we had a rash of failing WD drives around the 120-200GB era, I have just written off WD, and wouldn't buy another one.

Thanks for the idea on serial numbers. I hope this is something that can't happen once the array is defined and a parity check has happened... as it has only happened before this point. (knock on wood) The next time I power down, I will check to make sure the cards are seated correctly... but I'm not pressing my luck till I HAVE to restart. After that last time of wiggling the cables inernally, everything seemed to go fine, except I found out one more drive was essentially dead... during the parity check I stopped it after around 50 or 60K errors... changed slots and tried again, with the same results. But I'm glad to see the errors right away, rather than after data is being shuffled around. Whew.

We've got a new SATA system in recently, and I seem to be having a fun time trying to identify which drives are what on the devices panel. I setup the drives one by one earlier today, finding out 2 of my 8 new drives were DOA... Once I had determined which drives were good, I inserted one drive at a time, from start to bottom, and booted up the unraid server with each added disk. This allowed me to pick the top slot as parity, second slot as disk 1, etc. Well, after I did all this (but didn't format or bring the array up in any way), I transported the system to it's new home, only to find that when I booted it back up, that no disks were listed in the main settings page. So, I go to the devices page, and all of the device ID's are showing up as "not found" (or something similar) after the device "location". When I chose from the dropdown menu, I have six "new" drives to chose from with different "locations". So... I start the process over, powering down and installing only top drive... assign as parity, power down, etc. Well, I get thru the first 4 drives and then drive 5 won't show up. So I power down, wiggle the drive bay, no luck. So I open the case, wiggle the power cords and SATA cables... And boot up to no drives found on the main page. I am now on my THIRD time thru setting up the drives (currently on disk 5) and am concerned that this may happen again AFTER I've had the system up and running with data on it. This is a royal pain. My major concern is that none of the device ID's seem to make much sense... THIS time thru I have: /dev/scsi/sdh9-9c0i0l0 /dev/scsi/sdh10-ac0i0l0 /dev/scsi/sdh9-9c0i1l0 /dev/scsi/sdh10-ac0i1l0 /dev/scsi/sdh4-4c0i0l0 /dev/scsi/sdh2-2c0i0l0 (I typed these in by hand, I think I got that all right!) BUT, before, when the drives weren't appearing in the main settings page, I am 90% sure (should have written that down) that the parity drive was coming up as "sdh5" and that other drives were coming up "shd6". And for the record, I haven't traded slots with any drives... they get pulled an inch out of their chasis, but not removed, so they're not getting stuck in different bays. Can anyone here give me an idea of what might be going on? Thanks

I believe that's only 1 rebate per household, not one HD per household. You can order 10 400GB hard drives from them at 109 each, but only get 1 rebate (if the rebate even applies to this). That would put it at $114 each, after shipping... not too shabby.

Joe- I have a (somewhat old) version of Norton Ghost that... altho probably not as good as newer products... seems to be able to restore the OS if necessary. I've only had to do that twice in the past 5 years or so between 4 machines, thankfully. If ghost ever stopped working good enough, I'd probably look into a newer/better program for that purpose, which I admit True Image does seem a LOT nicer than Ghost. The reason for the individual file backups are so that we always have multiple versions of files we can pick from, and in case one is accidentally modified/deleted/whatever, we can go back and easily just pull the file from an older date. The workstation/server contains a working copy on a raid 1 setup, which only saves me from ONE hard drive failing, but not from accidental deletion/modification/virus/etc. I am looking to have setup 5 drives with the same data (only different update points), so that we have the last 5 versions of files available at any given time. Even if we do this every day, that gives us almost a week worth of easy recovery options. I've found it to be much easier to be able to browse to an older file than it is to go digging thru backup files, but I'll still have full-blown backup (windows backup or ghost) files as a last resort. Plus, as much as I like the concept of redundancy, parity and whatnot... I still don't trust my data to all be in one place, or even two with the parity disk. So having many copies of my files are a big plus to me.

HDTV- Is that using the duplicate method, or the backup? I seem to have found a working program called "ViceVersa Pro" that had a 30 day trial version and is doing a good job. Not quite as easy as Retrospect, but it works for now. If Retrospect 7 works, It'll probably be cheaper to just upgrade, however.

Well Joe, That program doesn't seem to want to let me just copy the files (and verify them). It wants to make a complete backup image, which I think the backup built into windows will do an adequate job for data at least. I was wanting something like how Retrospect offers a duplicate option that will go and look for new, deleted and updated files and only change those on the backup drive (in this case un-raid). This would save a LOT of time, over manually copying the entire contents of the workstation over. I found a little 30 day trial program that does a good file comparison... but it seems to choke once I try to backup 100+ GB of raw files. It handled all the little files well, however. Soooo... I'm still searching for something that will verify files and update only the ones that need it.

Limetech- I'm running 6.5 ::edited to add:: Sorry, that's version 6.5.342, if that makes a difference. Joe- I downloaded and installed the demo, but haven't restarted to try it out because I'm copying some files to the unraid server. But while looking at their website, I noticed that they claim to not support servers for the "home" edition, but are willing to sell me a server license for $700. OUCH Funny, it let me install the home edition on win2k server, but who knows if it will actually run after the reboot. I had planned on upgrading this computer with 2k server to 2k3 server, but might have to demote it to just XP or 2kPro to save on software costs. We really only need the server software for a few limited applications... perhaps it can be installed on a different system, oh well.

Hey Joe, (cue Hendrix music) Thanks for the lead, I'm downloading their 15 day trial to give it a whirl. Hopefully this will give me better results... even at the cost of buying a new program, it'll be worth it. Will try to report back if the problem persists with other backup software. Thanks

Hey, I have just finished setting up an unraid server, and thought it would play nice with my copy of Retrospect (backup software). At first glance, it seems that everything was working... Retrospect showed file comparison, transfer speed, etc. BUT, I noticed on the unraid maintenance page that the free space wasn't changing much. So I hopped over to "drive 1" of the unraid, and all the files were ghosted out, and everything was at 0kb. Anyhow, after an hour of "copying", I now had a complete 0KB copy of all the files I was backing up. To test, I was able to drag and drop files from the same location, and I was able to use Retrospect to backup to an external hard drive... but the backup software doesn't seem to want to work well with the un-raid server. Does anyone know what might be the cause of this... or if not, does anyone have a good working filecopy/backup software that works with unraid? I would prefer to have a program that will automatically update certain data each night onto a different unraid disk. I don't want any type of compressed or backup file... I want all the files identical to what is on the workstation. Any thoughts/input appreciated.