sureguy

You can just choose to export the share as hidden. That way you can type the path in to access the disk shares if you ever need to, but the shares aren't visible when you browse the unRAID resource. This is ideal as you don't need to modify anything if you ever want to access a disk share.

No, you're not in for disaster. If one is already using a cache drive, some plugins prevent the cache drive from spnning down(sickbeard, I believe is one). Hosting the files there prevents an additional drive from being spun up assuming the media being played isn't on the same drive as the fanart etc.

People that care about DTS-HD and TrueHD generally want the audio bit-streamed (not modified) to their receiver.

I've got an Asus RT-N16 which I've flashed the tomato firmware onto. Its range isn't terrific, but it's alright, and it was about $100. For a friend I installed 2 Asus RT-N66U routers (one in the basement, one on the 2nd floor, connected via ethernet) the 2.4GHz range on these are great, but the 5GHz range is a little anemic, hence the ethernet connection) these also run tomato firmware and cost $175. Both of these routers have gigabit ports. I'd investigate tomato, dd-wrt, or openwrt to see if there is alternate firmware available for the routers you already own. The firmware generally makes your router much more stable and robust than it was (although on newer routers some functionality may be lost, like usb ports, or dual band functionality) Lost functionality may be restored as newer firmware is released.

I just checked into mediabrowser, and probably the issue is the Windows 7 requirement. While I use Win7 for my XMBC install, I chose it because I want netflix support and bit-streaming audio out, many people without such requirements probably can't justify the OS price when they're really just relying on network connectivity, driver support, and the media software/interface.

They provided the tool, so I can't imagine they'd care.

I have APCUpsd running on a non-persistent VM (which has the APC USB cable passed through). The VM sends a command via SSH on the ESXi box. It shuts down all my hosts except the APCUpsd VM , and then turns the UPS off. It doesn't shut down the ESXi box gracefully. I tried using APC powerchute business edition on ESXi, but it doesn't seem to work with the USB cable I have. I'm running ESXi from a (backed up)flash drive, and after several reboots ESXi seems to come up properly. I wouldn't recommend this set up for anything other than a virtual server. I could issue a command to shut the ESXi server down gracefully, but then my ESXi server wouldn't come back online when the power returned, as there's no way to shut the UPS off after the ESXi server shut down.

To me the problem with standalone media players, vs a full fledged computer with an open source product, is that the manufacturers have a disincentive to release new firmware to support newer codecs. All they have to do is say that the current hardware can't support the new features, but hey, our new product has capable hardware, upgrade and you'll be fine. With products like Openelec, Plex, XBMC there isn't any incentive to make the product less capable.

The problem is that the new permissions script is simply running commands like chown, or chmod, and they don't return a progress status, just a command line when they're done, and error output if they encounter issues. Possibly a line of output indicating that for arrays with many files the process may take an extremely long time. Considering it took so long on your array, I suspect you have many small files stored on it. New permissions on my 7TB of actual data, only takes a minute or so, but almost all of my data is rips of my blu-ray and dvd collection, so the individual files are rather large.

So Apple is taking a page from Windows XP regarding accurately guesstimating the amount of time it'll take to copy files? I've never noticed a problem copying files with Finder, wonder why iPhoto behaves that way?

You can always press enter, that won't hurt anything. It should return a new line when it's done. Running chown is changing the ownership of all files and folders in the directory specified. It does this one file at a time. The more files you have, the longer it will take. Once it is done all files and folders should be owned by nobody.

You could try issuing the following: chown -R nobody:users /mnt/user/unraid

You will need to run the New Permissions script. Currently everything is owned by root, but it should be owned by the user "nobody".

You could try using the HP format utility to format the USB drive as FAT rather than FAT32.

The 8168 test is for people with realtek hardware that doesn't work properly, I think this is the 8169 driver being replaced by the 8168 driver. You don't need the 8168 release unless you're affected by this particular issue.

Since windows works, it sounds like the samba implementation on the iPad software needs to be updated. They could be using a really old version that is not compatible with the version being used presently. You may want to contact the software developer, as it's a problem on their end.

I know some of the transmission plugins can cause this error. I released a version of the transmission plugin that fixes this issue: http://unraid-sureguy.googlecode.com/files/transmission-2.52p-i486-1_W-W.plg

ESXi is designed to be run on it's own box. The advantage of ESXi is that the underlying OS has a smaller footprint than a user OS (no GUI, etc). Because it's not a user OS, there is a much smaller chance of it crashing and taking all the VMs down with it. I get 105MB/s on my ESXi unRAID install at the start of parity checks, slowing down to ~65MB/s at the end (running green drives). My question regarding setting up a linux VM was that it should help indicate how fast the drives will run under virtual box.

Most people that I've seen are running ESXi in order to virtualize unRAID. ESXi as a host, uses far less resources than a user OS. Can you see what kind of transfer speeds you get by setting up another linux based host and copy files to and from the same set of drives?

This is actually a very valid point. There are some significant changes between RC5 & RC6, including reverting back to a newer kernel. Unfortunately some users cannot upgrade to RC6, as it breaks LSI cards.

Did it start a parity check on start up? If not, run one (with no correction enabled).

I'd look at what other people are using. Then find out what chipset is on the motherboard, and which NIC. If a chipset is supported, the same chipset on another motherboard will probably work. Stay away from motherboards that have HPA, which will backup your BIOS to your first HD - this is not desirable (Gigabyte boards tend to have this feature). I personally can't help you, unless you want to spend more money than necessary, as I'm running ESXi, and unRAID as a virtual machine, and using an LSI card for connecting my drives. As far as network cards go, a lot of the onboard NICs aren't as good as a dedicated NIC, like a 1000mb/s PCI intel NIC (which is what I have dedicated via passthrough to unRAID). Many onboard NICs can't reach 1000mb/s. Whether this is a driver or hardware issue, I don't know. The other thing to be aware of (regarding motherboards) is that certain revisions may change some hardware (such as the type of onboard network controller). Many people will be reluctant to say something is guaranteed to work, because of issues like a motherboard revision change.

Doesn't the unRAID preclear-like procedure require your array to be offline while it's running?

I guess you could hook them up to a normal PC (I always have a motherboard kicking around for testing). You can WDIDLE as many drives as you have sata ports at the same time (from my personal experience at least). Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

What happens if you stop Serviio? I would suspect it's what's keeping the drive spun up.