awediohead

Thanks for the input, however I've actually been running unRAID on my Haswell era hardware for quite a few years now. As I said in my OP, it works very well as purely a media server, combined with a GTX1050 it also manages encodes, decodes and transcodes probably because I only have a small family where it's unusual for it to have to handle more than two streams simultaneously. I think the way forward for me is to just carry on with things as they are for now, (if it ain't broke . . . ) and use my x570 +3600 for experimenting and learning stuff, which could an unraid trial license, but also Proxmox, reverting it to "gaming PC" on the rare occasions it's needed. At some point in the future I might be able to snap up a 3900x or similar secondhand, as well as more DDR4 RAM, at which point I'll revisit the whole idea of combining media server and VMs into a single box.

H all I posted this in the lounge cos I thought it was more of a chatty or general kind of topic rather than my either having a hardware problem or needing advice about what hardware to buy. If a mod thinks it belongs elsewhere, no problem. I'm OK with my unraid box just being a media server using an old CPU, not least because it's something that old hardware does perfectly well and I'm not sure what else I'd do with it, other than sell it for peanuts. On the other hand if a more modern CPU can do the same job better and do other things (run VMs) my old hardware simply can't do well, AND lower my electricity bill, then that's something I really need to think about. Cheers

Thanks for the info : diagnostics when on 6.11 attached. Everything still seems solid on 6.10.3 a few hours of media server duties later. Thanks singthesis-nas-diagnostics-20220926-1649.zip

As title says, I tried to update to 6.11 but ended up back with 6.10.3 after a fairly frantic couple of hours: A problem was that I couldn't locally access any GUI as various web browsers just wouldn't connect, so I couldn't troubleshoot. Maybe something to do with http vs https, with it defaulting to the latter but only connecting via http, or https with a security exception. Eventually I hooked up a monitor over VGA and managed to powerdown and restart where it was stable for long enough to revert to 6.10.3. I did type "diagnostics" in the CLI but have no idea where to find the file it then generated to share here, so as to try to figure out what went wrong with 6.11 - I doubt running diagnostics again now it's back on 6.10.3 and seems stable would show anything helpful? Also wondering if unraid is set to automatically start a parity check with an OS upgrade or whether that was triggered by the hard shut down I had to do? For future reference if I get in this mess again and can't access the GUI does it make any difference whether I connect a monitor directly over HDMI or VGA? HDMI didn't seem to work for me, while VGA did, but that might be just my ancient hardware.

My current set up (see sig) is pretty old and I'm wondering about whether to switch the motherboard and CPU to much newer x570 and 3600 hardware from a gaming PC that gets very little use. I really don't know what to expect in terms of performance, efficiency and practical usage, and would love to hear from those actually running unRAID on something like this hardware: I mean in the same ball park. Also any thoughts on Intel vs AMD with unRAID? For example, in terms of using 12 threads and six cores, for modest gaming with an RX580 passed through would it manage to play some not very taxing games AND handle light Plex media server duties simultaneously? Maybe with pinning 2 cores to Plex and 4 to a Windows VM? I'd plan on using the GTX 1050 for transcoding with Plex and have the RX580 just for gaming. Is it realistic to think that 2 cores and 4 threads on a 3600 would be roughly equivalent or perhaps better than 4 cores / 4 threads of Haswell era CPU? Obviously it's a lot newer, but I'm struggling to get an idea of what to expect, and I'd like a better understanding before I take the plunge. Do you think that would be more or less efficient than running the Haswell as purely a media server 24/7 and just booting up the Ryzen PC on the odd occasions we want to play some games? Would the more modern hardware be "smarter" at powering down when not in use? TIA

Thank you so much - all done and working as it should be. I don't really understand though why such an important part of the template has to be added. I notice it's not there on the official plex version either. Thanks again

Going around in circles here, mostly I think because I'm working with out of date info. Firstly I realised my Nvidia GPU (just a 1050) was being seen under IOMMU as recognised but the fields for the UUID were blank on the Nvidia plugin page. Solved this by removing and reinstalling the plugin and several server reboots. At the time I was trying to reinstall Unmanic which was misbehaving, presumably because something had messed up with the nvidia plugin. Unmanic is now working as expected and shows up on the dashboard as being used for encoding under the GPU monitor. But when I try to use it within Plex for transcoding nothing happens - well the CPU pins at 99% on all cores (only 4) but nothing happens with the GPU. Yes I have Plex pass. I went to edit the linuxserver Plex docker I've been using for years and realised there's no longer a section where I can input the UUID of the GPU which I'm pretty sure used to be under the "show more settings" section in advanced view - along with adding --runtime=nvidia under extra parameters. I'm pretty sure it was there and there are still You Tube tutorial videos showing how to set up plex that even mention it. What am I missing? Should I be using a different version of the Plex docker such as the binhex plexpass version? Normally I'd experiment but my wife's currently housebound and very reliant on Plex to distract from severe pain so I can't risk borking her access by tinkering until I know what I need to do.

There's a good Spaceinvader One you tube video from a few years ago that I found excellent in walking me through grabbing the essential apps and plugins - though the video is old the vast majority of those recommendations (I actually can't think of an exception) are still good. IOW don't be put off my the age of those videos This is part one - with 2 and 3 also worth watching

Agreed I had no intention of hijacking this thread, however it had already been suggested to the OP that he pick more specific issues to get help with one at a time. I think that's reasonable, however my experience as a new unraid user was definitely to feel completely swamped in detail and Ed's channel helped me get a "big picture" or high level overview on what was practically feasible with my hardware and level of understanding. As the saying goes, "A journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step." But it's a bugger if the first few steps you take are in completely the wrong direction!

That "buddy" for me has been the Space Invader One You Tube channel. Ed isn't just extremely knowledgeable but generally has a solid grasp of how little his typical viewers understand, whereas I find a great many other channels that will talk about Docker related projects, (not specific to unRAID) typically assume FAR more knowledge than I have. Another channel is Ibracorp which is also good, but again I've found in trying to follow along he's missed out critical steps. I don't mind putting the hours in to painstakingly follow a tutorial, but it's pretty disheartening if things don't work as they should, and then you have to undo everything just to get back where you started. To be blunt, without the Space Invader One tutorials I would have given up on unRAID during the initial trial period. HTH

As I said: Combined with Apple's cloud storage of photos, the problem for me is NOT effective back ups (at no point did I suggest ONLY storing photos on unraid) but fairly massive duplication where I have so many copies of the same photos on multiple different computers, some fairly modern, some positively ancient, then each of those multiple computers has external drive back ups, I wouldn't be surprised to eventually discover that I have at least tens of GB's of duplicates, triplicates, quadruples of photos! So what I want is a single central point where all these overlapping photo libraries can be organised and ALL I know about that is that I want it to be a FOSS based solution - if it can be done with a docker on unraid, so much the better. I've been an Apple user for nearly 30 years, building hackintoshes for the last 10 years. Happily for me Apple Silicon has arrived at roughly the same time as increasingly robust Linux DE solutions, of which Fedora 36 stands out for me as having been super reliable, and I'm hoping to finally break the Apple shackles - not just for myself but for my much less tech savvy family.

I'll watch this thread with great interest as I've been trying to do much the same things. In fairness, the problem IME arises mostly from Apple making things unnecessarily difficult. I have had reasonable results following Space Invader tutorials on YouTube to set up Time Machine back ups - though much less so when actually trying to use those back ups, and of course a back up you can't actually utilise to recover with can't reasonably be called a back up. I have also tried using Carbon Copy Cloner to back up to a sparse image, but I need to do more testing to see if that actually functions properly as it should. i.e. it does back up on a schedule incrementally, but what would happen should that boot volume fail I dread to think. That's why I have local per machine back ups to external drives as duplicates. For photos I can't suggest anything beyond archiving the various photo libraries to an unraid share - maybe using Syncthing? I plan to do this but haven't implemented it yet - I've just some peace of mind that at least 20 odd years of photos are backed up to unraid AND external drives per PC. The idea of having a single photo library that pools our family photos, identifies duplicates and generally organises itself according to meta data is something I understand is do-able with Android phones and Windows PC's - though I've not dug too deep into that because it's irrelevant to my family situation. For me part of the problem is that, quite rightly, unraid and best practice have kept on evolving over the years, yet some of the most reliable tutorials are several years old - faced with putting hours of effort into getting something working that's no longer best practice leads to me procrastinating like hell. A bit of a Catch 22. The end result is that I've stuck with bomb proof local back ups and mostly resigned myself to my unraid set up being 90% Plex media server and the *arrs, though it's got a couple of TB's of backups as TM's and Samba shares, it's the polar opposite of the elegant all in one solution I'm hoping for eventually. Given the age of the current hardware my unraid set up runs on (4th gen intel) I've not even tried to use it as a gaming VM - and I haven't tried to upgrade the hardware because I'm not convinced the end result would be user friendly enough for my family to cope with. I have fun in my spare time tinkering around, but understandably they just want things to work without having to jump through any tech hoops.

At the moment I have unraid running on a 4th Gen intel CPU with 1050 gfx card and it's basically a Plex Media server with the *arrs. It works fine and does very important work because my partner is severely disabled and in chronic pain and uses the Plex media to distract/occupy and help manage her pain and mental health given she's largely housebound recovering from major surgery. We've got another 4th gen Intel box with an RX580 that does "gaming PC" duties in the lounge - very occasionally. My kid normally plays Skyrim or GTA, (VERY uncompetitively!) . . . in other words no demanding modern games. My wacky idea is based on trying to replace both with another PC that's a Ryzen 3600 + x570 + RX580. I was thinking of dedicating 2 cores and 4 threads to the Plex side of things (I could add in the 1050 for encoding) and running a Windows VM or possibly a Linux VM (I'm really enjoying Nobara on my personal PC) with the other 4 cores / 8 threads + the RX 580 passed through. 1080p gaming is all that's needed. The "gaming" aspect would get used for just a few hours a week on average - the question is whether or not such a set up would be possible to configure so it ran reasonably reliably and in a user friendly way to my non-techy family? And also is it safe to assume that a much more modern CPU like the Ryzen 3600 would run more efficiently, especially in terms of powering down when idle, than the 4690k and z97 that's currently doing unraid duties? IOW if I were to pin the Plex duties to 2 cores and the remaining 4 cores were unused 90% of the time - is that efficient? Or is it more the case that more modern CPU's work more efficiently if the compute demand is spread over the available cores? Any thoughts and general pointers gratefully accepted!

I think I may have figured this out - I noticed I had two folders for the artist, one called Artist and the other ARTIST - these having been automatically generated from metadata by Lidarr. Having deleted the Artist folder in Krusader the ARTIST folder which had previously only shown itself to contain one album suddenly showed itself to contain all 15 album folders (visible via Krusader) via SMB. If anyone cares to explain why this happened - I'm always happy to learn. I'll wait a day before marking this solved just in case someone cares to explain? Thanks

So I have some music files that Lidarr recognises as present, which Plex can play and which I can see using Krusader, but a lot of these album folders or directories are invisible over my network. So far - just as an example of what's happening - a folder that I know contains 15 albums from a particular artist shows as only containing one album when viewing the share over SMB - the other 14 album folders being essentially invisible, except when I use Krusader. So I can't play them or copy them by using a local music player pointed at my data/media/music folder on unraid. The player can of course play the audio files in the folders it CAN see. While I've identified this as a problem with one artist I suspect there could be many more "invisible" directories where any given artist has some albums missing when viewing shares over the network and there would seem to be a weird permissions problem going on? Could someone please walk me through what I should do? I have checked the permissions of these "invisible over the network" album folders with Krusader and I can't see anything obviously wrong. My /data share over SMB is public This is NOT a Lidarr problem, or a Plex problem or a Krusader problem - they all work perfectly well, which is why I posted in the general support forum. It could be a weird SMB and MacOS thing I suppose? Thanks Julian

Hi ljm42 - thanks for the help - changing the DNS seems to have made some good changes. I watched an interesting video about Quad 9 DNS security a few months back and while I didn't change the unraid settings I did change them on my computers and then, sometime later, on my router. Anyway I think it's all sorted now - all up to date Thanks again

Hi there - I've spent the last few months moving house and putting up shelves in the new one so, as unraid has continued to function as a media server and I've been able to update plugins and dockers fine, I've not paid much attention to the myservers api problems that have been going on for quite a while. I understand that 6.10.3 is current but I'm on 6.9.2 and the status on the upgrade os page is "unknown" and there doesn't seem to be a way to upgrade or update it as things stand? Also when I try to send this to support via the My Servers dropdown (trying to log out as it suggests) it 'Fails to fetch' constantly - I can't log out as this also 'fails to fetch' though when I login via the forums/unraid site to myservers it says I'm offline. I've tried to restart the api via terminal and the report -v says: <-----UNRAID-API-REPORT-----> SERVER_NAME: SINGTHESIS-NAS ENVIRONMENT: production UNRAID_VERSION: 6.9.2 UNRAID_API_VERSION: 2.47.1 (running) NODE_VERSION: v14.15.3 API_KEY: invalid MY_SERVERS: authenticated MY_SERVERS_USERNAME: awediohead RELAY: disconnected MOTHERSHIP: disconnected ONLINE_SERVERS: OFFLINE_SERVERS: ALLOWED_ORIGINS: HAS_CRASH_LOGS: no </----UNRAID-API-REPORT-----> Presumably the problem is that the api is invalid but no idea how to fix that myself what to do next? Cheers Julian

So I know I'd ideally get an 8TB or larger drive to back up ALL the files on my server, but I can't afford one right now, and in any case by the time I get an 8TB drive I'll probably need a 10 TB drive and so on. Nor can I afford TB's of cloud back up. Then it struck me that the truly important files I really need to back up are only a fraction of what's on the server, since the vast majority of the 6/7TB currently on it are movies and TV shows, I can always download again. So that means I already have big enough hard drives to back up the important stuff, I just don't know how to do so selectively and then how to schedule the back ups? I'm used to GUI back up apps like Carbon Copy Cloner and haven't the faintest idea how to do this with unRAID? Again if I could be properly selective about what is really important then I could probably afford 50 odd GB of cloud storage for the ultra important stuff. When I search Community Apps for 'Backups' there's 83 pages to wade through, so if anyone can help me whittle down the options or recommend a specific docker for what I want to do, that would be really helpful: Back up of selected files/shares/subfolders to an external drive and / or unassigned device that can be scheduled? Preferably with some sort of hand holding tutorial as to how to set it up. Thanks

I'm probably doing something dumb but about 10% of the tv shows are actually increasing in file size - which also means that 90% of the time there's a significant decrease in file size, so I'm not complaining, I'd have just assumed it would automatically not process a file if the end result was to make it bigger- or revert it - but then of course I don't really understand the process. I'm just 90% very grateful and 10% puzzled Any ideas ? Ah Ok I found the reject file if larger than original plugin - which I hadn't added as I thought there was a five plugin limit, which seems to have been changed since I first set things up?

Midnight Commander to the rescue - marked as solved. No more errors Thanks very much Squid

Sorry to say but I don't actually know how to delete the folder as it's specific to the one cache ssd I think it'll be something like rm /mnt/cache_standard/domains - but obviously I'm not going experiment in CLI !!! Can someone walk me through it please?

Hi Squid - thanks to your instructions no more errors re appdata and system, but the process doesn't seem to have done anything for the domains error - I tried switching the cache, running the mover and then switching back and running the mover again. But it still says "Share domains set to use pool cache_vms, but files / folders exist on the cache_standard pool" However when I look at the /mnt/cache_standard/domains folder contents it says it contains 0 objects: 0 directories, 0 files (0 B total) The three vdisk1.img containing folders for Windows XP, 7 and 10 are all on cache_vms What do you suggest please? Thanks

Hi Squid - what I don't understand is I haven't changed anything - When I look at the attached screenshots, User Shares shows that this mysterious 'Cache' is assigned to appdata and system, but when I select those shares they both show themselves to have been assigned to cache_standard as shown below: That's how it's been for as long as I can remember - the cache_standard ssd having been there since I first installed unraid - I added the cache_vms drive a year or more ago. It might be that when I added the cache_vms drive I renamed the original cache to cache_standard - I don't remember. Either way though, nothing has changed for months as I recall, and until the power cut the server had been up with no errors from FIx Common Problems for a couple of months. Does a bad shutdown maybe cause the system to do a deeper level of self-check ? i.e. that might reveal something I messed up months ago? Anyway, by 'disable all the services" does that mean turn docker off? Not running any VMs . . . anything else to disable? And once off - given the share settings that have always been in place for appdata and system, I should just run mover? Thanks very much for your help!

Thanks Squid Diagnostics attached - if you need them un-anonymised let me know. cheers singthesis-nas-diagnostics-20220130-1717.zip

So yesterday with the high winds we had a powercut for about 15 minutes - when power was restored and I rebooted my server I got the notifications shown in the attachment. I call them weird because I haven't changed anything for months: I haven't renamed a pool as far as either appdata or system shares are concerned. I have 2 cache SSDs called cache_standard and cache_vms with the latter being used for VM related stuff - isos, domains etc. Been that way for well over a year. Re the domains share it's possible that there maybe some files/folders VM related stuff I did over 18 months ago, but that begs the question why this hasn't been flagged up since? Obviously I suspect the power outage has messed something up and I'm wondering what to do about it? Apart from these alerts in Fix Common Problems everything seems to be working as normal. I rarely boot up the sole Windows 10 VM I have installed, as this is only a 4-core CPU and it's got its work cut out to keep up with media server duties. I am a novice with regard to the CLI but perfectly willing to learn if someone can walk me through what to do. Thank you PS Yes I have a UPS arriving tomorrow!