I'm a new user to Unraid and I have a question about 4.1 versus 4.2(4b) that maybe someone could help me with.  I'm building my first media server soon - probably next week and I'm pretty excited about it.  In preparation I bought a Lexar Firefly 1G flash drive and wanted to verify that 1) it could run Unraid and 2) it had the appropriate Flash GUID (I expect to be upgrading to Unraid Server Plus fairly soon). 

 

So after reading the recommendations here from some of you I decided to go with the last stable release - 4.1.  I formatted the drive and followed the directions for Unraid installation and put the flash drive into my Dell Inspiron 9300 Laptop just to see if it would boot up.  I set the laptop to boot off of the flash drive BTW.  It ran fine and I could log into the //tower from my other machine to retrieve the Flash GUID.  So everything went great on 4.1.  Just to clarify - I don't have the parts for the Unraid server yet, I am only using my laptop for testing the flash and DHCP capabilities of Unraid.

 

Next I decided to push my luck and try the 4.2 (beta 4) version.  And although the Unraid seems to run (I get the menu and it auto boots) it doesn't seem to get an IP address.  I'm running DHCP on my home network with a Linksys BEFSR41 router.  When I do an 'ifconfig' I don't see an ethernet address on eth0 like I did under 4.1.  So for some reason it seems to not be working on the network side.  Sure enough when I tried to log into the //tower it could not connect.  I repeated this test with a second flash drive (same make and model) just to verify that there wasn't anything wrong with it (but I suspected there wasn't otherwise it wouldn't have run 4.1).  It seems to take significantly longer to boot on 4.2 opposed to 4.1 - which in itself is ok, I just don't know if it's looking for something it can't find.

 

So my question is - has there been a change to the way DHCP works from 4.1 to 4.2?  Is there something else I need to provision to get it to work?  I took a look at the network.cfg file and it is just the default:

# Generated network settings

USE_DHCP=yes

IPADDR=

NETMASK=

GATEWAY=

 

Which is the same as what 4.1 was.  I would post the ifconfig results but since it didn't get on the network I'm not sure how to grab the results.  I don't want to spend a lot of time troubleshooting this because this won't be my final configuration anyway - using the laptop was just a test.  But I thought I would ask to see if there is something I'm missing - like my laptop network card is suddenly unsupported in 4.2 or something.  Any thoughts you have on this are appreciated.  Unraid looks like a great product!

I'm running 4.2b4 and the DHCP seemed to work fine for me with the two nic's i tried.  Onboard (not sure who made it, and TredNET GigaBit.  I actually disabled DHCP so that i could configure my firewall so that i could access my shares over the internet. 

 

There is mention somewhere around here about checking to see if the GUID's last 12 digits are not zero to make sure that you can register it.  If you have a modern one i'm sure you'er fine. 

 

Odd that the behavior between versions changed.  I'm also quite new to unRAID but i've done all of my testing with 4.2b4 i never even looked at the other versions because I really wanted the read write user shares.

 

Oh, and if you wanted to run commands on your unraid box without a network configuration you should be able to log into the console of the machine running it as 'root'

Thanks for the reply.  The last 12 digits of the Flash GUID aren't 0, that's why I was checking it out though.

I know that I can login as root - that's what I did as soon as the server came up.  I'm just not sure how to get a screen print or logfile of the ifconfig if that would help anyone to diagnose the problem.  I'm a linux noob - sorry.

It sounds as if the driver module for your laptop's network card worked properly on the 4.1 release, but does not load on the 4.2 release.

Either the driver was accidentally left out of the current 4.2 release, or you need a boot time option to get it working again.  Tom constantly upgrades the drivers and there have been occasions where an older version works better than the newest/latest/greatest.

 

Post the chipset used on its network card... at least Tom will know what does not work on 4.2.

 

In any case, you do not have DHCP because your network card's driver module did not properly load.

(One other possibility... when you formatted the flash drive to load 4.2, did you remember to set the drive LABEL to "UNRAID" ?  If you did not, then unRaid would not know where to find the network module and you would be without a network connection also.)

 

Joe L

Post the chipset used on its network card... at least Tom will know what does not work on 4.2.

Will do.

 

I did remember to set the label as UNRAID, even used a second drive to eliminate the drve as suspect.  Thanks for the reply.

Here's the info on that built in network card in the laptop I was using to test my flash drive.  To sum up it worked fine using 4.1 but on 4.2(beta4) it couldn't get a DHCP address.  It's not a big deal as I'm not building my Unraid server on a laptop    I was just using it for a test.  I should be getting my parts for my real Unraid server next week.  I was just concerned that something working in 4.1 seemed to be broken in 4.2 for me.  But mainly I'm just listing the info in case someone has a similar problem with DHCP not working in 4.2.

 

Dell Inspiron 9300 Laptop

 

Broadcom 440x 10/100 Integrated Controller

 

Device type: Network adapters

 

Manufacturer: Broadcom

 

Location: PCI bus 3, device 0, function 0

 

 

 

Driver Provider: Broadcom

 

Driver Date: 8/19/2004

 

Driver Version: 4.25.0.0

 

Digital Signer: Microsoft Windows Hardware Compatibility Pub

 

 

 

Driver details: bcm4sbxp.sys

 

Between 4.1 and 4.2 there have been a couple linux kernel updates, but I don't believe there have been any Broadcom driver changes.  If this were your unRAID h/w platform, we would spend the time to troubleshoot and get it working, but since it's not, well, let's not 

If this were your unRAID h/w platform, we would spend the time to troubleshoot and get it working, but since it's not, well, let's not 

 

Fair enough.  I'm really looking forward to using your product soon.