Failing to boot due to timeout connecting to registration.unraid.net

[ryanhaver]

Please excuse the angry rant here, but there is nothing more infuriating than not being able to use a product because of DRM or a critical design flaw.

 

I've had repeated Issues booting Unraid 6.9.2 due to failed attempts connecting to registration.urnaid.net. Overall this appears to be random and inconsistent in nature. This is not an issue on my end, but something in-between my network and the services behind the address in question. The address resolves to a range of IP addresses, both IPv6 and IPv4, without issue, but Unraid continues to state that the connection failed due to timeout. I assume there is an issue with Cloudfront, the CDN, that LimeTech is using.

 

Why would you architect your OS to freeze at a point during the boot process if it can resolve an address, but ultimately cannot reach the server or service behind the address? If we learned anything this week from yet another Akamai outage, it's that you don't build your product to be reliant on a single point of failure. Even though Akamai has redundancies built in their outage brought down an absolutely massive chunk of the internet globally.

 

Why is this even an issue? What if my server didn't have internet access or was on a network where external DNS resolution was blocked?

[itimpi]

Are you running a trial licence or a paid for license?    The trial licence DOES require internet access, but paid-for licenses do not.  If you have a paid for licence then something else is going on that is accessing the internet as unraid does not then need to access the internet while starting up.

[ryanhaver]

10 hours ago, itimpi said:

Are you running a trial licence or a paid for license?    The trial licence DOES require internet access, but paid-for licenses do not.  If you have a paid for licence then something else is going on that is accessing the internet as unraid does not then need to access the internet while starting up.

 

I am running a paid Pro license. This was never an issue for me before Unraid 6.9.2...not that 6.9.2 is the problem, as the issue only reared it's head over the past month or two. It's possible that it's also a bug in Unraid, but I'm more inclined to think it's LimeTech's CDN and/or how they are using their CDN for registration checks...even with paid licenses.

Edited July 24, 2021 by ryanhaver

[ryanhaver]

I think this issue may be related to the my.servers plugin. It's possible the most recent update for the plugin resolves this issue for me...and maybe for others too. It would be great if LimeTech were more forthcoming about what the plugin is doing under the hood. It appears that the plugin does facilitate some sort of interaction with the Unraid registration servers via the the new Unraid API, which in my mind would be a registration check. It's also possible that it doesn't do this and this was an innocent unforeseen consequence of how they are interacting with their own API.

 

I'm guessing one or more of the changes I've highlighted below in yellow are what resolved my issue.

This version resolves:

Issues connecting to mothership

Flash backup issues after uninstall

Docker stats missing in specific conditions

Unexpected disk spin up

This version adds:

Unraid 6.10 compatibility

Streamlined communication between between unraid-api and mothership

Ability to track server uptime on dashboard

Ability to see number of VMs installed and running

Origin checks to unraid-api

 

If @limetech or another LimeTech employee can provide some candid clarification that would be great. I'd rather not make assumptions here and don't want to misrepresent your code and the way it interacts with your APIs.

[ChatNoir]

@ljm42 might be the guy able to answer that.  

[ljm42]

16 hours ago, ryanhaver said:

I've had repeated Issues booting Unraid 6.9.2 due to failed attempts connecting to registration.urnaid.net.

 

Sorry for the trouble. My Servers checks for updated files during bootup, but there is probably room for improvement in how that is being done. If you are not comfortable running beta software please uninstall the My Servers plugin. There is nothing in core Unraid that needs this connection.

 

Regarding communication in general, My Servers installs the unraid-api which communicates with our cloud service to provide you with a dashboard allowing you to monitor your servers:

  https://forums.unraid.net/my-servers/

 

More information about My Servers is available here:

  https://wiki.unraid.net/My_Servers

and there is more discussion here:

  https://forums.unraid.net/topic/104018-my-servers-early-access-plugin/

 

 

Hope it helps!

[ryanhaver]

@ljm42 Thank you for the clarification that My Servers is still in beta, I had assumed it had moved out of beta. Can you confirm the issue I was having was related to the recent fixes referenced in the My Servers plugin change log?

[ljm42]

9 hours ago, ryanhaver said:

@ljm42 Thank you for the clarification that My Servers is still in beta, I had assumed it had moved out of beta. Can you confirm the issue I was having was related to the recent fixes referenced in the My Servers plugin change log?

 

No, this code has been in the plugin for a few releases now. You just got unlucky that you had Internet problems during bootup. Good for everyone else though, as we've cleaned that code up and will be releasing an update so that nobody else hits it

 

Here's what happened... the javascript file that displays the User Profile Component in the upper right corner of the webgui is loaded from a cloud server so that we can make adjustments without having to issue a full plugin update. But of course we need the webgui to run properly if your Internet goes down so we cache the javascript file on the flash drive. If the webgui can't access the cloud version it will load the version on the flash drive.

 

It is ironic that the code that cached this file to prevent issues during an Internet outage, had issues itself. Sorry about that.

[ryanhaver]

2 hours ago, ljm42 said:

 

No, this code has been in the plugin for a few releases now. You just got unlucky that you had Internet problems during bootup. Good for everyone else though, as we've cleaned that code up and will be releasing an update so that nobody else hits it

 

Here's what happened... the javascript file that displays the User Profile Component in the upper right corner of the webgui is loaded from a cloud server so that we can make adjustments without having to issue a full plugin update. But of course we need the webgui to run properly if your Internet goes down so we cache the javascript file on the flash drive. If the webgui can't access the cloud version it will load the version on the flash drive.

 

It is ironic that the code that cached this file to prevent issues during an Internet outage, had issues itself. Sorry about that.

 

Thank you. I really appreciate the explanation. Have a great week.

[ljm42]

BTW we have released an update that behaves better if the Internet is not available during boot:

 https://forums.unraid.net/topic/104018-my-servers-early-access-plugin/page/24/?tab=comments#comment-1019433