Basically I want to be able to register two usb drives and have them mirrored in the same machine. I don't know if it's possible to do this or not, but I think it would be a nice to have.

Considering I've had 3 usb drives fail me over the years I just want something that doesn't have me nervous it'll stop responding randomly someday. So even something like support for Sata-DOMs would be really welcome. Although I think just having some sort of automatic mirroring would be good enough.

The MyServers plugin does a "mirror" of the flash drive (optional), but mirrors it to the cloud for easy recovery from any browser on any device

That's a great solution but it doesn't give you a zero downtime scenario. A USB drive just failed on me during a reboot. I'm not sure what happened but it was a remote reboot as I was on our VPN. No one is in the building to do the swap of the USB drive which sucks. I'd love an option were there could be 2 usb drives mirrored in a pool like the cache drives as the boot/OS drive and be notified of a failed drive and have time to swap it out. 

 

Just my $0.02. 

On TrueNAS you could mirror the boot drive and if one failed the other would boot and it would resilver the first, why can't unraid do that now?

16 hours ago, sunwind said:

why can't unraid do that

Because the boot drive for Unraid has to match the license file.

On 6/23/2023 at 1:45 PM, JonathanM said:

Because the boot drive for Unraid has to match the license file.

 

could it not generate a hash based on the hardware device ID or something of 1 second USB stick only (basically however it identifies the mai none) that ties to your key, and will only work on that second usb stick, while in conjunction with the first? that way you won't get people sharing 1 key to 2 people etc.

Edited July 7, 20232 yr by sunwind

Having just had a USB drive be corrupted on reboot (safe shutdown, don't know what the issue was), the lack of capacity for a redundant boot is very frustrating.  For a system built on redundancy, depending on the integrity of a single flash media device seems like a pretty big oversight.  Particularly since it's quite a hassle to set up and register a new device.  It's easier to swap a failed hard drive or motherboard than it is to swap a thumb drive, and that's not right.

Just had the same issue.
Safe shutdown - USB corrupted on reboot - no one physically available for a week or so to swap the USB.
worst downtime we've had in a couple years due to no redundant USB/boot.

Would LOVE a solution to this.
Even if we could just have 2 USBs with the same bzfirmware file & use a single USB as the "License" USB.

Wart about this: 

Unraid is installed on a regular SSD (or disk) and die USB Stick is just checked for licensing

1 hour ago, Mpwg said:

Wart about this: 

Unraid is installed on a regular SSD (or disk) and die USB Stick is just checked for licensing

You could already do that manually I think as far as basic booting is concerned.    However the USB stick would still be used for storing all settings so not sure you would gain much as currently they are always stored on the device holding the licence.

On 5/8/2024 at 11:33 AM, itimpi said:

You could already do that manually I think as far as basic booting is concerned.    However the USB stick would still be used for storing all settings so not sure you would gain much as currently they are always stored on the device holding the licence.

I undestand the use of USB boot to authenticate the installation, but I dont understand why you could not replicate that on a SSD, far more reliable. What prevent Unraid to use SSD UUID instead of USB UUID?

Great recommendation @Tetricz.

 

If / when the license/boot USB fails, it would be nice to have another USB in a different slot that is already registered with Limetech as a known trusted GUID.

 

I feel this really gets ahead of the problem rather than waiting for it to fail, notifying support, waiting for approval, THEN rebooting the production server.

 

They would need to modify their backend database: License => Primary GUID, Backup GUID

A simpler solution might be to not even bother with the licensing in such an event. You could mirror the drive without the license file, and if the first one fails to boot the second drive boots into the free trial mode. Then you can just get the license transferred. This is something that could be set up yourself now, without a new feature added or Limetech having to change the backend registration process.