Consequences of running Unraid in blacklisted GUID state

[lsaranto]

I'm having repeating troubles with my USB flash drives. I've already switched drives twice, but the troubles won't go away. With the current drive, after a boot, it shows the flash GUID ok and the license is validated, but after a while the GUID changes to all zeros and Unraid shows BLACKLISTED in the top right corner of the GUI. However Unraid and the array seem to continue to operate normally.

 

 

I don't have any reliable spare (new) USB drives and it's gonna take a few days to get one. What are the consequences if I just keep running Unraid like this? I believe the array wouldn't start if the license doesn't match the drive GUID, but like I said the GUID is fine after every boot (so far) and the array starts along with everything else. So far I've noticed that I can't remote login with SSH and VMs won't start after it fails the GUID. Are there other disabled features? Or is there something more serious that can happen?

 

Edited June 12, 2022 by lsaranto

[itimpi]

Very difficult to tell as it depends on why this is happening.  A GUID should never change so I doubt anyone has looked at the consequences.  It could mean for instance that Unraid is no longer able to read and/or write any configuration information from the flash.

[lsaranto]

22 hours ago, itimpi said:

Very difficult to tell as it depends on why this is happening.  A GUID should never change so I doubt anyone has looked at the consequences.  It could mean for instance that Unraid is no longer able to read and/or write any configuration information from the flash.

I just now tested reading and writing to the flash and it was fine at least at this moment. Of course I'm not going to do any changes to the system in its current state., but it's good to have a running system as my smart home runs on it. I think this behaviour is better than what I had before, when my previous flash failed. It just crashed the whole system. I couldn't find anything about the cause in the logs. The only way I knew it was the flash drive was because it wouldn't boot with just a reset. A full power off was needed. Then it booted fine again and the system ran for about a week or so until it crashed the same way again.

[Frank1940]

If it happens again, make sure that your flash drive is plugged into a USB2 port rather than a USB3.  (For some reason, some MB/BIOS combinations seem to 'lose' the Unraid boot drive when plugged into a USB3 port...)

[lsaranto]

I post this update here. Maybe it will help someone someday.

 

So it seems my issue was caused by some plugin. I began to suspect it after I realized Unraid was showing me the same notification about plugins having an update available, even though I had already done the update (several times) successfully. Every time after doing the updates the flash drive lost it's GUID until I rebooted the server.

 

There were 3 plugins in the notification: Community applications, Unassigned drives and OpenVPN Server TAP.  I'm pretty sure we can ignore the first two. I also may have had both old and new versions of USB Manager installed (which I know I should not have had). I also tried booting into Safe mode and the system ran fine.

 

So my solution was to rename /config/plugins directory on the flash drive and create a new one. I then copied back just the user scripts and dockerman directories. All other important plugins I reinstalled via GUI.