Super discouraged need pointers!

[Matt Nickel]

Hello, first post…in march while Covid sick I ordered the parts and I set up a brand new computer with unraid, with the purpose of:

 

1. Getting all of our multiple external drives that we had collected over the years consolidated 

 

2. Hopefully having our computers (both Mac and Pc) backed up in the background. 

3. Our pictures from all our phones easily moved into one folder. 

 

4. Plex server functionality 

 

5. Sweet gaming PC

 

6. Remote access for some of the above mentioned uses, but mainly remote access to a folder so that I could eliminate Dropbox. I am a contractor and between quoting and marking up plans, I accumulate a fair number of PDFs that I don’t wish to lose. 

 

I accomplished a lot of it just by following tutorials! I installed a Windows VM and passed the video card through (At this point I was feeling like a super smart computer hacker). I transferred all my external hard drive‘s into the folders I created. Separated them all up so that I could have a folder for pictures, folder for my wife's shares, a folder for media, etc. I installed some dockers and can access my Plex server from my home Network. I have photo prism on and can put my pictures on there (although this is not really the functionality I was looking for and perhaps there is better software that would sink across our phones and laptops). And as mentioned prior, I can play games. So in that regard, I am happy. Unfortunately I don’t understand the language of computers or rather Linux. I would consider myself a techie guy and usually can figure things out fairly quickly. But Linux an unraid have me wanting to pull my nonexistent hair out!

 

I have spent days trying to make WireGuard work. I cannot get to seafile to work. Nothing wants to back up easily. My wife’s McIntosh can access the server locally but in no way shape or form can I get a back up working. My pc has issues too. When trying to access shares and sign in on any computer the only one I can get to work is the admin sign in… My personal sign in just never works! I know this is from my lack of understanding the whole language and structure of this system. When googling topics some of the language used around port numbers and IP addresses just confuses me as some of the people demonstrating are obviously hiding their information so that they don’t expose them selves…so I never really know what number of mine they are referring to. Now on my server when I even try to install a docker I’m getting warnings that accessibility is an issue and it’s a read only file system. So I go back to my shares and I am unable change any settings. There is a warning from the action centre but then when I try to update that there are further errors that prevent me from updating it and I feel like I’m going back in circles.

 

So while I can use the Plex server and drag and drop files from my computer into my share folders on my local network (even then sometimes the home server doesn’t want to show up until I access the “recent” folder), I still haven’t made any headway on figuring out how to run a VPN, accessing any folder remotely, or backing up our computers in an easy way. I’ve certainly spent way more time trying to figure this out than I ever did unplugging and plugging external hard drives. I’ve lost tons of information on corrupted external hard drives in the past and that’s why this seemed like such a great option but I feel like I’m in over my head and completely discouraged! If only I had a buddy here that could walk me through it I’m sure I’d be able to pick it up. 

[itimpi]

My suggestion is that you start by posting your system's diagnostics zip file so that we can see the current state of things.

 

Then pick one specific issue that you are having problems with that you want resolved and we can then see if we can guide you getting that done.  After that work on the next issue.  I suggest concentrating on a single issue at a time so that the feedback you get at any point in time s focused on that one issue rather than scattered across different ones.

[awediohead]

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.

[Frank1940]

10 hours ago, awediohead said:

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.

 

On 9/1/2022 at 2:00 PM, Matt Nickel said:

3. Our pictures from all our phones easily moved into one folder. 

 

Both of these users are indicating that they want to use Unraid to store photos from several different sources.  Let me take a moment and issue this caution.  Never, never use Unraid as the sole storage point for any data that can not be replaced.  And photographs usually qualify for that category!  In fact, let me go a bit further.  You should have three copies of this type of data.   Furthermore, one of them should be in an offsite location!  Think beyond the failure of simple electronic devices to things like theft, vandalism, fire, floods, tornadoes and earthquakes.   

[awediohead]

As I said:

Quote

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.

 

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.

 

[awediohead]

Quote

If only I had a buddy here that could walk me through it I’m sure I’d be able to pick it up. 

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

[Frank1940]

2 hours ago, awediohead said:

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.

 

 

Might I suggest that you create a separate thread on this topic and ask about finding a solution to this problem.  I have a feeling that you might not be alone.  Thinking out loud, is there any program that will do what you want it to do available at any cost?   I hope you can find a solution!

[trurl]

On 9/1/2022 at 2:00 PM, Matt Nickel said:

When trying to access shares and sign in on any computer the only one I can get to work is the admin sign in

root user is treated as a "guest" (anonymous user) for network file access, so can only read/write public shares, read secure shares. No access to private shares. Only root user has access to webUI and command line.

 

Have you setup any users on your Unraid server?

 

Windows only allows one login per network resource, and after it has already established a connection, won't use another login even though it will prompt you to log in. Go to Credential Manager in Control Panel and delete any credentials for your server then it will let you establish another login

 

 

Also

 

Sticky pinned to the top of this General Support subforum:

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/89452-windows-issues-with-unraid/

 

And a more detailed guide:

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/110580-security-is-not-a-dirty-word-unraid-windows-10-smb-setup/

 

[awediohead]

Quote

Might I suggest that you create a separate thread on this topic and ask about finding a solution to this problem.  I have a feeling that you might not be alone.  Thinking out loud, is there any program that will do what you want it to do available at any cost?   I hope you can find a solution!

 

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!

 

 

 

 

Edited September 4, 2022 by awediohead
correction