Unraid licensing

[Xoores]

I'm planning to build new NAS and I'm thinking about several ways to tackle the issue... Until now I was running various QNAP machines and they worked quite well and were quite reliable - but I want to utilize custom hardware. I'm thinking about a system with up to 12 disks with several SSD cache drives (probably R0 for speed) and with 10G network.

 

Now I was planning to run Arch on it (SSD and R1 probably for OS), build up XFS, LUKS etc - on top of that perhaps docker for few applications. I discovered Unraid (and TrueNAS) and initialy was excited as I quite liked the solution - I don't mind paying at all for something that is worth it.

 

However I was reading through the docs and just found out that I have to run this from USB flashdisk. And the whole reason behind that is that Unraid ties license to the GUID of that flashdisk - and my jaw dropped. This means that at any point in time if my random flashdisk dies, I have to not only deal with outage of my NAS, but I also have to unnecesarily fiddle with licensing. Which basically means that I cannot really fix the issue just by myself as I have to rely on someone else being around (at least licensing servers of Unraid being up). That also effectively means that I cannot just have a backup flashdisk ready in my drawer just in case my old one dies). And proposed solution of spinning up trial of Unraid and then continue to fiddle with licenses (which also require some 3rd party infrastructure to be reachable - over ISP which is yet another third party).

 

I don't really care about "flash disk are not so bad nowdays" or "that will never happen, it runs from RAM" etc - I work in IT and I saw my fair share of borked flashdisks (of all brands).

 

Not gonna lie, I don't like it and I feel disappointed as such a seemingly nice product shoots itself in a foot by insane licensing enforcement that effectively prevents me from truly and fully owning my own NAS.

 

So the ultimate question is: is the Unraid worth this hassle and potential risk of not being able to recover from USB disk crashing? Or is it better to either go for TrueNAS/etc or go completely solo and build up my own server on Arch so I *know* I can reliably get it back up and running even when the internet is completely down?

 

TL;DR: Was quite excited at first, wanted to go full in. Then I found out that the licensing is a pain (and a main reason I have to run the whole thing from flashdisk) and now I'm not sure if its worth it the risk/hassle. 🤷

Edited January 26 by Xoores
typo

[Hoopster]

3 hours ago, Xoores said:

Was quite excited at first, wanted to go full in. Then I found out that the licensing is a pain (and a main reason I have to run the whole thing from flashdisk) and now I'm not sure if its worth it the risk/hassle

I've run at least one Unraid server for 12 years (I have three now) and have never found the USB flash drive licensing model to be a problem.  In fact, it has been a huge advantage when I want to upgrade hardware.  I have been through four motherboard/CPU/RAM changes all with the same Unraid USB flash drive and retaining the same Parity/Data drives and cache/pool SSDs.  Of course, those have been upgraded as well throughout my Unraid journey.

 

The license being tied to the GUID of a flash drive makes it highly portable and easily replaceable when/if it fails.  I have never had to replace a flash drive on any of my Unraid servers due to a flash drive failure.

 

Your Unraid configuration and the license live on the flash drive but it has nothing to do with your data.  If a flash drive fails, you restore a flash drive backup to a new flash drive and the server continues to run just as before.  You can then transfer the license to the new flash drive and that can be done from within the Unraid GUI.  Only if you need to do more than one license transfer a year do you need the intervention of Limetech.

 

The Unraid Connect plugin allows for automatic backups of you flash drive if you choose to use it.  Some prefer to do that manually which is possible as well.  Just maintain recent USB flash drive backups (especially after configuration changes) and it is very painless to recover from a flash drive failure.

[Xoores]

6 hours ago, Hoopster said:

The license being tied to the GUID of a flash drive makes it highly portable and easily replaceable when/if it fails.

It is not portable, if it is tied to one specific drive. That's by definition the exact opposite of being "portable" 😅

 

6 hours ago, Hoopster said:

Your Unraid configuration and the license live on the flash drive but it has nothing to do with your data.  If a flash drive fails, you restore a flash drive backup to a new flash drive and the server continues to run just as before.  You can then transfer the license to the new flash drive and that can be done from within the Unraid GUI.  Only if you need to do more than one license transfer a year do you need the intervention of Limetech.

I don't believe this is the case but maybe I misunderstood something. 🤔 When you drive fails, you have to use some process that requires Limetech to be around & alive to get a new license - even though it does not have to be a human interaction if you don't need more that 1 license change a year. And if they are not around or their infrastructure goes down, you are SoL because you cannot get even the "trial" license anymore and your device will just refuse to start up. So either you would have to figure out how to mount your drives on vanilla system (don't know if that is possible) or somehow crack the Unraid (unnecesarily painful if you already paid for your license).

 

That is my main concern, it needlessly ties consumable hardware (USB disks are a consumable) and its whole functionality.

 

The second concern is that if a developer is willing to unnecesarily create a system of useless hoops users have to jump through in a name of some protection, it (usually) means that they invested quite a lot of time in that instead of investing it into something that would truly make users life easier 😁 I've seen this few times already: product itself was not bad, but the hoops you had to jump through were bananas.

One company did tie their license to NTFS drive ID of C:/ for example - that was fun as we intended to run the whole setup in a VM. Other did tie MAC addresses to its license - for VM appliances. 🤦

 

6 hours ago, Hoopster said:

The Unraid Connect plugin allows for automatic backups of you flash drive if you choose to use it.  Some prefer to do that manually which is possible as well.  Just maintain recent USB flash drive backups (especially after configuration changes) and it is very painless to recover from a flash drive failure.

This sounds interesting - it means that I can have another USB disk plugged in & there is a live (atleast somewhat, does not have to be realtime really) backup so I can boot from that and get my system fully up & running if the primary fails and I have no network? That would atleast partially address some of my concerns about having USB disk as a primary system device. 🙂

[Hoopster]

2 hours ago, Xoores said:

It is not portable, if it is tied to one specific drive. That's by definition the exact opposite of being "portable" 😅

Depends I suppose your definition of the word.  I say it is portable because you could remove the flash drive from an Unraid server and boot Unraid on a completely different machine if you wished.  Sure, you may have to tweak the configuration a bit because the HDDs, SSDs in that machine will be different but Unraid does not care about the motherboard, CPU, etc. on which it runs.  Using Windows as an example, it it very much tied to a specific hardware configuration and if you change motherboard, CPU, RAm, etc. it can invalidate the license.

 

2 hours ago, Xoores said:

I don't believe this is the case but maybe I misunderstood something. 🤔 When you drive fails, you have to use some process that requires Limetech to be around & alive to get a new license

True.  Yes, the Unraid/Limetech infrastructure needs to be present for a license transfer but they have indicated that would be maintained even if Limetech were no longer actively developing Unraid; even if third party intervention were needed

License Manager from within the GUI:

 

You are not the first to raise your particular concerns about Unraid licensing and this has been much debated over the years.  However, the general consensus seems to be that the advantages of the current method outweigh the disadvantages and there has been no indication that licensing will be changed any time soon.

 

You, of course, are free to make whatever choice you feel is best for you.  If the licensing is a big hang-up for you, perhaps Unraid is not the solution you want to use.

[SpencerJ]

6 hours ago, Xoores said:

And if they are not around or their infrastructure goes down, you are SoL because you cannot get even the "trial" license anymore and your device will just refuse to start up.

 

We've been around since 2005 and are not going anywhere. Even if something catastrophic happened, we would not just leave users high and dry. 

 

We hope you try us out and give us a shot. thanks for the feedback.