unRAID fork(), concepts, ideas and discussion, Running unRAID on another distro.

[lionelhutz]

He is just a symptom of the overall disease.

 

We all have jobs, families, Wives / GFs, kids, lives, hobbies, responsibilities, commitments, etc. but somehow we seem to find time to take 5 minutes to read / post / respond to people who have questions, issues, failures, developing plugins, writing guides, helping users decide on the right equipment, etc. that are not even our paying customers.

 

Business 101 - Give the customers what they want for a reasonable price. Here we have a large amount of paying customers and future customers that want to see the things we have discussed come to light and they are even willing to PAY FOR IT (AGAIN).

 

If Tom doesn't want to get his act together, if he can take 5 minutes out his day to respond to his paying customers, police his own forum (and deal with the 2 or 3 assclowns in this thread), communicate, support his own product, innovate or hire people to do all that for him on top of LONG HISTORY of ignoring us for weeks / months at a time... He is asking / begging / Taunting others to create a competing product that he doesn't have a chance in hell of competing with if the past / present is any indication of how he is going to continue to run this business.

 

 

I suspect that Ironic, Ford and others have also had a similar experiences as me. Hell, just the mention of Ironic offering to develop / expand upon unRAID with some of the things discussed in this thread ("still vaporware")... He has already received several large donations by users who really want to see it come to light.

 

This isn't 2005 anymore and with all the innovations with Hardware, Software, Linux, NAS, torrents, usenets, Tivo, etc. and the costs of hardware for Servers / XBMC / Plex / Roku / Hard Drives / Etc. players / machines... He can't hold back innovation and force us to play in his sandbox unless he devotes time / energy / effort / support to make sure we never want to leave.

 

Well that time has long since come and gone and yet here he is... Still doing the same crap he has done since 2005 or won't hire / farm stuff out to able and willing people who will do it for FREE.

 

Having 2+ year development cycles for a "Slackware" / Kernel upgrade, make us wait 3+ years (and counting) for a 64-Bit version, disappearing for weeks / months on end, having hardly any presence on the forum, outdated wikis, guides, documentation, etc.

 

When I came to use unRAID in 2008 I could find evidence of how slowly the releases were at times and also it was clear the support forum was user based and not the official support channel simply by reading the forum. Either you accept that is how it will be and pay your money and use the product or you don't. If yo don't, then you go somewhere else. Who dives in blindly with software or a product without reading some of the history on any message board to know what to expect in the future?

 

 

2+ years for a Kernel ungrade - that was an unRAID upgrade. Long and drawn out, but it wasn't simply a kernel upgrade.

3+ years for 64-bit - The plan to release that was posted some time last year so how can it be a 3 year wait already?

 

[lionelhutz]

So, your plan to "prove me wrong" is to demand a response in your favour by threatening to release a distribution which includes unRAID without permission to redistribute unRAID from LimeTech?

 

Nope.

 

I am releasing a totally opensourced version with my own emhttp that people are free to use, add on too, make it better, etc.

 

 

The truth comes out. To paraphrase,

 

"If you don't get the answers you want and demand from LimeTech by the end of the week you're releasing your own fork".

 

Or simply

 

"I'm releasing my own fork"

 

one of the two.

 

And I'm the asshat for posting that those wanting to develop their own fork need to go somewhere else?

 

HAAAAAAhaaaaaahaaaa. Thanks for my daily laugh.

 

[grumpybutfun]

The truth comes out. To paraphrase,

 

"If you don't get the answers you want and demand from LimeTech by the end of the week you're releasing your own fork".

 

Or simply

 

"I'm releasing my own fork"

 

one of the two.

 

And I'm the asshat for posting that those wanting to develop their own fork need to go somewhere else?

 

HAAAAAAhaaaaaahaaaa. Thanks for my daily laugh.

 

Yes... Tom goes weeks / months without saying a word, he does not have 5 minutes to respond / police his forum and he permits people like you to take over his forum, defy the mods and attack people for days.

 

I want to rid myself of people like you and since Tom or the Mods won't do it... I came up with an alternate solution. A community and open sourced version of unRAID where people don't have to deal with the likes of you.

[bnevets27]

When I came to use unRAID in 2008 I could find evidence of how slowly the releases were at times and also it was clear the support forum was user based and not the official support channel simply by reading the forum. Either you accept that is how it will be and pay your money and use the product or you don't.

 

It was hard to miss these facts when I was considering buying unRAID also. Am I happy with my purchase, yes. Could it be improved, definitely. Is it doing everything I would like it to in this day and age no, and that's why I'm getting into VM's. Was it fulfilling all my needs years ago, yes. Was/is it a pain in the ass to get plugins running definitely. Are some of the plugins necessary, very much so (APC...) Most software develops/evolves as close as possible to the world changing around it. (XBMC is a good example) unRAID is definitely falling behind. I think it hard to deny that, though I'm sure it will happen.

[RockDawg]

I see both sides of this.  I really do.  I've been using unRAID Pro since 2006 (IIRC) and I love it.  The few times I have needed help directly from Tom (needed keys for new flash drives) he has replied quickly and without question.  My first preference would always be loyalty to Tom and his unRAID.  With that said, if there were another option that had benefits that unRAID does not offer, I would be hard pressed not to go with it.

 

The only real issue I have ever had (and still have) with unRAID is with interruption in streaming content if drives in the array are accessed or written to.  This has been an issue for years across many versions of unRAID and many different hardware configurations.  The more my home system evolves, the more of an issue this becomes. In the beginning I would only notice it occasionally because I wasn't usually doing anything else on the system while streaming music or a movie.  But now as I've evolved to use Sick Beard and Couch Potato along with having several different cron jobs for backing up data, the server gets accessed multiple times a day without my interaction and it almost always causes an interruption in streaming whenever one of them runs.  I am not the most knowledgeable guy, but it seems like an unRAID issue to me.

 

This issue has been discussed a couple different topics on here before with numerous other users having the same problem.  Tom even joined in the discussion and conceded that something didn't seem right, but then no more was said and nothing ever came of it.  I'm not angry or anything like that, but I would love to get rid of this problem  I'm anxious to try the fork just to see if it manages to fix that problem, not so much for anything else right now.  If it doesn't I'm hopeful that will evolve into an active community of developers that will be able to look into it.  As it stands, I don't see that happening with unRAID anytime soon.

 

I hope this works out in a manner that Tom is happy with and also benefits him.  I really do.  But ultimately I just hope unRAID grows and evolves however it happens.

[NSTAR]

 

 

If somebody would be so kind to start a new poll with the various Linux Server Distros... Whatever wins is what I create the ISO for.

 

Till Then...

 

+1

[vl1969]

I still vote for OpenSuse.

I kind of let grow on me in the last few month :-)

[squirrellydw]

The truth comes out. To paraphrase,

 

"If you don't get the answers you want and demand from LimeTech by the end of the week you're releasing your own fork".

 

Or simply

 

"I'm releasing my own fork"

 

one of the two.

 

And I'm the asshat for posting that those wanting to develop their own fork need to go somewhere else?

 

HAAAAAAhaaaaaahaaaa. Thanks for my daily laugh.

 

Yes... Tom goes weeks / months without saying a word, he does not have 5 minutes to respond / police his forum and he permits people like you to take over his forum, defy the mods and attack people for days.

 

I want to rid myself of people like you and since Tom or the Mods won't do it... I came up with an alternate solution. A community and open sourced version of unRAID where people don't have to deal with the likes of you.

 

Like I posted earlier, stealing someones else's work.  While it may not be technically stealing, it is NOT cool.

[grumpybutfun]

Like I posted earlier, stealing someones else's work.  While it may not be technically stealing, it is NOT cool.

 

/*
* md.c : (modified) Multiple Devices driver for Linux
*         Copyright (C) 2006-2011, Tom Mortensen
*
* Greatly revised to support UnRaid in a particular manner.
*
* Derived from:

   md.c : Multiple Devices driver for Linux
          Copyright (C) 1998, 1999, 2000 Ingo Molnar

 

/*
* md_private.h : (modified) Multiple Devices driver for linux
*        Copyright (C) 2006-2010 Tom Mortensen
*
* Derived from:

   md.h : Multiple Devices driver for Linux
          Copyright (C) 1996-98 Ingo Molnar, Gadi Oxman
          Copyright (C) 1994-96 Marc ZYNGIER
          <[email protected]> or
          <[email protected]>

 

 

Tom didn't "steal" what Ingo, Gadi and Marc did but I am?

 

Please explain exactly how I am stealing GNU open sourced licensed software... I'd really like to know.

[Kryspy]

I vote you just pick up your toys and your open source release and piss off now.  Don't bother with your timeline and ultimatums and threats just do it. Why share some of that 25,000,000 dolars of potenital revenue with Tom. We all know this was your planj from the get go.

 

Kryspy

[grumpybutfun]

I vote you just pick up your toys and your open source release and piss off now.  Don't bother with your timeline and ultimatums and threats just do it. Why share some of that 25,000,000 dolars of potenital revenue with Tom. We all know this was your planj from the get go.

 

Contrary to what you believe... People have seen me, Ironic, Ford, and others try for months with Tom and were willing to do all the work for free... As usual, little to no response from him.

 

We wanted to incorporate Tom's emhttp so that he received 100% of the financial reward for the work that we did and have a place on this forum. Apparently he doesn't seem to care and can't be bothered with that. So we have no choice but to release our own version without emhttp.

 

On top of that, we all get the pleasure of having to tolerate your ass since he doesn't care about his paying customers to even police his own forum.

 

Sherlock... How am I profiting if I am releasing a fully open sourced version that charges nothing?

[NAS]

Can we slow the pace down.

 

The forum is not all about this fork or the handful of posters who are massively for or against. You could delete 90% of the posts about it and not lose any info as its the same for/against in subtle different ways over and over.

 

A modicum of patience would go a long way to calming things down.

 

And I say it again. This is Toms job. For me this is only day 2 of work after 3 weeks. Whilst the community has been fever pitched over this non stop and waiting for weeks of delay on answers most companies have been shut and drinking beer. I wish I had.

 

Just take it down a notch

[grumpybutfun]

Can we slow the pace down.

 

The forum is not all about this fork or the handful of posters who are massively for or against. You could delete 90% of the posts about it and not lose any info as its the same for/against in subtle different ways over and over.

 

A modicum of patience would go a long way to calming things down.

 

And I say it again. This is Toms job. For me this is only day 2 of work after 3 weeks. Whilst the community has been fever pitched over this non stop and waiting for weeks of delay on answers most companies have been shut and drinking beer. I wish I had.

 

Just take it down a notch

 

NAS I really do have a lot of respect for you and what you are trying to do. Your are trying your best to make cooler heads prevail (I have only inflamed the situation). Out of respect for you, I will honor your wishes and "calm down", grow some thicker skin and ignore any further posts but the 2 or 3 trolls who are trying to get a raise out me, you and others.

[lionelhutz]

My boss gives me raises....

 

I wanted you to post the truth. You've finally made your true intentions more then clear. Good luck with your new software development efforts. It sure takes a lot of audacity to be on a forum of a commercial company posting about plans to create a new competing product.

 

 

[grumpybutfun]

I wanted you to post the truth. You've finally made your true intentions more then clear. Good luck with your new software development efforts. It sure takes a lot of audacity to be on a forum of a commercial company posting about plans to create a new competing product.

 

Thank you for your support and encouragement... we appreciate it.

 

We wouldn't have done this without your help. You after all, YOU are the primary reason we are doing this.

 

So I'm sure you will get a big thank you and job well done from Tom in the upcoming weeks / months.

[Kryspy]

Ah see that's better. We're all getting along now.

 

Kryspy

[grumpybutfun]

Ah see that's better. We're all getting along now.

 

You and I normally do not agree but you are absolutely correct and my goal is for that to continue.

 

Can we have a group hug now?

[Kryspy]

Sure. Turn your back I want to pour you a drink.

 

Kryspy

[ironicbadger]

Wow.

 

 

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[Fx.]

the last few posts got real weird

 

aside from whether you think its "a dick move" i think a few people on here misunderstand GPL open source + reverse engineering:

(from wikipedia)

Binary software[edit]

This process is sometimes termed Reverse Code Engineering, or RCE.[9] As an example, decompilation of binaries for the Java platform can be accomplished using Jad. One famous case of reverse engineering was the first non-IBM implementation of the PC BIOS which launched the historic IBM PC compatible industry that has been the overwhelmingly dominant computer hardware platform for many years. Reverse engineering of software is protected in the U.S. by the fair use exception in copyright law.[10] The Samba software, which allows systems that are not running Microsoft Windows systems to share files with systems that are, is a classic example of software reverse engineering,[11] since the Samba project had to reverse-engineer unpublished information about how Windows file sharing worked, so that non-Windows computers could emulate it. The Wine project does the same thing for the Windows API, and OpenOffice.org is one party doing this for the Microsoft Office file formats. The ReactOS project is even more ambitious in its goals, as it strives to provide binary (ABI and API) compatibility with the current Windows OSes of the NT branch, allowing software and drivers written for Windows to run on a clean-room reverse-engineered GPL free software or open-source counterpart. WindowsSCOPE allows for reverse-engineering the full contents of a Windows system's live memory including a binary-level, graphical reverse engineering of all running processes.

[WeeboTech]

NAS I really do have a lot of respect for you and what you are trying to do. Your are trying your best to make cooler heads prevail (I have only inflamed the situation). Out of respect for you, I will honor your wishes and "calm down", grow some thicker skin and ignore any further posts but the 2 or 3 trolls who are trying to get a raise out me, you and others.

 

 

Thank you! I'm so buried with my own work right now I don't have all that much time to be here.

[WeeboTech]

FWIW...

Tom has been really sick this week

TomH

[grumpybutfun]

aside from whether you think its "a dick move" i think a few people on here misunderstand GPL open source + reverse engineering:

 

unRAID "AntiChrist Edition" is 100% of the md Linux Module and emhttp (If Tom ever decides he will permit it which I am assuming is he won't) or an opensource alternative. I didn't have reverse engineer anything.

 

99.9999% of the problems and what a lot of us have issue with boils down to 3 things.

 

Slackware

 

That Linux Distro is dead, there is no community, it has no forum, no documentation, no blogs, etc. that are dated before 2009 practically. There is no support online that will help me, you, everyone else when they want to add additional features or functionally to their system.

 

1. There is no package manager.

 

2. Good Luck finding random precompiled binaries out there that are maintained. Try and find a Slackware package for any number of the "standard" apps that you want / use / run in Ubuntu, Arch, CentOS, etc... You won't find them.

 

3. Since you there is no package manager and you can't find precompiled binaries... You have to compile those from scratch.

 

That is why we have this crazy plugin system that is a mess. If you want a package... you have to BEG / HOPE / PRAY / WAIT that some programming genius wants it too and goes through a whole lot of shit to write one and BEG / HOPE / PRAY he maintains it.

 

For Example...

 

To install XBMC, you have to go compile a bunch of dependencies and dependencies of the dependencies just to get it to the point of compiling / installing it. It took me (A Linux Expert / Pro) practically all day to do this. There isn't a chance in hell I would subject users to that when they can simple type "yum install XBMC" or "apt-get install XBMC" and install a binary that is managed / maintained by a team of (EXPERTS) Package Managers whose sole responsibility is for that specific software package... Which of course installs XBMC in seconds.

 

Some poor sap took months to write a 2,000+ line plugin that may or may not work for virtualbox. In any other Linux Distro that I can think of aside from Slackware... You simple type "yum install virtualbox" or "apt-get install virtualbox" get the latest version and have it in seconds. Hell even in Gentoo where you pretty much compile everything and do not download binaries you can install it via "emerge --ask app-emulation/virtualbox".

 

It's gotten to the point that people are offering to pay money for someone to write plugins for the SIMPLEST and EASIEST things to install like a fork of subsonic.

 

Linux Kernel

 

Out of the 3,000+ Hardware, Software, Drivers, Features and functions, etc. that the Linux Kernel can do... Only 187+ are enable / turned on in the unRAID Kernel. Even the lightest weight Distro to an Enterprise Server Linux Distro has 2,000+ or more of those drivers, features, functions, etc. turned on.

 

That has gotten so bad you have probably 50 Threads of on how to compile TV Card, Fibre Controller, NIC, RAID Controllers, etc. and this has been going on for YEARS! Seriously... What did we pay for? To all learn how to become experts in compiling Linux Kernels? Tom could do it ONCE and it wouldn't be something we would ever have to touch / think about again.

 

unRAID is a Read Only Ram File System

 

When you boot unRAID EVERYTHING including the file system is loaded into RAM and it's READ ONLY.

 

That means if you wanted to load software (like what the plugins attempt to do)... It has to do all this crazy stuff every single time you boot up. You can't simply install a program once and not have to worry about and use a package manager to update it.

 

We are told that this is required  for two reasons...

 

1. To preserve the life of a $5 dollar USB Flash drive.

 

Even if you used it normally and had the file system on the USB Drive... It would last for 13 - 27 years depending on the make / model you get. Does anyone think USB will be around in 13 years? Thunderbolt is already out and it comes with newer motherboards already. It's only a matter of a few years before USB goes away.

 

2. That it's easier to support.

 

For who?

 

It certainly isn't for me.

 

And where is this support?

 

Is Tom writing plugins?

 

Is he paying people to develop plugins since he won't let me decide what I will or won't load on my Server?

 

Why do I have to be 100% dependent on him or BEG / HOPE / PRAY / WAIT that some nerd like me wants to spend weeks / months writing a plugin that may or may not work or be maintained?

 

If I want use owncloud...

 

I can't have it. Still no working plugin. Even if there was... I have to hope / pray it's maintained and works on every reboot / unRAID upgrade.

 

To get around that my other choice is go spend $500 - $1,000 in computer parts and spend a month earning a PhD in ESXi, Xen or KVM and hope like hell that I can install unRAID in a VM with PCI Passthrough and have all the other VMs so I can run things like owncloud.

 

How do I install owncloud in my VM? "apt-get install owncloud" and it takes 10 seconds or less.

 

Does anyone else not see how ridicules that all is?

 

I paid for SUPPORT that I don't see and SUPPORT that requires me to go through all that hell above, spend all that money on new hardware, get a PhD in Virtualization to install a package that takes less than 10 seconds in any other Linux Distro without a read only File System.

 

The only difference between unRAID and unRAID "AntiChrist Edition" is the following:

 

1. A Real Linux Distro with a package manager, tons of online documentation, guides, blogs, forums, etc. for just about anything you could ever want to do.

 

2. An Updated / Current / Normal Linux Kernel with all the Software, Hardware, Drivers, Features and Functions that it can / should have. Speed Increase too. Xen, KVM, VirtFS, Video Card Drivers (so you can choose to install XBMC, Desktop, Plex Media Center), etc.

 

3. It won't be a read only File System. If you want, install it to a USB Drive, SSD, etc. and knock yourself out with what YOU CHOOSE to install or not or how you want to configure / use your system.

[tallnerd1985]

grumpbutfun

 

Lets say that UNraid is migrated over to a CentOS distro as the default Linux distro. From there, is it possible to use the "cache" drive as a /data drive for storage of all the programs and package dependencies and such(Similar to another embedded Linux distro such as Android)?

 

I do agree with how neutered the kernel is and such, its too much of a hassle to remove features then have users add it back in.

[graywolf]

 

Is it possible to stop this guy from posting in this thread.  He just can't let it go....

 

Just want to say thanks to all of the people that are working on this it sounds very interesting.  I am interested in switching from ESXI and appreciate your work.

 

+1000