Hi guys, this is something that has bothered me about unraid plugins for a while now, the ability for plugins to seemingly wreak havoc on the unraid OS itself!

 

I am trying to remotely administer my unraid box from another location. Upon installing crashplan plugin, SAB, Sickbeard, Headphones, and Transmission, there seems to be so many bugs that creep up and cause my entire unraid OS to become unresponsive! I lose connectivity to the server, cannot access the web interface, terminal, etc!

 

This is an unfortunate side effect of plugins being poorly designed or the applications which they run I suppose, but isn't there a better way??? I'm starting to feel like I can't have plugins installed at all or my OS stability will be compromised! I cannot afford to lose connectivity when I'm away from home as I then have to make a call to get someone to go and manually restart the box which is such an inconvenience!

 

I've noticed Freenas has a plugin jail platform which seemingly runs each plugin in its own little VM. My guess would be that this prevents the plugin from interfering with the rest of the OS as it is contained in its own sandbox. Is this not viable for unraid???

 

All I know is I am so tired of my box crashing/losing connectivity because of PLUGINS!!! Please help! Someone! If anyone is interested I could upload a system log when I can eventually get someone to reboot my box physically.

 

Kind regards

Nokoff

Can't help since I'm a newbie, but Lime Tech has plans to address this with the upcoming 6.0 update. More in the announcement here.

plugins are complex bits of code, there could be issues either with the way the plyugin is written, or more likely that there is a package conflict which is causing you issues.

 

i myself run a few plugin, and whilst i dont have any instability issues per say (very careful with what packages get installed and manually hack plugins to prevent this), i do have the occasional shutdown/restart issue, which is just not acceptable to be honest.

 

so the way around this, and what Tom is working towards is forgetting about unraid plugins and instead allowing you to create a seperate vm with your os of choice (windows, centos, ubuntu, whatever) running on your unraid server, you can then run any application you wish in the vm, this would keep it completely isolated from unraid and thus the issues your seeing simply go away, sounds good?, it will be! :-).

so the way around this, and what Tom is working towards is forgetting about unraid plugins and instead allowing you to create a seperate vm with your os of choice (windows, centos, ubuntu, whatever) running on your unraid server, you can then run any application you wish in the vm, this would keep it completely isolated from unraid and thus the issues your seeing simply go away, sounds good?, it will be! :-).

 

My concern here is that the current complicated, error-prone and fragmented plugin environment will become even more so, and even less accessible for the masses.

 

The announcement I linked to promises otherwise, but when I read all these posts about VMs and Slackwares and whatnot, my eyes glaze over. To illustrate, when someone said in the linked thread that this allows "ordinary" people to run plugins, grumpybutfun replied with: "If your hardware doesn't do PCI Passthrough in Slackware 14.1 (unRAID 6.0)... It isn't going to do it in XenServer, Ubuntu, CentOS, etc. either." Ordinary people like me don't understand any of that.

 

The risk is that plugins will become even more difficult to use for lay-users like me, who don't want to spend hours learning about what a VM is, how to install one, which one, and how to find, install and manage plugins within that VM.

to begin with, yes vm's may seem complicated, but i foresee this will only improve in time, probably to the point where you literally click a button in the webui and say create vm, you can then connect to it and mount your iso of choice and off you go!. plugins are not the way to go to be honest, they are just a necessary evil at the moment to allow you to run what you need.

 

pci pass-through is simply the ability for you to "pass" devices through to a vm, so that the vm can directly access your graphics card, or sata ports etc, if your not concerned with running xbmc in a vm or running unraid in a vm (which you most probably wont want to do) then you do not need pci pass through, if all your worried about is running applications in a vm then pci pass-through is NOT required.

 

i really wouldn't worry too much, there are going to be a LOT of people wanting to do this, and you will see a lot of guides and people discussing this once Tom releases 6.0, you may even see vm's packaged and ready to be run with os, apps etc all bundled in, then its simply a case of run and customise and away you go,

The thread on here about Docker seems like a nice midway point between plugins and VMs.  Something the less technically inclined might find easier to manage.

When you say unresponsive, do you mean the webGUI is inaccessible? The most likely cause of this is emhttp getting killed due to Linux memory management. Other processes are needing more memory, so Linux kills any processes that haven't been used in a while. See here for a fix to this common problem. This should probably be built in but unfortunately is not. Once 64-bit unRAID comes out this problem will probably go away if you don't have an extremely small amount of memory installed.

 

Also, headphones has a known issue with cookies making the webGUI inaccessible. Clearing your browser cache should fix this.