OK. Thanks!

A curiosity question that I don't plan. You said I could stop a preclear whenever and restart it when ready. How do you stop it?

Ctrl-C in the session you wish to kill. If you have multiple preclears running in different screen sessions, you could resume each session in turn and type Ctrl-c. Or, if your intent is to down the box anyway, just go ahead and shut down with the GUI like normal. It won't hurt anything to abort the preclears with a shutdown. By restart, I mean from the beginning, with a new preclear command.

 

Also, if you are curious, there is a pretty good explanation of unRaid's parity implementation here.

http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php/Parity

Parity as used in the array is file and even filesystem agnostic. It will happily protect and reconstruct a corrupt file or filesystem. It's meant to recover from single drive failures, and it does that very well.

 

File corruption and recovery is a whole nuther subject. Fortunately the author of unraid is very careful about making changes to the basic program, too careful and slow for some, but the end result is that unraid is very stable, and file corruption is very rare.

Awesome explanation. Glad I'm learning all this. Probably more questions to come but for now... Preclearing away.

Also, on the subject of interrupting and restarting preclears. It is possible to skip parts of the preclear process. For example, if you stop it after the preread phase, you can restart it and skip the preread phase. Just type preclear_disk.sh without any parameters and it will show the switches that allow you to modify its behavior. Probably best to wait until you become more familiar with it before you try any of these more advanced methods.

 

That's good to know also. I probably won't find myself in a need to mess with those settings but good to know the options.

Any android telnet apps out there? And if so how do you close screen (ctrl-a, d on my normal keyboard, but no ctrl button on my phone or tablet...)

In addition to asking about an android ctrl- option with telnet to use a phone or tablet to check on the system, I had a couple questions about add on packages....

 

- unraid status e-mail: seems like this is useful...anything I should know or think about before I install?  Best way to install is from unMENU?  Any better options to know there is a problem if I don't want to log on and check the status, or should I be checking regularly (daily? hourly?) the status?

 

- monthly parity check: same questions as above.  Any other better ways to do this parity check?

 

- powerdown-2.06-noarch-unRAID: what is the advantage of this over the powerdown in the normal GUI.  I am running headless...has anyone needed the opportunity to plug in a keyboard and just hit ctrl-alt-del (and does that really work as simply as that?)

 

- unraid-overtemp-shutdown: again, seems useful.  Why WOULDN'T I want to install it?  If I do install - again, from unHOME?  Anything to be wary of?

 

Are there any other packages/scripts/whatever I should consider to start out with?

 

I already have unHOME, Screen, and mail set-up.

 

Thanks!

bump...I now have a 4TB parity drive, 3GB and 2TB data drives, and it is working great!!!  Some additional questions:

 

Is there a android ctrl- option with telnet to use a phone or tablet to check on the system.  I have found plenty of telnet apps for android, but no way to do a ctrl-d for example in screen.

 

About add-ons:

 

- unraid status e-mail: seems like this is useful...anything I should know or think about before I install?  Best way to install is from unMENU?  Any better options to know there is a problem if I don't want to log on and check the status, or should I be checking regularly (daily? hourly?) the status?

 

- monthly parity check: same questions as above.  Any other better ways to do this parity check?

 

- powerdown-2.06-noarch-unRAID: what is the advantage of this over the powerdown in the normal GUI.  I am running headless...has anyone needed the opportunity to plug in a keyboard and just hit ctrl-alt-del (and does that really work as simply as that?)

 

- unraid-overtemp-shutdown: again, seems useful.  Why WOULDN'T I want to install it?  If I do install - again, from unHOME?  Anything to be wary of?

 

Are there any other packages/scripts/whatever I should consider to start out with?

 

I already have unHOME, Screen, and mail set-up.

 

Thanks!

Glad all's working well.

 

I definitely recommend using UnMenu to install the various additional scripts you want.

 

The PowerDown script will overcome some weaknesses in the built-in UnRAID powerdown code, and will be more reliable at shutting down the system in the event of a power failure, assuming you're using the APC UPS control script (which you SHOULD be doing -- all servers should be UPS protected).

 

I am guessing you are referring to apcupsd? I will have to get smarter on power down...

I am guessing you are referring to apcupsd?

 

Yes.

 

OK thanks! I'll start messing around with it