Dynamix - V6 Plugins


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While I like how stable is unRAID, when I want to add a simple thing like a temp monitor, I don't like how complex it is, and how much time I need to research about how to do it, and to find the right post with the latests information :(. Sorry, it's not your fault, but I think unRAID needs to be much more easy in the future if they want to go mainstream :(.

 

Can I ask where am I suppose to find the /BOOT/EXTRA/ folders? My flash drive has no /BOOT/ folder, and I'm not sure if I should create one and copy the Perl libraries there or I didn't understand it and the BOOT folder is somewhere else :(.

 

I've read that another folder called "PACKAGES" can be used. I have a Packages folder, but from /, not inside BOOT, and that folder contains also other .TXZ files. Is that the place?

 

Do I need to do also all the things explained on the WIKI article? https://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php/Setting_up_CPU_and_board_temperature_sensing

 

I understand there're tons of mobos out there, but this complexity just to check temps is incredible :(.

 

I can tell you are almost certainly a long time Windows user!  You've a lot to learn about Linux!  First thing to learn is Linux is case-sensitive, and by convention prefers lower case, so you don't want to use all caps like you have been.  You mentioned PACKAGES and Packages folders, and while you can create those, you absolutely don't want to, as the only one that unRAID uses is packages.  You could create all 3 folders, and have them visible simultaneously, but anything you put in the other 2 won't be seen by unRAID.  And I'm absolutely sure you did not see .TXZ files in that folder, they had to have been .txz files to be usable.  Using all caps is going to create a lot of confusion for yourself.

 

  FAQ, unRAID Console section - old but still useful

 

I strongly recommend you spend a little time on the info found in the FAQ, unRAID Console section.  I think it will help answer some of your questions, such as the /boot folder.  Even in Windows, paths can be different depending on how you map them.  You can assign different drive letters and access the same file through a different path.  If you were to name your unRAID server MyStuff, then assign a drive letter of U: to the flash drive, then you could access flash root files as \\MyStuff\flash\*.* or as U:\*.* .  unRAID maps it as /boot, so you would access the same files on the console as /boot/* .

 

As to the temp monitor, you can blame much of that on the manufacturers, as there hasn't been much call for standardization previously.  Tools like SpeedFan on Windows have taken a long time and a lot of code and a built-in database of info in order to analyze and dig temps out of all the mobos out there.  The Linux tools are catching up though, and sensors and sensors-detect and the lm-sensor project have been gathering up info to make it easier.  The System Temp plugin is a fairly new tool to automate this, and except for a brief hiccup over Perl, has made it a lot smoother than it used to be.  (It's almost too bad that you weren't here to see how much harder it used to be!)  And I'm quite sure that it's going to be getting even smoother in the near future, great people behind it!

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While I like how stable is unRAID, when I want to add a simple thing like a temp monitor, I don't like how complex it is, and how much time I need to research about how to do it, and to find the right post with the latests information :(. Sorry, it's not your fault, but I think unRAID needs to be much more easy in the future if they want to go mainstream :(.

 

Can I ask where am I suppose to find the /BOOT/EXTRA/ folders? My flash drive has no /BOOT/ folder, and I'm not sure if I should create one and copy the Perl libraries there or I didn't understand it and the BOOT folder is somewhere else :(.

 

I've read that another folder called "PACKAGES" can be used. I have a Packages folder, but from /, not inside BOOT, and that folder contains also other .TXZ files. Is that the place?

 

Do I need to do also all the things explained on the WIKI article? https://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php/Setting_up_CPU_and_board_temperature_sensing

 

I understand there're tons of mobos out there, but this complexity just to check temps is incredible :(.

 

I can tell you are almost certainly a long time Windows user!  You've a lot to learn about Linux!  First thing to learn is Linux is case-sensitive, and by convention prefers lower case, so you don't want to use all caps like you have been.  You mentioned PACKAGES and Packages folders, and while you can create those, you absolutely don't want to, as the only one that unRAID uses is packages.  You could create all 3 folders, and have them visible simultaneously, but anything you put in the other 2 won't be seen by unRAID.  And I'm absolutely sure you did not see .TXZ files in that folder, they had to have been .txz files to be usable.  Using all caps is going to create a lot of confusion for yourself.

 

  FAQ, unRAID Console section - old but still useful

 

I strongly recommend you spend a little time on the info found in the FAQ, unRAID Console section.  I think it will help answer some of your questions, such as the /boot folder.  Even in Windows, paths can be different depending on how you map them.  You can assign different drive letters and access the same file through a different path.  If you were to name your unRAID server MyStuff, then assign a drive letter of U: to the flash drive, then you could access flash root files as \\MyStuff\flash\*.* or as U:\*.* .  unRAID maps it as /boot, so you would access the same files on the console as /boot/* .

 

As to the temp monitor, you can blame much of that on the manufacturers, as there hasn't been much call for standardization previously.  Tools like SpeedFan on Windows have taken a long time and a lot of code and a built-in database of info in order to analyze and dig temps out of all the mobos out there.  The Linux tools are catching up though, and sensors and sensors-detect and the lm-sensor project have been gathering up info to make it easier.  The System Temp plugin is a fairly new tool to automate this, and except for a brief hiccup over Perl, has made it a lot smoother than it used to be.  (It's almost too bad that you weren't here to see how much harder it used to be!)  And I'm quite sure that it's going to be getting even smoother in the near future, great people behind it!

 

The whole business of case can be a real problem area.  Please see this Wikipedia article on the subject:

 

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filename#Letter_case_preservation

 

and

 

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filename#Comparison_of_filename_limitations

 

Now consider that most of us are using unRAID in mixed environment!  And with SMB (usually) thrown into the mix for good measure!  The best and only thing to do is to keep all file (and folder/directory) names as unique spellings.  Even if you have Linux computer connected to an unRAID server and you are using SMB, you would  have to double check all possible situations to see how SMB would actually handle two files named File and file.  (As I recall, SMB came from Samba which basically was developed for Linux/UNIX around the Windows Networking scheme that MS developed way back in the Window for Workgroups era.  There has been a lot of water under the bridge since that time but I would bet that a computer running Windows for Workgroups would still work over SMB today!) 

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Can I ask where am I suppose to find the /BOOT/EXTRA/ folders? My flash drive has no /BOOT/ folder, and I'm not sure if I should create one and copy the Perl libraries there or I didn't understand it and the BOOT folder is somewhere else :(.

 

/boot/extra means this is the top level folder extra on your flash drive. If you have remote access to your flash drive from your Windows machine, you can just open windows explorer and create the folder extra. Then copy the just downloaded .txz file to that folder.

 

I've read that another folder called "PACKAGES" can be used. I have a Packages folder, but from /, not inside BOOT, and that folder contains also other .TXZ files. Is that the place?

 

No the folder packages is not used.

 

Do I need to do also all the things explained on the WIKI article? https://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php/Setting_up_CPU_and_board_temperature_sensing

 

I understand there're tons of mobos out there, but this complexity just to check temps is incredible :(.

 

Once on the temperature settings page turn on Help, which gives you more background information. Btw Help is now available for many pages and settings, make use of that!

 

Basically do: Detect -> Save -> select sensors

 

Thank you! I did it and it worked! :)

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While I like how stable is unRAID, when I want to add a simple thing like a temp monitor, I don't like how complex it is, and how much time I need to research about how to do it, and to find the right post with the latests information :(. Sorry, it's not your fault, but I think unRAID needs to be much more easy in the future if they want to go mainstream :(.

 

Can I ask where am I suppose to find the /BOOT/EXTRA/ folders? My flash drive has no /BOOT/ folder, and I'm not sure if I should create one and copy the Perl libraries there or I didn't understand it and the BOOT folder is somewhere else :(.

 

I've read that another folder called "PACKAGES" can be used. I have a Packages folder, but from /, not inside BOOT, and that folder contains also other .TXZ files. Is that the place?

 

Do I need to do also all the things explained on the WIKI article? https://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php/Setting_up_CPU_and_board_temperature_sensing

 

I understand there're tons of mobos out there, but this complexity just to check temps is incredible :(.

 

I can tell you are almost certainly a long time Windows user!  You've a lot to learn about Linux!  First thing to learn is Linux is case-sensitive, and by convention prefers lower case, so you don't want to use all caps like you have been.  You mentioned PACKAGES and Packages folders, and while you can create those, you absolutely don't want to, as the only one that unRAID uses is packages.  You could create all 3 folders, and have them visible simultaneously, but anything you put in the other 2 won't be seen by unRAID.  And I'm absolutely sure you did not see .TXZ files in that folder, they had to have been .txz files to be usable.  Using all caps is going to create a lot of confusion for yourself.

 

  FAQ, unRAID Console section - old but still useful

 

I strongly recommend you spend a little time on the info found in the FAQ, unRAID Console section.  I think it will help answer some of your questions, such as the /boot folder.  Even in Windows, paths can be different depending on how you map them.  You can assign different drive letters and access the same file through a different path.  If you were to name your unRAID server MyStuff, then assign a drive letter of U: to the flash drive, then you could access flash root files as \\MyStuff\flash\*.* or as U:\*.* .  unRAID maps it as /boot, so you would access the same files on the console as /boot/* .

 

As to the temp monitor, you can blame much of that on the manufacturers, as there hasn't been much call for standardization previously.  Tools like SpeedFan on Windows have taken a long time and a lot of code and a built-in database of info in order to analyze and dig temps out of all the mobos out there.  The Linux tools are catching up though, and sensors and sensors-detect and the lm-sensor project have been gathering up info to make it easier.  The System Temp plugin is a fairly new tool to automate this, and except for a brief hiccup over Perl, has made it a lot smoother than it used to be.  (It's almost too bad that you weren't here to see how much harder it used to be!)  And I'm quite sure that it's going to be getting even smoother in the near future, great people behind it!

 

Thank you for all your explanation, but not, I'm not a Windows user ;). I have used many OS out there. I began with DOS, Windows, then tried many Linux flavors (Mandrake, Mandriva, Fedora, Ubuntu, Linux Mint) and now I'm a Mac user. I know about upper and lowercase, I just wrote it with upper case to make it more visible.

 

In my Linux experience, I never saw to call /boot/ the system folder. It was always /

 

And thanks for your recommendations, but I don't want to learn about the command line. And I think a normal unRAID user shouldn't need it too. I've discussed with many Linux users about that for years. Many find the console very easy and powerful. I HATE IT, and I promise you, most of the people out there does too. You need time, and to learn a lot of commands to use it properly. One needs to remember all those commands, and it also needs a lot of trial & error time. But computers evolved, and GUIs came, and people love them because they make life easier for most of us. They are much more visual and human-friendly, and I love them, so the less I have to deal with the console, the better. My point is that, if unRAID want to go mainstream, console should be avoided from most normal situations :(.

 

It's just my opinion ;)

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A lot of development has been done to make unRAID more approachable for the novice. It are the first steps and definitely more progress can and will be made.

 

Is the command line completely avoidable? Hard to say ... it is always handy to know a little, just for those special cases.

 

Do we need to know how the engine of our car works? Not at all, and some people have never looked under the hood, but sometimes an oil reading needs to be done and knowing where to look helps a lot :)

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In my Linux experience, I never saw to call /boot/ the system folder. It was always /

 

The root folder (call it system, if you like) is still /

However, the root is memory resident and, therefore, volatile - reboot the computer and any changes you made will be lost.

 

/boot is the mount point for the flash boot drive.  Any changes made here will survive a reboot.

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Do we need to know how the engine of our car works? Not at all, and some people have never looked under the hood, but sometimes an oil reading needs to be done and knowing where to look helps a lot :)

 

Excellent analogy !!!

Not really, if someone doesn't know how the engine in their car works then someone better know a good mechanic or they will be walking the first time the engine doesn't start. If almarma doesn't want to know how unraid works perhaps he can hire someone to set it up for him and pay him to fix it whenever it breaks.

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A lot of development has been done to make unRAID more approachable for the novice. It are the first steps and definitely more progress can and will be made.

 

Is the command line completely avoidable? Hard to say ... it is always handy to know a little, just for those special cases.

 

Do we need to know how the engine of our car works? Not at all, and some people have never looked under the hood, but sometimes an oil reading needs to be done and knowing where to look helps a lot :)

 

I agree with your comment. Of course, I appreciate the development done in UnRAID 6! I find it fantastic, and even Dockers are quite easy to use!

 

And the analogy to check the car oil, I agree too, we must be able to do that, but you don't need a course to check the oil and liquids: there are "max" and "min" readings on the needle to make our life easier. We don't need to learn about engines manufacturing, to learn now much oil should we use. I hope you know what I mean.

 

Of course, if I want to tune my car for races, I need to learn deeply about engines and cars. So for advanced unRAID use (like VM), I understand one needs console skills. But for a temp monitor, it should be easier.

 

Again, I don't complain about your plugin AT ALL, please, don't misunderstand me! I really appreciate your help and your plugins! I just want to share my opinion, trying to be constructive and polite, about what unRAID COULD do to get more users. I love it, and I want more people using it! :)

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Understood, Limetech has also stated they want to reach a broader audience, and everybody knows the command line is not the answer to that quest.

 

Temperature reading should be an easy thing to setup, but hardware and software are not really in sync here, making it much harder than one expects.

 

Thanks for your input.

 

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Understood, Limetech has also stated they want to reach a broader audience, and everybody knows the command line is not the answer to that quest.

 

Temperature reading should be an easy thing to setup, but hardware and software are not really in sync here, making it much harder than one expects.

 

Thanks for your input.

To expand on this just a bit, if limetech published a list of approved hardware, and the software "just worked" on that specific list, and any other hardware was supported only by the community, would that help or hurt?  For advanced features like sleep, fan, and temperature monitoring, that approach is almost required. As it is right now, limetech pretty much only supports features that are common to 90% of hardware available, and the the "extra" features like sleep and temp are left to unnofficial addons that may or may not work seamlessly.

 

To almarma, which approach would you prefer? Would you rather be told that unraid will only work fully if you buy a specific motherboard?

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Hi @bonienl,

I think I have read it before somewhere, that on the dashboard, the CPU frequency is NOT the current speed - while e.g. fan speed IS current.

Is it possible to change that, so the user can verify, if powermanagement works properly?

I was successful to get the current CPU frequency with

cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_cur_freq

What do you think?

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Hi bonienl,

it seems, I have some trouble with the autodetected PWM controllers.

when I check the system with pwmconfig, it tells me to use

/sys/class/hwmon/hwmon1/device/pwm2

for fancontrol (which worked for me in unraid5 and fancontrol script in go script).

The dropdown to PWM2 in autofan however uses the PWM2 selection from device tree, resulting in following command line:

/bin/bash /usr/local/sbin/autofan -c /sys/devices/platform/it87.552/pwm2 -f /sys/devices/platform/it87.552/fan2_input -l 75 -t 31 -T 41 -m 3

The reading of the fanspeed works fine - but the setting does not.

Any recommendations?

A short feedback if others wonder what was the issue:

Everything is fine on Dynamix plugins and the chosen approach is fine. I replaced the motherboard (with exactly same type and model!) and now it works as expected - seems, it was a hardware defect...

As known, either perl needs to be installed for the internal sensors-detect script - or if the required drivers are known they can be entered manually in the respective field in the temp plugin.

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Hello everyone,

 

Reading through the last few and first few pages of this topic, I've learned how to install System Temp (I think!).

 

What now?

 

When I clicked through Detect -> Save and choose a sensor for reporting (wow, have I got a lot of sensors!), nothing appears happens after clicking "Done".  My drop-down selections disappear, and the only option I have is "Not Used."

 

In the mean time, my KVM console starts filling up with "Undeclared bus id referenced" errors.

 

Googling that error message indicates that maybe I didn't install perl.  But I can do a perl -v at the command line, and I'm told I'm running v5.18.1.

 

If it helps, I'm running a Supermicro 846 Chassis with a X8DT6 motherboard with two Xeon E5520's.

 

I can reset things by manually going into /etc/sensors.d/sensors.conf and deleting the contents, and start over again.  But I always end up with the same situation.

 

My thinking is that the conf file the culprit, but am not sure what other steps I can do to resolve.

 

Any help much appreciated!  Thanks!

 

 

 

 

 

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Hi Bonienl,

 

Yes, I do get multiple options after saving.

 

It's just that when I choose them, and then click "Apply" button, all the options disappear from the drop downs and nothing else seems to happen on the web gui.  It's at this stage that my KVM shows errors in the .conf file.

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Hi Bonienl,

 

Yes, I do get multiple options after saving.

 

It's just that when I choose them, and then click "Apply" button, all the options disappear from the drop downs and nothing else seems to happen on the web gui.  It's at this stage that my KVM shows errors in the .conf file.

 

This sounds like a conflict between driver(s) and KVM.

 

Can you do the following:

 

[1] unload the drivers

[2] type coretemp as the available driver

[3] save

[4] load driver

[5] Check if cpu and/or mb assignments are still possible

 

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Ooh!  Progress!

 

I followed your procedure, but I had to edit the sensors.conf file by hand first, and remove all the lines in it.  Trying to "Unload" didn't work.

 

Once I cleared out the sensors.conf file, I did a Detect, and removed the available drivers to just select coretemp.

 

The drop downs for Processor and Mainboard showed the same entries (the 8 cores from the processors). 

 

I hit "Apply" and now I see the processor temp in the status line at the bottom of the gui.

 

I'll add the mainboard temperature next ....

 

[EDIT]

The available drivers are listed as:

coretemp

jc42

w83795

 

Using just coretemp as the driver, I can see all 8 CPU core's and their temperatures. 

 

If I use coretemp and any other (jc42 OR w83795) the console reports errors on sensors.conf file, and I'm unable to view any dropdown selections for sensors other than "Not Used".  The Sensors.conf file is fully populated though.

 

Even if I manually edit the /etc/sensors/sensors.conf file to just, say, jc42 and label it as MB Temp, that label does not appear in the dynamix dropdown for Mainboard temperature.

 

[2nd Edit]

Ok, poked around on the lm-sensors.org website, and here's what I can deduce:

  • Sensors for a supermicro board use the i2c bus.
  • from command line, issue sensors --bus-list
  • (I got this: bus "i2c-0" "SMBus I801 adapter at 0400")
  • Determined by looking at other peoples Supermicro config files, that temp5 is my mobo temp, and temp 7 and 8 are the cpu temps

 

Issue: Can't seem to reload the drivers via the dynamix plugin, and certainly don't see a way to add the bus-list output to the config file.

 

Is it possible to modify the plugin to support i2c buses? :)

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Got it!

 

Here's the procedure that worked for me:

[*]Follow the guide Setting up CPU and board temperature sensing

[*]Since the Supermicro motherboard uses I2C, issue the command sensors --bus-list 

[*]The output of that command should be the first line in your sensors.conf file

[*]Edit the rest of your conf file as appropriate.

[*]Specify the chip name in the "Available Drivers:" box in the gui

[*]Click "LOAD Drivers" button (only... if you detect/save, you'll lose your changes)

[*]The dropdown lists will autopopulate

[*]Click Apply

 

Here's my conf file for posterity:

bus "i2c-0" "SMBus I801 adapter at 0400"
chip "w83795adg-i2c-0-2f"
label temp7 "CPU Temp"
label temp5 "MB Temp"
label fan1 "Array Fan"

 

 

And my go script:

#!/bin/bash
# Start the Management Utility
/usr/local/sbin/emhttp &
# Added for Sensors:
modprobe coretemp
modprobe jc42
modprobe w83795
/usr/bin/sensors -s

 

 

A Thank you to the authors for this dynamix plug-in.  I hope someone else finds this information useful.

 

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Hmmm... I have a user share named "3D Movies" but it doesn't seem to be cached.  I can choose it it the plugin, but after I enable the plugin, it is deselected.  When I invoke cache_dirs manually from the command line, it says the directory does not exist.  I have other user shares with spaces, and they are included without a problem.  Any suggestions?

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I have a Supermicro X8SIL-F motherboard in a Norco RPC-4224 case with the 120mm triple fan wall. A "feature" of this motherboard is that if the CPUs fan speed gets too low it goes into an alarm state and spins all the fans (three fan wall and one CPU fan) at 100% speed. The minimum PWM value I can set is 56 which equals approximately 1035rpm on the CPU fan and 800rpm on the fan wall.

 

There is a discussion on this specific issue here with no progress:

https://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=38850.0

 

I have attempted to override the IPMI lower threshold by installing the IPMI tool plugin:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dmacias72/ipmitool/master/ipmitool.plg

And running this command (the CPU fan is "FAN 1")

ipmitool sensor thresh "FAN 1" lower 0 0 0

 

This changed the following values (note that it didn't go to zero):

______________________________________________________________

Lower Non-Recoverable //

Lower Critical Lower //

Non-Critical

Original Value:

400

484

770

New Value:

30

30

30

 

 

The lowest PWM value I can set before the IPMI alarm kicks in is still 56. :-(

 

Onto my enhancement request - Obviously it is not desirable to reduce the minimum threshold of the CPU fan. Is it possible to update the Dynamix Auto Fan Control plugin to specify which fans are controlled rather than using the overarching PWM controller?

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