As most of us use unraid headless, and, for me, it often have problems, how do I have a view such as when it is physically connected to monitor? 

 

When physically connected to monitor, you see the plugins it runs, and see whether it was able to install it successfully, or which failed, among other things.  Is there any command I can execute via telnet to have such a view?  e.g., I chose to install plugins to /usr instead of installing it to one of the permanent disks, little did I know everytime you restart, it downloads a copy, and sometimes it fails.  With that knowledge, I'm changing settings to install it to my cache drive.  Without physical connection to monitor, you don't see those things.

 

Any suggestions?  Short of getting an ipmi motherboard.

Plugin installation and some other things can be seen in the syslog.

I just purchased a used Lantronix Spider from ebay for around $100.

I have not used it yet, however it looks like nice portable way of gaining console access over the network for boards without IPMI.

 

 

http://www.lantronix.com/it-management/kvm-over-ip/spiderduo.html

UnRAID starts up the lah connection pretty early on in the boot so putty works.  I normally have a Ping program running and as soon as I get a response I launch a putty session into the box. 

Correct,  running a putty asap.  But what commands do you execute? I do a ps - aux, but that doesn't give you a running process. Just what it has executed. Any other options? Though weebotech's suggestion seems to be the most similar to physical connection, I don't intend to spend money onto it. So possibly trurl's or dalben's suggestion will suit me best.

Trurl,  if due to some plug-in and unraid Web console didn't come up,  how do you read syslog?

syslog is /var/log/syslog

 

Quote from one of the most important stickies on the forum:

 

tail -f /var/log/syslog

thanks trurl!