Hi All,

 

1st Yes I read the wiki, but it was not very clear and after following it, I wound up with an unexpected result.

 

I am looking to setup unraid with x amount of discs. What I want from unraid is:

 

1. Show up on network as just a single large volume, now disc1, disc2 etc... just 1 volume ie: NASBACKUP.

 

I setup a user share and disc1, disc2 etc still show up...

 

2. I want an easy overview of the space used and free...

 

so a screen that basically just has NASBACKUP 4TB Total, 2TB FREE.

 

If I can get this then I am ready to purchase, but I cannot seem to get it to work like this, please advise.

 

Thanks,

Tom

I think what you want is in the Export settings part of the manual.  You want to set the Disk shares (SMB) (on the Shares tab) to either "Don't export", "Export read-only, hidden", or "Export read/write, hidden".

 

Keep in mind that unRAID does not create a 'real' single volume, just a virtual volume that looks like a single volume.  Since it is really still a set of disks, you are still subject to individual free space rules on those disks.  For example, if you have 1 gigabyte free on each of 4 data disks, it may show as 4GB free, and you can save 4 gigabytes of very small files, but not a 2GB file.  That may not be an acceptable downside for you, but the upside is that if you lose one of those disks, you haven't lost them all.  There are no files spanning disks.

 

I read the wiki, but it was not very clear and after following it, I wound up with an unexpected result.

 

I'm sorry.  We would love to hear any improvements you have time to suggest, especially corrections.

I think what you want is in the Export settings part of the manual.  You want to set the Disk shares (SMB) (on the Shares tab) to either "Don't export", "Export read-only, hidden", or "Export read/write, hidden".

 

Keep in mind that unRAID does not create a 'real' single volume, just a virtual volume that looks like a single volume.  Since it is really still a set of disks, you are still subject to individual free space rules on those disks.  For example, if you have 1 gigabyte free on each of 4 data disks, it may show as 4GB free, and you can save 4 gigabytes of very small files, but not a 2GB file.  That may not be an acceptable downside for you, but the upside is that if you lose one of those disks, you haven't lost them all.  There are no files spanning disks.

 

I read the wiki, but it was not very clear and after following it, I wound up with an unexpected result.

 

I'm sorry.  We would love to hear any improvements you have time to suggest, especially corrections.

 

 

Thanks for the reply.

 

I do not know if improvements to the wiki are needed, I am just looking to replace a drobo with unraid and I want unraid to work as easily and as closely to the drobo as I can possibly setup.

 

The drobo was natively seen by my homeserver and because of that my windows homeserver would backup to it natively, problem for me is the 4 drive maximum on the drobo of which I already have 4 - 1.5tb drives in it and it is about 3/4 full and I have about 400 more dvd's to finish ripping, so unraid seemed to be a solution to this issue. The only thing I am going to use unraid for is backing up my windows homeserver. My video's are the largest part of this and I do not turn duplication on for that folder in WHS simply because it is such a large amount of data. I realize looking at the wiki that unraid is really meant to perform some of what my windows home server does, but it lacks media center support and automatic backups of pc's on my network, that is fine as WHS does an outstanding job of this, I only need unraid to show up as 1 large volume which I can run windows powersync toy to have my WHS sync to the unraid server about once a week, then I will shut down unraid until next time.

 

My last concern is what happens say when a motherboard fails with unraid? I understand how disc fails will work, let's say my mb goes. What happens when I replace the board with a new one and bootup unraid?

 

Thanks

 

My last concern is what happens say when a motherboard fails with unraid? I understand how disc fails will work, let's say my mb goes. What happens when I replace the board with a new one and bootup unraid?

Yes, it is as easy as that.  At worst case, if the new motherboard/disk controllers scanned the disks in a different order than your old hardware, it would not initially start the array until you went to the "Devices" page and re-assigned the drives to their respective slots.    To make this much easier, do a screen-print of the devices page each time you make a configuration change and save it for reference.  Then, you can always get the drives assigned back to their same slots in the array, regardless of the hardware used.

 

Joe L.

My last concern is what happens say when a motherboard fails with unraid? I understand how disc fails will work, let's say my mb goes. What happens when I replace the board with a new one and bootup unraid?

Yes, it is as easy as that.  At worst case, if the new motherboard/disk controllers scanned the disks in a different order than your old hardware, it would not initially start the array until you went to the "Devices" page and re-assigned the drives to their respective slots.    To make this much easier, do a screen-print of the devices page each time you make a configuration change and save it for reference.  Then, you can always get the drives assigned back to their same slots in the array, regardless of the hardware used.

 

Joe L.

 

Thanks for all the info Joe, I nearly have my test machine doing what I want (3 drive test before taking the drobo offline)...

 

1 thing, is there a way to view the share free/used space as a total and not just all the drives combined on the main screen?

 

here is my test main screen....

 

something like:

 

what I am talking about would let me quickly see my overall share size - pie chart would be nice but bytes/gb/tb would work as a whole... note the added line in the command area...

 

is there a way to achieve this or an addon which would show a chart, progress bar? indicating used space for the share iteself? I am sure you know what I am getting at with me only wanting 1 huge drive represented.

 

Also if I understand correctly, when initially setting up unraid server, you should use the largest drive you have be parity? I plan on starting with 2x 750gb and 2x 1.5TB drives. Later I will add addition 1 to 1.5 tb drives as needed... I want to make sure I will not have to re-do anything if at all possible as the initial data transfer will probably take several days to comeplete.

 

I have my flash key and paypal ready, just being extra caustious I guess...

 

Thanks,

Tom

Yes, install the unMENU add-on package.  (described here )  It is a web-server with several built-in pages and a whole set of plug-in pages to add lots of new ways to keep track of your unRAID server.  It is written in "awk" a programming language that is supplied on the unMENU distribution.  It appears on port 8080 on your server when running. The plug-in pages are also written in awk (or shell) and can be extended to do almost anything.

 

unMENU has a much improved built-in with a improved main display, including the total space and drives not yet in the array.

 

Its built-in main display looks like this:

http://i35.tinypic.com/1o87xw.jpg

 

The even more impressive myMain plug-in to unMENU adds lots more features (written by bjp999) and it will look liike like this: http://img515.imageshack.us/img515/4333/bgmymenuv09jz5.jpg

 

If you install the unMENU-web extension, written by BubbaQ, it will install a more capable web-server "lighttpd" and a set of "extensions" with its own main display:  from here (and I suggest you give it a try) it looks like this: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=3354.0;attach=1223;image

 

The unMENU-Web has a super new file-browser that works from your browser, and I wrote an "extension" for unMENU-Web that also lets you run most all of the unMENU plug-ins too.

 

Lots of ways to get a total of the free space.

 

Joe L.

Yes, install the unMENU add-on package.  (described here )  It is a web-server with several built-in pages and a whole set of plug-in pages to add lots of new ways to keep track of your unRAID server.   It is written in "awk" a programming language that is supplied on the unMENU distribution.  It appears on port 8080 on your server when running. The plug-in pages are also written in awk (or shell) and can be extended to do almost anything.

 

unMENU has a much improved built-in with a improved main display, including the total space and drives not yet in the array.

 

Its built-in main display looks like this:

http://i35.tinypic.com/1o87xw.jpg

 

The even more impressive myMain plug-in to unMENU adds lots more features (written by bjp999) and it will look liike like this: http://img515.imageshack.us/img515/4333/bgmymenuv09jz5.jpg

 

If you install the unMENU-web extension, written by BubbaQ, it will install a more capable web-server "lighttpd" and a set of "extensions" with its own main display:  from here (and I suggest you give it a try) it looks like this: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=3354.0;attach=1223;image

 

The unMENU-Web has a super new file-browser that works from your browser, and I wrote an "extension" for unMENU-Web that also lets you run most all of the unMENU plug-ins too.

 

Lots of ways to get a total of the free space.

 

Joe L.

 

Thanks again for all the info, well I bit the bullent and purchased a pro key, now I am waiting on the file I need so I can set it up, everything is ready, just waiting on the key...

 

Ok,

I have my unraid setup now running and am performing my initial back-up, drobo has been sold on ebay, I hope I don't regret it, but so far so good.

 

I note that the bubba extension does not run when unraid starts, is there a way to force this to run each time w/o using the windows installer?

 

Also will at least the feature of displaying the total, free and used space showing actual GB/TB be added anytime soon to the official version? It would be a great addition and was one of the things that suprised me that it was not. I am hoping this will be added to the official release and a cherry on the cake would be a pie or progress image for quick at a glance status of space on the array.

 

Tom

is there a way to force this to run each time w/o using the windows installer?

If you have installed unmenu, and have used the unmenu-package-manager to "Auto-Install" on reboot and of the downloaded packages, and have put the unraidweb-0.1.04-i386-bubba.tgz file in /boot/packages

 

then... you can simply create a file in the /boot/packages/ folder named "unraidweb.auto_install" by doing this:

log in via the console or via telnet then type:

echo "installpkg unraidweb-0.1.04-i386-bubba.tgz" >/boot/packages/unraidweb.auto_install

 

When you reboot, the newly created .auto_install file will be run along with any others you set to "auto-install on reboot"

(If you named your "unraidweb*.bubba.tgz different than the name I have in my /boot/packages directory, use your alternate name.  It must end with .tgz for the installpkg to work)

 

Joe L.