NEW to unRAID, some roadblocks ahead (help needed)


s.Oliver

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hey there, unRAIDers!

 

coming from the Mac World of Servers/Software (and so FreeBSD beneath it) some things are different enough to stop my experience with unRAID, even before it started. so i hope to find some helpful souls here and get this thing off ground. so lets dive into it...

 

problem 1:

USB stick, trial license and bios startup order all well, until unRAID tries to get it's IP from dhcp. long story short, unRAID has problems with the additional equipped 4-port gigabit pci-card (Fujitsu D2745-A11 = Intel i340-T4). i selected this one, after researching for quite some time, and being sure of good linux driver support. to bolster this, i just did a quick install of fedora 22 server and it was supported out of the box. so at least, there are drivers!  ;)

to get on with unRAID, i just removed it and unRAID booted and received it's IP; so far so good.

>> how to get this card working (it's a requirement later on) and find/compile/however the necessary drivers?

 

problem 2:

the X-Case 19" rack enclosure is equipped with 3x 120 mm fans. the motherboard has enough headers to deal with the enclosure fans and the 2x fans from the cpu-cooler. the bios shows all fans with their correct values. it reports the "NCT7904D" as hardware monitoring chip.

after boot, sure enough, all 3 enclosure fans are running at 3000 rpms making alot of noise. after installing perl, running the sensors / sensors-detect command/script i get just the basic values for the cpu temps. any plug-in dealing with fan control do not detect anything beyond that. so i guess i would need a driver for this particular chip used by the supermicro board. it's just too loud to work, not even thinking about concentration.

>> how to get the fans controlled by unRAID? i'm willing to put effort into the solution, just need enough help to work me through.

 

side notes:

unRAID's dashboard doesn't recognize this board/cpu exactly. the mobo gets identified as X10DAi (which hasn't got the LSI 3008 chip, but first test show, that unRAID detects HDDs connected to it). the processor is declared as "Not Specified @ Unknown". i guess not really important, maybe just when it comes to driver/extensions which require exact details.

 

 

ok, so my situation is actually a pretty stupid one. i could get unRAID working as to the point of exploring/testing it's features, but the noise level of the enclosure fans makes me switch it off, after max. 30-60 mins (headaches starts). so problem 2 needs to be adressed first.

before i've decided, that unRAID could be a good solution, i've read up quite a bit in the forums of diverse stuff and saw how well the community around responded/helped out. so this built up confidence and wants me to get into the unRAID-world. later on, a few other challenges might arise (VMs, passthrough stuff), but i think these are all solvable.

 

thx. alot for your time reading through and i would appreciate any help. if you need additional details, logs, etc. please gimme a hint how to retrieve them and i'm back here with them posted.

 

have a nice day, and let your unRAID rock! and later on, mine too  :)

 

cheers

 

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Because unRAID is installed and runs entirely in RAM, it is completely stripped down of everything unnecessary, to make sure that as much memory as possible is available for operation.  All you need to do is determine the correct driver for that network card, and request it from Tom, at LimeTech.  Drivers are small, but not included unless there's a use for it, no need taking up memory on everyone's system if no one is using it.  But if one person needs it, others probably will too, sooner or later, especially if your reports of it are favorable.  And if the nct module isn't included now, request that too (they are tiny).

 

As to the motherboard and other info, that just comes from the DMI info, part of the BIOS.  It's just what the BIOS is reporting, only displayed to inform the user, not used by the system.  If the info is 'unknown' or wrong, that's what the machine is saying.  Ignore it.

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Because unRAID is installed and runs entirely in RAM, it is completely stripped down of everything unnecessary, to make sure that as much memory as possible is available for operation.  All you need to do is determine the correct driver for that network card, and request it from Tom, at LimeTech.  Drivers are small, but not included unless there's a use for it, no need taking up memory on everyone's system if no one is using it.  But if one person needs it, others probably will too, sooner or later, especially if your reports of it are favorable.  And if the nct module isn't included now, request that too (they are tiny).

 

hey RobJ! you're right, i knew alot beforehand (reading up so much) and understanding the point of less is more  ;)

i just thought, because of lots of supermicro boards in use here, that maybe these are covered, as probably alot of them share the same chip.

 

As to the motherboard and other info, that just comes from the DMI info, part of the BIOS.  It's just what the BIOS is reporting, only displayed to inform the user, not used by the system.  If the info is 'unknown' or wrong, that's what the machine is saying.  Ignore it.

 

hmm... i'll check with another linux system, what they do read out. kinda strange, that these boards wouldn't want to be identified right. anyway, as you say, it's not important for the functionality, but later on, when virtualization and stuff comes on, maybe some software wants to tune itself to hardware and that would then be problematic.

 

question: what's the best/official way to contact Tom?

 

thx. for being here and helping with ideas.

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