First time build - What to do AFTER the UnRAID server is built?!

[Kaygee]

ipconfig /flushdns from your workstation.

 

mac addresses are matched to ip addresses, ip addresses are matched to dns names, netbios is fudged into dns. Changing switches means dns/netbios is temporarily broken (2-30 mins). The above command should fix it.

 

or use http://192.168.1.3:8080

 

unmenu sits on the alternate http port (8080), unraid uses the default port of 80.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[betaman]

Thanks Kaygee...got it working after a couple of restarts!  I'm well on my way to my next issue - configuring UPS backup!

[RobJ]

Added to the FAQ (link back only).  Feel free to edit or expand.

  Why did //tower stop working after changing the router or switch?

 

If anyone has a better way of wording the question, to make it easier for a searcher to find, or recognize as relevant to their problem, please let me know.  It just needs to be relatively brief, with a minimum of punctuation.  I did add some qualifying descriptive text, before pointing to Kaygee's helpful post.

[spinbot]

Time for me to jump on to one of betaman's threads! 

 

 

We are both in a very similar situation.  I'm being a bit more cautious as I have run pre-clear about 5 or 6 times now ( as I had some issues with my ram ).  It's just finishing its last cycle and then I am ready to mount the drives.  Betaman.. you may want to read some of the final posts here:  http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=4404.new;topicseen#new .  Just a way to move some data to the array and confirm its accuracy, before you start moving TB of info.

 

I've only purchased 2 new drives ( 1.5TB each ) as I have other drives already with data on them.  I am going to have to move the data off my largest drive into the array first, format it, install it on the array, then move data from my next largest drive, format it, install it on the array, etc, etc, etc.

 

I'm still unsure of setting up the "shares".  The primary reason's I built this server are to 1. regain my living room as its overwhelmed with 2000 DVD cases; provide instant access to my DVD collection; to get around my Popcorn Hours inability to mount more than 1 drive ( when I bring up the menu of movies, I want to see EVERY movie, not just one physical drive); and some form of backup.  So, in order to see all the content on ALL the drives on the PCH A-110, do I just create one big share called "Media" and everything going into it or can I create:  Video - DVD , Video - TV , Video - Trailer and Audio ?

 

What I have on HDD for video is 90% .iso , 1% VIDEO_TS (which i can convert easily enough ), 6% .avi (tv episodes) and 3% .mov (I have trailers for many of my movies, so the skin I use with the PCH lets me select "play the movie" or "play the trailer".    I guess I have some .mkv files too.  I have only a few BluRay discs, however at this time I have no BluRay-Rom to read/rip them.

 

I know their is talk of http , Samba and i think one other way of getting the info from the server to the PCH, but I must say I'm not familiar with any of them.    Getting the drive shares figured out before I move the data is preferred (for me).

 

betaman  when you are finished your setup, will you have a HDD in your PCH or not?  I have a 1.5TB in mine now, but I plan to remove it.  I know you need the drive in it to run *something*.  I only installed mine as my network connection was so poor I couldn't stream properly from one room to the other ( I was using slingbox ethernet over powerline adapters back then ).    I'm thinking that I would rather use the 1.5TB drive in the unraid server as the data is protected then.  I remember reading before how some people were getting a SATA to SD (or one of those type of cards) to store the applications on.  I don't use my PCH for much beyond its primary function.  I do have custom skins  (like below), but even them I can't remember if I needed to store anything on the PCH itself for.

 

[Kaygee]

Having a hdd or storage of some kind is pretty much a must have, your front end (nice looking fe btw) is installed on the hdd, the nmt apps are installed on the hdd. A lot of nmt front ends require additional daemons or services like telnet being installed. I was in the same boat, I removed a 1TB hdd from the nmt and replaced it with a smaller sata hdd.

 

For adding apps to the nmt i use the nmt community installer:

http://www.nmtinstaller.com/?p=download

 

It will make managing your nmt software installs a doddle.

[betaman]

Time for me to jump on to one of betaman's threads! 

 

betaman  when you are finished your setup, will you have a HDD in your PCH or not?  I have a 1.5TB in mine now, but I plan to remove it.   I know you need the drive in it to run *something*.  I only installed mine as my network connection was so poor I couldn't stream properly from one room to the other ( I was using slingbox ethernet over powerline adapters back then ).    I'm thinking that I would rather use the 1.5TB drive in the unraid server as the data is protected then.   I remember reading before how some people were getting a SATA to SD (or one of those type of cards) to store the applications on.  I don't use my PCH for much beyond its primary function.   I do have custom skins  (like below), but even them I can't remember if I needed to store anything on the PCH itself for.

 

I've just ordered a 1.8" 40 pin to SATA adapter for a 40GB Toshiba HDD that I pulled from an old MP3 player.  I want to have NMT apps on my A-110 but do not plan to store any movies on the local hard drive.  If you are using YAMJ (or even UMC) then you can manage your skin from your local PC and store the files on your UnRaid box or on your NMT.  I will probably choose the NMT just to keep the server cleaner.

 

As for user shares, I'm not certain yet how this is handled with UnRaid.  I started copying over some data last night through Windows just to test my Gigabit switch.  I was getting between 50-60 MB/sec.  I think I copied over 1 TB worth of data in just over 4 hours.  I will have to check out the thread you noted before copying over more data.  Anyway, I think you can manually control the copying of files (along with the structure) you want and when you create the user share it will create a "root" directory (e.g. media) on all drives that you can point the share to on the NMT.  Similar to what you can do now with Winbolic or even the Windows operating system with shared drives.  Here is the structure I was thinking of using based on type and file structure:

 

Drive 1

/media

/media/TV

/media/BluRay

/media/DVD

/media/Collections

 

Drive 2

/media

/media/TV

/media/BluRay

/media/DVD

/media/Collections

 

etc.  and then point the NMT to the UnRaid server /media directory using user shares.  The reason I will have the same structure on each drive is because I will eventually fill the drives in sequence with different media types.  The question I have is once I start using user shares will I also be able to see all content from all drives in the /media/TV folder?  Not sure why I would need this except to easily determine if I already have a certain movie or tv show.

 

This weeked will be big for me as I'll try to get streaming content from the server to my NMT and TV.  I think I will start with SMB first since I know how to use it.  If that doesn't work then I'll try NFS.  If that doesn't work then my last resort is http using llink.  I don't have a lot of DVD iso's but I could envision upgrading to the C-200 in the future and storing BD iso's so I'm trying to avoid http for as long as possible.

[betaman]

Well, I'm happy to report that I can successfully stream using smb from my UnRAID box!  User shares is definitely AWESOME and it works just like I was hoping (i.e. NMT share points to root directory aka "user share" which in my case is called "media" using the following address on NMT, smb://"ip address of unraid box"/media).  The beautiful thing about user shares that I was really hoping for was the ability to have common subdirectories viewed also as a "share".  As in my example directory structure above, the media user share groups all of the BluRay content from all the drives and lists it in one directory as well as the TV and Collections.  This is extremely convenient if you are using the standard NMT interface to navigate to your movies (especially 1080p ones that don't work behind YAMJ!!).

 

@Spinbot:  If you have any trouble configuring your PCH feel free to PM me.

[spinbot]

Perfect betaman! 

 

4:14AM in Belleville, Ontario.. going to catch a few hours of sleep then work on the shares and test moving some data over next

 

I was using YAMJ and I have .nfo files , the odd image file as well as .mov files in the same folder as my .iso file of the movie ( this was so I could force YAMJ to find the right info at IMDB, right image as well as load a movie trailer ).  Does that affect my shares at all?

 

Secondly... windows file system versus Linux .... I have movie titles with spaces in them on my Windows machine.  Will that pose an issue on the Unraid machine ?

[Joe L.]

Perfect betaman! 

 

4:14AM in Belleville, Ontario.. going to catch a few hours of sleep then work on the shares and test moving some data over next

 

I was using YAMJ and I have .nfo files , the odd image file as well as .mov files in the same folder as my .iso file of the movie ( this was so I could force YAMJ to find the right info at IMDB, right image as well as load a movie trailer ).   Does that affect my shares at all?

Linux does not care what files are in various folders.  You can group them as you please.   

 

I have two MG-35 media players on my LAN in my home.  At one point I was experimenting and had a .jpg file per .iso that contained an image describing the movie.  At that point in time I had all my ISO images in a "Movies" share, spread across a number of physical disks.  I found my poor media player was taking forever (it seemed  like forever) to display to me the listing of the movies. (about 8 or 9 hundred DVD's in my collection, and 2 files per (.ISO and .JPG)...  The listing took a long time to transmit across the LAN.

 

Eventually I made shares for alpha ranges.  I now have "Movies A-D", "Movies E-J", "Movies K-O", etc...  I use a script I wrote  to link the .ISO file in the "Movies" share to the individual movie share ranges.  A link is similar to a window's shortcut. It takes no space, but provides an alternate pointer (directory entry) for the same file.  That way, the file is visible in two places, both the main "Movies" share, and the "Movies X-Y" range share.  It just makes finding a specific movies faster with a large collection.

Secondly... windows file system versus Linux .... I have movie titles with spaces in them on my Windows machine.   Will that pose an issue on the Unraid machine ?

The spaces are not a problem.  There are a few characters not allowed in a shared file name on the LAN, but those are windows limitations.    As far as Linux is concerned, only two characters are not allowed.  The forward slash "/" (used to separate directory names in a path) and the "null" character (value= 0x00) used internally to Linux to mark the end of the string of characters in a directory or file name.

 

At the command prompt in Linux, to reference a name that has spaces or a character special to the "shell" within it, requires you to either quote the name

"The Day The Earth Stood Still"

or to escape the special characters

The\ Day\ The\ Earth\ Stood\ Still

 

Characters special to the "shell" include

?,*,(,),[,],<,>,^,$,%,#,|,\

The "\" is the escape character.  To have it in the file name, you need to escape it... "\\"    (Window's really does NOT like backslashes in directory or file names at all, as it uses that character to separate directory/fie names in paths to files.)

 

Any file or directory name with any of those characters within it will need to be quoted as described above.

 

From http://support.microsoft.com/kb/909264

NetBIOS computer names

Allowed characters

NetBIOS computer names can contain all alphanumeric characters except for the extended characters that are listed in the "Disallowed characters" section. Names can contain a period, but names cannot start with a period.

 

Disallowed characters

NetBIOS computer names cannot contain the following characters:

 

    * backslash (\)

    * slash mark (/)

    * colon ( : )

    * asterisk (*)

    * question mark (?)

    * quotation mark (")

    * less than sign (<)

    * greater than sign (>)

    * vertical bar (|)

 

Names can contain a period (.). However, the name cannot start with a period. The use of non-DNS names with periods is allowed in Microsoft Windows NT. However, periods should not be used in Microsoft Windows 2000 or in later versions of Windows.

 

Joe L.

[betaman]

Perfect betaman! 

 

4:14AM in Belleville, Ontario.. going to catch a few hours of sleep then work on the shares and test moving some data over next

 

I was using YAMJ and I have .nfo files , the odd image file as well as .mov files in the same folder as my .iso file of the movie ( this was so I could force YAMJ to find the right info at IMDB, right image as well as load a movie trailer ).   Does that affect my shares at all?

 

Absolutely not an issue.  YAMJ will interpret the info on the UnRAID box the same as if it were on your PC.  As I mentioned, I was extremely impressed with how user shares behaves and it truly is perfect for the NMT.  I need to test what happens when a disk is spun down and I try to play something.  I read where another user said they just have to hit play twice (once to spin up the disk and another time to actually play the file).

[daniel.boone]

I need to test what happens when a disk is spun down and I try to play something.  I read where another user said they just have to hit play twice (once to spin up the disk and another time to actually play the file).

 

I've used YAMJ on unRaid for some time now. I've noticed a slight lag when the drive spins up but I've never had to hit play twice. I stream using lighttp in case that makes a difference.

[betaman]

I've used YAMJ on unRaid for some time now. I've noticed a slight lag when the drive spins up but I've never had to hit play twice. I stream using lighttp in case that makes a difference.

 

Thanks db...once I get the parity drive running, I'll do some testing and report back.

 

EDIT:  I want to add cache_dirs script and edit my go file but I'm not sure which attributes I really need.  Is this the correct edit for my go script:

 

/boot/cache_dirs -w

[Joe L.]

I've used YAMJ on unRaid for some time now. I've noticed a slight lag when the drive spins up but I've never had to hit play twice. I stream using lighttp in case that makes a difference.

 

Thanks db...once I get the parity drive running, I'll do some testing and report back.

 

EDIT:  I want to add cache_dirs script and edit my go file but I'm not sure which attributes I really need.  Is this the correct edit for my go script:

 

/boot/cache_dirs -w

That's all most people will need.

 

Joe L.