Tips and Tweaks page


Recommended Posts

In the "Use static IPs" section, I would suggest setting the IP address in the upper end of the range.  The  reason being is that not all ( if any) of the cheaper routers keep track of static IP addresses.  Many of them depend on the user to enter the appropriate IP address in a reservation table on the router.  If the static IP address is at the bottom of the range, then the router may assign that address to some new device that requests an IP address via DHCP.  (There was a fellow who had this happen a while back and I only suceeded in helping him when I noticed that there were no DHCP requests in his log file.  He had used an address of 192.168.1.12  and something was coming on line and grabbing that address.  He can tell you that two devices with the same IP address don't coexist peaceably!)

 

I think this problem may be a much bigger issue as more and more wireless devices starting using the Internet (Internet of Things).  I know when My kids and Grandkids arrive at my house, the first thing they do is turn on the wireless access point and my network suddenly acquires another half dozen or so devices (phones, tablets, laptops, etc.)  Plus, every AV and video device in my house now wants to be connected.  I can wait until my refrigerator and door bell want to connect...

 

Going to the high end of the range, means that you have two hundred plus devices that connect before you get into address conflict trouble and most of the cheaper routers will choke trying to handle that many devices simultaneously.  (I have a friend who was an IT guy at a High School and he said that 50 active connections was about the limit.) 

Link to comment

Not sure static IP is any better than DHCP. Seen plenty of people get a new internet service and wonder why they can't find their static IP unRAID that is on 192.168.1.x from their DHCP devices that are now on 192.168.2.x

 

All the devices on my network, including unRAID, use DHCP. I have the router reserve IP addresses by MAC address for each of them. Only need to manage them in one place that way. Probably lots of other people do it that way

Link to comment

Not sure static IP is any better than DHCP. Seen plenty of people get a new internet service and wonder why they can't find their static IP unRAID that is on 192.168.1.x from their DHCP devices that are now on 192.168.2.x

 

All the devices on my network, including unRAID, use DHCP. I have the router reserve IP addresses by MAC address for each of them. Only need to manage them in one place that way. Probably lots of other people do it that way

 

Well, one reason is if you use NFS.  Whenever I have setup a device to use NFS (although the reason to do so is much reduced with the more recent versions of SAMBA), I have had to use the server's IP address to setup the mount point.  If there is a way to do it without having that IP address, I am not aware of it...

Link to comment

Not sure static IP is any better than DHCP. Seen plenty of people get a new internet service and wonder why they can't find their static IP unRAID that is on 192.168.1.x from their DHCP devices that are now on 192.168.2.x

 

All the devices on my network, including unRAID, use DHCP. I have the router reserve IP addresses by MAC address for each of them. Only need to manage them in one place that way. Probably lots of other people do it that way

 

Well, one reason is if you use NFS.  Whenever I have setup a device to use NFS (although the reason to do so is much reduced with the more recent versions of SAMBA), I have had to use the server's IP address to setup the mount point.  If there is a way to do it without having that IP address, I am not aware of it...

I have the IP address. I just assign it in my router instead of in unRAID. unRAID used DHCP to get the assigned IP from the router. It is always the same, known IP because my router has that specific IP address reserved for the MAC address of my unRAID server. Same for all of my other devices. They all use DHCP but they all have known, unchanging IP addresses because I set them up in my router. Everything managed in one place but everything has a known, unchanging IP address.
Link to comment

Not sure static IP is any better than DHCP. Seen plenty of people get a new internet service and wonder why they can't find their static IP unRAID that is on 192.168.1.x from their DHCP devices that are now on 192.168.2.x

 

All the devices on my network, including unRAID, use DHCP. I have the router reserve IP addresses by MAC address for each of them. Only need to manage them in one place that way. Probably lots of other people do it that way

 

Well, one reason is if you use NFS.  Whenever I have setup a device to use NFS (although the reason to do so is much reduced with the more recent versions of SAMBA), I have had to use the server's IP address to setup the mount point.  If there is a way to do it without having that IP address, I am not aware of it...

I have the IP address. I just assign it in my router instead of in unRAID. unRAID used DHCP to get the assigned IP from the router. It is always the same, known IP because my router has that specific IP address reserved for the MAC address of my unRAID server. Same for all of my other devices. They all use DHCP but they all have known, unchanging IP addresses because I set them up in my router. Everything managed in one place but everything has a known, unchanging IP address.

 

True, you can do that. On my old cheap router (pre 2010), there is a table for up to eight reservations.  (I have 15 addresses currently assigned on my router via DHCP and that does not include the two servers!)  Of course, you have to know the MAC address.  I know that the Network Settings page for unRAID servers has that information but then you have to explain to how to find both that address, the current IP address of the server that was assigned through DHCP and how to find the proper place in the router settings to be able to make the proper entries.  Either way will work, you make your choice.  Perhaps, you would like to write up an explanation of how to do the reservation method in any user's router that will be easy for the neophyte to follow?  ::) 

Link to comment

Not sure static IP is any better than DHCP. Seen plenty of people get a new internet service and wonder why they can't find their static IP unRAID that is on 192.168.1.x from their DHCP devices that are now on 192.168.2.x

 

All the devices on my network, including unRAID, use DHCP. I have the router reserve IP addresses by MAC address for each of them. Only need to manage them in one place that way. Probably lots of other people do it that way

 

Well, one reason is if you use NFS.  Whenever I have setup a device to use NFS (although the reason to do so is much reduced with the more recent versions of SAMBA), I have had to use the server's IP address to setup the mount point.  If there is a way to do it without having that IP address, I am not aware of it...

I have the IP address. I just assign it in my router instead of in unRAID. unRAID used DHCP to get the assigned IP from the router. It is always the same, known IP because my router has that specific IP address reserved for the MAC address of my unRAID server. Same for all of my other devices. They all use DHCP but they all have known, unchanging IP addresses because I set them up in my router. Everything managed in one place but everything has a known, unchanging IP address.

 

True, you can do that. On my old cheap router (pre 2010), there is a table for up to eight reservations.  (I have 15 addresses currently assigned on my router via DHCP and that does not include the two servers!)  Of course, you have to know the MAC address.  I know that the Network Settings page for unRAID servers has that information but then you have to explain to how to find both that address, the current IP address of the server that was assigned through DHCP and how to find the proper place in the router settings to be able to make the proper entries.  Either way will work, you make your choice.  Perhaps, you would like to write up an explanation of how to do the reservation method in any user's router that will be easy for the neophyte to follow?  ::) 

I do it the same way as trurl, and I think that is the best way, since the router will not give a client that ip address over dhcp then.

 

In my old Asus router (Asus N-66U) and my Ubiquiti edgerouter, I can map the mac addresses to an static IP, but the router would tell me the hostname too if that is available, then I know which MAC address my unraid server has.

Link to comment

I see good things happening here!  Are we ready to go live?

 

I'd like to add the plugin to the wiki page, when you feel it's ready.  In order to do that though, you'll need to set up a plugin support thread for it, that I can link to.  Then I'd like to go live with this, promote it in the beta thread and possibly elsewhere.  I'd like to introduce these as a set of new Troubleshooting tools, "Fix Common Problems" plugin (with the new Troubleshooting mode), "Tips and Tweaks" wiki page, and "Tips and Tweaks" plugin, and strongly recommend everyone try them out, but especially anyone having problems with recent versions.  Anyone see a reason why it's too early?  I'd hoped for more critiquing of the page.  And I'd hoped to add something about write caching, but I'd like more knowledgeable opinions on it.  I'm not comfortable yet with how to present the 'dirty' options.

 

I've created a post on the plugin here http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=49233.0

 

I think we are ready to go.  I'm sure there will be some changes once we get more feedback on the settings and what works for people.

Link to comment

I have the IP address. I just assign it in my router instead of in unRAID. unRAID used DHCP to get the assigned IP from the router. It is always the same, known IP because my router has that specific IP address reserved for the MAC address of my unRAID server. Same for all of my other devices. They all use DHCP but they all have known, unchanging IP addresses because I set them up in my router. Everything managed in one place but everything has a known, unchanging IP address.

 

In part, I do the same, but I *also* (where possible) set them as static on the item itself.  In the router, I set a range of known addresses from my list for everything I know of, and let anything else (like SMART phones of relatives) get addresses above those.  That takes care of all IP reservations.  But then on primary machines like my desktop and unRAID server, I set them to not use DHCP, and I assign them the IP from that same list.

 

Why?  Mostly because it seems wasteful to keep asking for the same thing, and I hate waste.  It's fixing what isn't broken.  I know it's safely reserved on the router, and there's no wasted requests for what it knows it's going to use anyway.

 

But for unRAID, I have a couple of other reasons.  The first is not major, but a nuisance when examining syslogs.  Every renewal puts a bunch of stuff in the syslog, more if there's bridging, even more if there's Dockers.  And if the users' router has a short lease time, then the syslog is full of this stuff, making more to look through, annoying since it seems so unnecessary.  In some cases, I've seen lease times of 2 hours, and since most are configured to renew in half the lease time, they had a bunch of IP renewal lines every single hour.  I'm not sure why we can't at least recommend monthly IP lease renewals, or every 2 months so it happens monthly only.

 

The other reason is because I found a problem recently in a users syslog that appeared tied to the first renewal (see this, the DHCP comments).  And I believe I saw another user with similar.  It looks to me as if something isn't renewing correctly when there's bridging and/or Dockers involved, or some other special circumstance (jumbo frames maybe, not getting set correctly on the renewal?).  I fully accept that I may have the wrong diagnosis there, and may be 'jumping the gun' too quickly.  If anyone else sees something different, please feel free to say so.  But it's clear in that syslog, the issues start with the first renewal, and disappear when the user changed to non-renewing, static assignment.

 

I think Frank's idea of using a high range for 'static' assignments is a good one, a good recommendation.  Ensures no conflicts.

 

In the "Use static IPs" section, I would suggest setting the IP address in the upper end of the range.  The  reason being is that not all ( if any) of the cheaper routers keep track of static IP addresses.  Many of them depend on the user to enter the appropriate IP address in a reservation table on the router.  If the static IP address is at the bottom of the range, then the router may assign that address to some new device that requests an IP address via DHCP.  (There was a fellow who had this happen a while back and I only suceeded in helping him when I noticed that there were no DHCP requests in his log file.  He had used an address of 192.168.1.12  and something was coming on line and grabbing that address.  He can tell you that two devices with the same IP address don't coexist peaceably!)

This troubles me, it's hard for me to believe that decent routers would allow that.  That would be an obvious bug.  I don't know for sure, but I suspect that the router did not know about the static, so gave .12 to a device, then later the other device turned on and began using .12.  There's nothing a router could do about that except log it, as it knows this is coming from the wrong MAC address.  But routers can't scream or shout or raise red flags.  All it can do is log it, and who reads those!  As you said, static assignments should be set in a safe range, unreachable.

 

As to using DHCP because of router replacements, that seems a special circumstance, where users really ought to *know* that a new router may not use the same default subnet.  Even if it doesn't occur to them after they install a new router, the first time you turn on your unRAID server and can't find it on the network, the reason for the issue should slap you right then, and you'd slap yourself and get to work fixing it.  It seems such an obvious possibility when you set the router up, that you may have to tweak the static assignments.  I don't know how we can help if they can't figure that out.  Add a FAQ - "I got a new router, didn't touch my unRAID server, why can't I see it on the network any more?"  It's almost embarrassing.

Link to comment

Some observations on Flow Control settings:

 

First, if you look at my hardware listings for my two servers, you will note that they both have low power CPU's and an Intel Network card installed.  The network cards were installed during the ver 6 beta program because of problems with playback of high data-rate BluRay ISO's.  The Intel cards solved that playback problem but they introduced a new issue with a large number of dropped packets when playing back a BluRay ISO.  Since this didn't cause a problem, I simply lived with the situation.  The players I use are Netgear NTV550 media players and they are installed at each three different media centers throughout my home.  (Apparently, the NTV550 flood the server with packet requests when playing high bit rate material!)

 

Second, connecting everything together was (and remains) a logistical nightmare.    The main switch is a 16-port Gb switch to which the router and its associated modem are connected.  Both servers are also connected to this switch.  One on the media centers is on the same floor as this router and it is connected directly to this switch.  The other two media centers are on a different floor of the house.  I managed to get a cat5 cable to a  center location on that floor and I installed a 8-port Gb switch there.  During construction, I did install a cat5 cable to the general areas where these media centers are.  What I never realized at the time was that in a few short years everything in the media center would expect to have its own Internet connection!  So the solution to that problem was to install 5-port 10/100 switches at each one and all of AV gear at that location is connected to it.  (10/100 switches were much cheaper and most of the time, only one device will ever require at high data rate.)

 

As you can see, one media center is on the same switch as both servers and the other two media centers are three switches away from either server. 

 

So the Tips and Tweaks plugin gets released and I installed on my Test Bed server to see how it worked.  Wow, I thought as I looked at it and read the help files that were included with it.  Plus, I had seen a post in another thread that said that turning off the Flow Control would solve the dropped packet problem.  So I decided to test it.  I did this by determine the number of packets received turning a timed fifteen minute segment of the same BluRay ISO.  (I used the same segment for all of the tests.)  With both Flow Control 'on' NIC Offloading 'on', the percentage of drops was 152% of the total packets received.  With the Flow Control 'off' and NIC Offloading 'on', the percentage of drops was 1.96%.  With both settings 'off', the percentage dropped to 1.48%.  Wow, thought I.  This looks like a no brainer.

 

I next installed the new plugin on my Media server and set both Flow Control and NIC Offloading to 'off'.  After a lunch, I went down to one of the other media centers to watch a movie.  I picked a nice comedy that was contained in a BluRay ISO.  The studio logo had not finished before the video playback stalled and proceeded in 'slooow moootion'.  I thought perhaps it was an anomaly.  I stopped the playback and restarted.  Same thing.  Tried another movie, same thing.  I ran up the stairs to change both setting back to 'on'.  The problem was gone. 

 

To make a long story short, it appears that if you go through more than ONE switch, you could have problem with playback if you turn the Flow Control and NIC Offloading 'off'.

 

One point I want to make at this juncture is that you may want to tone down your recommendation about turning these two parameters 'off' and suggest that issues can arise in networks that have any complexity in their makeup.  If one wishes to experiment to be sure to test with high data-rate material on all of the end points to make sure that problems are not being introduced! 

 

Link to comment

I simply set the timeout for Static DHCP Entires to be 30 days, so it's centrally managed and doesn't cause chatty requests.

I haven't checked if it's commonly configurable, but I've noticed in other's syslogs that they commonly renew in half the the time they request.  Do you find yours renew every 15 days?

 

It's a lot easier to manage that way instead of coding it as static entries on each and every device.

Agreed, and for the most part that's what I do.  But I only have a few I can set to static, and only one with a syslog that gets littered!

Link to comment

Some observations on Flow Control settings: ...

Great feedback, just what we were looking for.  As Dan said and you've emphasized, make changes slowly, one at a time, and test, verify that it helps.  Sounds like the combination of settings that may help one user may not be right for another user.  So users may want to test many combinations.

Link to comment

Some observations on Flow Control settings:

 

First, if you look at my hardware listings for my two servers, you will note that they both have low power CPU's and an Intel Network card installed.  The network cards were installed during the ver 6 beta program because of problems with playback of high data-rate BluRay ISO's.  The Intel cards solved that playback problem but they introduced a new issue with a large number of dropped packets when playing back a BluRay ISO.  Since this didn't cause a problem, I simply lived with the situation.  The players I use are Netgear NTV550 media players and they are installed at each three different media centers throughout my home.  (Apparently, the NTV550 flood the server with packet requests when playing high bit rate material!)

 

Second, connecting everything together was (and remains) a logistical nightmare.    The main switch is a 16-port Gb switch to which the router and its associated modem are connected.  Both servers are also connected to this switch.  One on the media centers is on the same floor as this router and it is connected directly to this switch.  The other two media centers are on a different floor of the house.  I managed to get a cat5 cable to a  center location on that floor and I installed a 8-port Gb switch there.  During construction, I did install a cat5 cable to the general areas where these media centers are.  What I never realized at the time was that in a few short years everything in the media center would expect to have its own Internet connection!  So the solution to that problem was to install 5-port 10/100 switches at each one and all of AV gear at that location is connected to it.  (10/100 switches were much cheaper and most of the time, only one device will ever require at high data rate.)

 

As you can see, one media center is on the same switch as both servers and the other two media centers are three switches away from either server. 

 

So the Tips and Tweaks plugin gets released and I installed on my Test Bed server to see how it worked.  Wow, I thought as I looked at it and read the help files that were included with it.  Plus, I had seen a post in another thread that said that turning off the Flow Control would solve the dropped packet problem.  So I decided to test it.  I did this by determine the number of packets received turning a timed fifteen minute segment of the same BluRay ISO.  (I used the same segment for all of the tests.)  With both Flow Control 'on' NIC Offloading 'on', the percentage of drops was 152% of the total packets received.  With the Flow Control 'off' and NIC Offloading 'on', the percentage of drops was 1.96%.  With both settings 'off', the percentage dropped to 1.48%.  Wow, thought I.  This looks like a no brainer.

 

I next installed the new plugin on my Media server and set both Flow Control and NIC Offloading to 'off'.  After a lunch, I went down to one of the other media centers to watch a movie.  I picked a nice comedy that was contained in a BluRay ISO.  The studio logo had not finished before the video playback stalled and proceeded in 'slooow moootion'.  I thought perhaps it was an anomaly.  I stopped the playback and restarted.  Same thing.  Tried another movie, same thing.  I ran up the stairs to change both setting back to 'on'.  The problem was gone. 

 

To make a long story short, it appears that if you go through more than ONE switch, you could have problem with playback if you turn the Flow Control and NIC Offloading 'off'.

 

One point I want to make at this juncture is that you may want to tone down your recommendation about turning these two parameters 'off' and suggest that issues can arise in networks that have any complexity in their makeup.  If one wishes to experiment to be sure to test with high data-rate material on all of the end points to make sure that problems are not being introduced!

 

I'm not sure it's the complexity of your network that is the issue, I think it has more to do with the slower speed switches.  You are probably overwhelming the 10/100 switches and flow control helps with that.  The switch can only buffer so much before it has to request the sender pause with flow control.  Turning off Flow Control may or may not help in all cases.  That's why the Tips and Tweaks plugin recommends making changes and verifying how it affects your overall network and unRAID operation.

 

The NIC settings may interplay with each other.  You may find that setting higher NIC Rx and/or Tx buffers and Flow Control off might offer better results.

 

Default NIC settings are meant to handle most network situations and may not be optimized for performance.  That's why I developed a way to tweak the NIC settings because so many people using unRAID with VMs for media streaming and gaming are now pressing the performance envelope and default NIC settings might not offer the best performance.

Link to comment
  • 1 month later...

 

cp /boot/60-persistent-storage.rules /lib/udev/rules.d

udevadm control --reload-rules

udevadm trigger

sleep 5

 

 

What is the content of that file?

 

udev is also ran by unRAID upon startup and it  should find the relevant devices.

 

Here is the thread out of which all of this came. :)

 

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=38487.0

 

That persistent-rules file is based on unRAID v5, was it ever tried to run on unRAID v6 without copying this file?

 

FYI the rules file in v6 has been updated to support new NVMe cards as well, overwriting it with an 'old' file will loose such support.

 

I commented out the lines and rebooted. See pic. LOst my drive labels insomuch that unRaid can't tell which one is which and couldn't start the array. I am putting them back in ;)

 

FYI... I created a plugin which runs with the latest unRAID v6.2 version of persistent rules plus the modifications from bubbaQ for SCSI attached disks.

 

See also this discussion.

 

Link to comment
  • 1 month later...

Ok. Small tip for RobJ:

  • I want all of my syslogs redirected to a ELK (elasticsearch/logstash/kibana) instance for easy checking and log aggregation. so I inserted this into my go file:

echo "*.* @@192.168.2.5:514" >> /etc/rsyslog.conf
/etc/rc.d/rc.rsyslogd restart

 

which will make any syslog entries from this point on visible in my ELK instance.

 

If my php skills were any better, I could make a plugin to disable telnet and ftp via the WebGUI

 

Link to comment

You can disable FTP thru the GUI, see settings -> FTP server.

 

Yes, but it turns back on after a reboot and I forget to turn it off.  The Tips & Tweaks plugin would turn off FTP and telnet on each reboot when the plugin is loaded and would not require interaction if it is set by the user to turn off in the plugin.  As Ron Popeil would say "Set it and forget it".

Link to comment

dlandon has now added disabling of Telnet and FTP to the Tips and Tweaks plugin.  That makes it by far the easiest way to do it.  I've added the plugin link to the tips on the Tips and Tweaks wiki page.

 

I just added a performance tip (turning on turbo write) to the page, as it provides such a great write speed boost.  I did make sure to mention the downside.

 

I think it would be great to have a toggle for turbo write on the Main page.  Plugin anyone?

 

ken-ji, I haven't gotten to your tip yet, as I wanted to understand it better, as soon as I have time.  I'm afraid the only ELK's I knew about were 4 legged!

Link to comment

I think it would be great to have a toggle for turbo write on the Main page.  Plugin anyone?

There are a couple of additional scripts for the user scripts plugin dealing with turbowrite.  Simple enable / disable, and enabling / disabling based upon the number of drives spinning at the time (although this one really would require a spindown time of 1 hour to be set, since the minimum frequency for script running is every hour).

 

Almost as easy as bonienl creating a plugin.

Link to comment

I think it would be great to have a toggle for turbo write on the Main page.  Plugin anyone?

There are a couple of additional scripts for the user scripts plugin dealing with turbowrite.  Simple enable / disable, and enabling / disabling based upon the number of drives spinning at the time (although this one really would require a spindown time of 1 hour to be set, since the minimum frequency for script running is every hour).

 

Almost as easy as bonienl creating a plugin.

I'm sorry, I completely forgot about them, which is nuts since I've added them and been on the User Scripts screen rather often in the last few days!

 

I do still think a Main screen button/toggle would be somewhat quicker, more convenient.  Unless you add an option for a Main screen button for User Scripts!?!

Link to comment

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Restore formatting

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.