I've been running unRAID for about a year now, and I haven't made it past about 20 days before I have to do a cold shutdown.

 

The system, from a user perspective becomes completely unresponsive. I can ping it, but that's it. No docker UIs respond. Unraid web UI doesn't respond. No telnet, no ssh. According to a port scan, 23 is listening but I can never successfully connect to it.

 

I've avoided a reboot so far so that I can hopefully find some sort of cause here. I've got the flash drive connected to my PC, but the \logs folder is completely empty. Is there somewhere else I should be looking?

Give us a few more details.  What version of unRAID would be one.  A full description of your hardware would be another item.  And a list of plugins, Dockers, and VM's as complete as your memory will allow. Double check and make sure that there aren't any log files in the root of the Flash Drive. 

Do you have a monitor and keyboard attached to your server?

Our version is 6.2 or 6.2.1. I just started getting nags about the latest version.

 

Dockers I've got..

 

 

Rutorrent

Sickrage

delugevpn

plex

tonido

 

The machine is made from leftover parts. An old Xeon processor on the ASRock board that used to be on my old main PC. 12GB of RAM.

 

There's definitely no logs anywhere.

 

Since this is a recurring error,  what is the best way for me to gather live info? It seems like I can't rely on finding logs afterwards on the flash drive. So how can I setup something to continually dump to a syslog server or something?

Definately post up a Diagnostics report. You can create that by typing Diagnostics from command line or using the GUI. It will take a snap shot of your system and zip it up for posting here.

Diagnosticles attached.

unraid-diagnostics-20161216-1042.zip

Now read this Thread:

 

    https://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=39257.0

 

Particularity this line:

 

"* If the system crashes completely and there is no way to capture a final syslog, then start a tail on the unRAID console or Telnet session (tail -f /var/log/syslog)."

 

That will give a syslog that may contain the cause the of your problem. 

 

I would also open up the case and made sure that all of the fans are running and that the cooling fins on the CPU heat sink are clear of dust and dirt.  Check the spec's on the Power Supply to make sure that it large enough for your server load.  A single 12V rail is preferred for unRAID since, there is no need for a heavy duty GPU and unRAID will spin up all of the hard drives under certain conditions and that can result in high amperage requirement for a very short period of time.

 

 

I've got the tail running. Hopefully I'll remember to restart it when Microsoft decides I need a reboot whether I want it to or not.

 

I'll update this post when the next inevitable freeze happens.

I've got the tail running. Hopefully I'll remember to restart it when Microsoft decides I need a reboot whether I want it to or not.

 

I'll update this post when the next inevitable freeze happens.

If you have a monitor / keyboard attached to the server do it from there instead of via putty.  Your computer sleeping will also interrupt execution unless you use the screen program

 

Alternatively, you can also install the fix common problems plugin and then hit "troubleshooting mode" from its settings.  It'll do the tail (and some other diagnostics)