So I did have lengthy post but when I hit "Post" it logged me out and deleted the entire thing, so this one will be brief...and mildly salty.

 

First post. I'm new to UnRaid. I just got it running on a spare machine I had, and installed Community Applications on it. I have a few questions:

 

1. I see some shares already created: appdata, domains, isos, and system. What are these for?

2. Is it standard practice to create a user for yourself or just use root?

3. Is there a way to set the size of each share? i.e. 100GB for general storage share and 2TB for a media share

4. Where can I view the overall hierarchy of the array? I see paths like '/mnt' and '/usr' but I can't find them.

5. Where can I read up on what each path in the hierarchy's intended us is for? i.e. 'usr' seems to be place where applications are stored

6. All of my default shares (from #1) are marked as unsecure, how do I secure them?

7. I see 'Flash' in my windows explorer when browsing the server, it appears to be the OS, correct?

8. Out of curiosity, is there a way to reorder my drives in the array?

9. I see after formatting all my drives and starting the array that it put 23GB on one of the drives, what is that for and why did it choose the drive it did?

10. Got any tips for me or common mistakes I could avoid?

 

Thanks in advance!

1. These are standard shares for storing your dockers and VMs.

2. Root has root access at the console and webUI, but only guest file access on the network. Other users have whatever file access you give them on the network, but no console or webUI access.

3.No, but shares can span disks.

4 + 5. /mnt is the mount point for all your disks and user shares. /boot is the flash drive. All other folders are part of the operating system, and are in RAM. The OS is unpacked fresh into RAM from bzroot,bzimage on each boot.

6. Each user share has settings for security and many other things. Just click on the share in the webUI.

7. flash is just the /boot folder exported to the network. Not exactly the OS. See previous answers to 4 + 5.

8. Tools - New Config. You can reassign all drives or only some. Must not assign a data disk to parity slot or it will be overwritten. If you haven't changed any drives or the number of drives then there is a checkbox to make it not rebuild parity if you only have single parity. If you have dual parity parity2 will have to be rebuilt if you change the order.

9. That is just the folders in 1. above. It is usually best to have these on the cache drive.

10. Always ask on the forum before doing anything you are unsure about. We are very helpful.

1. I see some shares already created: appdata, domains, isos, and system. What are these for?

Virtual Machines and docker

2. Is it standard practice to create a user for yourself or just use root?

if you secure the shares, then you have no choice as root has no access to the files over the network.  On the converse, only root has access to the webUI

3. Is there a way to set the size of each share? i.e. 100GB for general storage share and 2TB for a media share

Only by limiting the shares to certain disks.  unRaid does not support quotas

4. Where can I view the overall hierarchy of the array? I see paths like '/mnt' and '/usr' but I can't find them.

All shares are ultimately stored within /mnt/user.  There is another /mnt/user0 that is the contents of all the shares excluding the cache drive if installed.

5. Where can I read up on what each path in the hierarchy's intended us is for? i.e. 'usr' seems to be place where applications are stored

You only need to worry about this if you're planning on developing yourself plugins.  But, any linux book should go into that.

6. All of my default shares (from #1) are marked as unsecure, how do I secure them?

Create some users.  Then on the shares tab assign users and set up access permissions to each share via the shares tab

7. I see 'Flash' in my windows explorer when browsing the server, it appears to be the OS, correct?

Correct

8. Out of curiosity, is there a way to reorder my drives in the array?

Tools - New Config.  But you will invalidate parity if you have 2 parity disks.  With the user share system, there really isn't any need to ever reorder them.

9. I see after formatting all my drives and starting the array that it put 23GB on one of the drives, what is that for and why did it choose the drive it did?

You have docker enabled (settings - docker), and no cache drive so it's placed the docker.img file onto probably disk #1

10. Got any tips for me or common mistakes I could avoid?

Install the Fix Common Problems plugin (link in sig)

 

3. Is there a way to set the size of each share? i.e. 100GB for general storage share and 2TB for a media share

 

Although quotas are not supported by unRAID they are supported by btrfs, so you can use them but are limited to a single disk for any quota, it can't be set on a share than spans multiple disks.