WiFi rather than Ethernet only for unRAID

[rayzor]

@BRiT That is not a solution, it takes away any and all flexibility to move around in an RV which is essential when living in a tight space.

 

There are many valid reasons and scenarios in 2022 (even back in 2018) where WiFi not only is the option, but is also a good option.

 

Also, my laptop doesn't even have an ethernet port. And most if not all USB ports are already taken.

 

It's fine. I am not looking for a solution other than to support WiFi. I can throw an 800MB arch iso onto a USB drive which has support for most if not all wireless drivers out of the gate, and it is as simple as `iwctl --passphrase=password station wlan0 connect apname` and I am up and running. There seems to be no logical reason to not have this support other than just because.

[BRiT]

I didn't mark it as a solution.

 

I don’t see how it takes away flexibility of movement. You have your server in a spot, that doesn't change at all. You merely have a tiny little Access Point on top of it.

 

Are you saying you were going to use a laptop as an unraid server? How were you going to add any storage to it? Adding any amount of external storage to a laptop is as restrictive as you claim to want to avoid. Maybe rethink your plan before throwing shade at those give creative ideas.

[JonathanM]

5 hours ago, rayzor said:

There seems to be no logical reason to not have this support other than just because.

The logical reason is that Unraid doesn't run from a disk or any permanent media. The OS stays totally in RAM. Any additions to the OS must be carefully weighed against the penalties of requiring extra RAM for a feature very few people would use, and that have viable alternatives.

[rayzor]

On 3/10/2022 at 4:18 PM, JonathanM said:

The logical reason is that Unraid doesn't run from a disk or any permanent media. The OS stays totally in RAM. Any additions to the OS must be carefully weighed against the penalties of requiring extra RAM for a feature very few people would use, and that have viable alternatives.

Neither does the ARCH install media, I run it fine from a USB drive, and it supports every wireless card I throw it on. Just for kicks ill boot arch install media and check the total memory usage, but I doubt it is high at all considering I have put arch on laptops from 2005 with no issues. If that is even a concern, then BriT's idea that unraid should only be run on machines with petabytes of storage arrays would make the additional small amount of memory any concern if we are only talking server class machines. EDIT: if the feature is not used, as in there is no config, it is VERY simple in any linux based system to compile it as a module and either 'modprobe' it as needed, or 'modprobe -r' it to remove it when not needed, thus not taking any additional memory for the 99% of users who don't need it.

 

And to @BRiT there are other scenarios than a storage server for unraid. The primary one being the separation of the host os from the operational day to day use of the machine (qemu/kvm). Being able to do whatever I want in my Windows machine with almost full hardware capabilities, and then deciding I hate Windows and switching to Arch, without affecting my 10 docker containers that handle backups, pihole, plex, etc.. or doing something stupid in Windows and hosing the OS knowing that I can switch to a backed up version of that same VM or even just the spare backup I keep sitting there on disk.

 

Also, yes, my laptop does have 3 drives, 32GB of memory, an Intel iGPU + NVIDIA 3070ti and 14 cores (20 threads) which far outrivals most 'server' machines you think unraid is made for.

Edited March 16, 2022 by rayzor

[JonathanM]

54 minutes ago, rayzor said:

Neither does the ARCH install media, I run it fine from a USB drive, and it supports every wireless card I throw it on. Just for kicks ill boot arch install media and check the total memory usage, but I doubt it is high at all considering I have put arch on laptops from 2005 with no issues.

Check the mount points with the ARCH media. Unraid doesn't run ANY of the OS from the USB stick, because it uses the USB as the license media, and read write activity is kept to an absolute minimum. I'm fairly sure the ARCH media will be mounted and used as part of the OS.

 

The Unraid USB is mounted as /boot, and the entire OS with all libraries is extracted into RAM from the bz* files.

[rayzor]

2 hours ago, JonathanM said:

Check the mount points with the ARCH media. Unraid doesn't run ANY of the OS from the USB stick, because it uses the USB as the license media, and read write activity is kept to an absolute minimum. I'm fairly sure the ARCH media will be mounted and used as part of the OS.

 

The Unraid USB is mounted as /boot, and the entire OS with all libraries is extracted into RAM from the bz* files.

ARCH actually has a mode while installing that it can copy to memory. Ive had to use this before when installing on a system that only had 1 usb port and had to swap in a usb keyboard.

 

So I just downloaded the latest ARCH, rebooted, and copied into memory. I verified mount points, and then just to be sure, I pulled the stick out. Ran `top` and checked - it is using 298MB of memory, while connected to wireless.

 

Like I said though, I would be totally OK with a few more MB for having that wireless capability. Those who don't need it, there is no need to have the kernel load it.