First time UnRAID'ing - can't even get UI! :-)

[Froberg]

Hi all

 

I've been on a journey from Ubuntu server, to OMV (For a minute or two) to Xpenology, through FreeNAS - now landing on UnRAID. It looks like it's exactly what I've been dreaming of, so I am very excited to get started - and I don't mind the entry fee if it works as advertised. 

 

I'm running an ASRock C2750D4I with 16 gigs of ECC memory and 4x6TB WD Red drives (well, it's 3x6 now, one died - hence my moving from Xpenology..) - there's another 10TB one on the way. I've got some SSD's ready for cache mode and I wanted to fiddle around with the interface a bit before the disk arrives next week. (woe is me on that delivery time..) 

 

Anywho, it seems the box won't take to an IP address. It comes up with only br0 interface and loopback - address for br0 is 169.254.4.112 - not that it really matters. 

ifconfig /renew fails with "device not found" 

 

This board has two dedicated NIC's for gigabit ethernet and a dedicated IPMI interface on a third NIC. All three are connected. 

 

This issue kind of has me stuck, I didn't get much of anything from google. Something obvious I'm missing? 

 

I made a default stick, using the tool & I didn't change any options during install. 

Repeated x2, same result. 

Thanks - I look forward to being part of the community here. :) 

[trurl]

8 minutes ago, Froberg said:

Something obvious I'm missing? 

 

Did you try both ports?

[ijuarez]

2 minutes ago, trurl said:

 

Did you try both ports?

 

1+

[Squid]

Worst case, boot unRaid and via the GUI Boot mode, log in and then go to Tools - Diagnostics, then poweroff, pull the stick, toss it into another machine and post the resulting zip here (/logs on the flash drive)

[Froberg]

Both NIC's GBE Interfaces are connected, as is IPMI (for management and setup purposes)

 

I'll do the diagnostics thing when I get home from work, thanks for the suggestion! :-)

[bonienl]

9 hours ago, Froberg said:

address for br0 is 169.254.4.112

 

By default the server uses DHCP to obtain an IP address automatically. A 169.254.xxx.yyy address indicates it did not receive a reply from a DHCP server and uses a self assigned IP address instead.

 

Do you have a DHCP server (usually your router) on the network and is it reachable for the Unraid server?

[Froberg]

Alright, I'm back from work and having put the kids to sleep. (sigh)

 

First: wow, what a response. I really appreciate it! My network is fine, DHCP enabled and everything is smooth sailing. 

When accessing the GUI I can't connect to localhost, even, so I can't get in to tools and pull any logs. There doesn't seem to be anything available of that nature from the "start" menu either. (see unraid1 attached)

 

On booting the terminal complains about the device not having device label "UNRAID", which it does. But more crucially, it seems like it's missing network drivers or something. Almost missed it because it went by so fast during boot-up. See unraid2.png attached. 

I'll try and remake a flash drive and see if that changes anything in the interim, unless anyone comes up with a bright idea. It really looks like it's having network connectivity issues. I tried rebooting using only one connected NIC and it didn't change anything. 

 

Edited August 29, 2018 by Froberg
forgot pic

[Squid]

Try a different USB port.  Ideally USB2

[bonienl]

Your USB device isn't properly prepared and loading of the critical files failed.

The "hint" that the label UNRAID isn't found, is already an indication that the USB device is somehow wrong.

 

How did you prepare the stick? Windows machine or other?

[Froberg]

Stick prepared with https://unraid.net/download windows creation tool. Re-creating (again) and trying a different port now. Picture of USB as it's created in attached image. 

Edited August 29, 2018 by Froberg

[bonienl]

Is this a used stick which may have had multiple partitions?

[Froberg]

1 minute ago, bonienl said:

Is this a used stick which may have had multiple partitions?

It's been freshly wiped using Low Level Format Tool. 4GB Verbatim stick, so not much room for multiple partitions, so no. I edited my post to include an image of how it looks now, if it helps. 

[bonienl]

Did you run "make_bootable.bat" after creation of the stick?

[Froberg]

First time, yes. This time, no. Will try again with running it and see if it does anything. If not, I'll try the manual route. Forgot to mention, it failed with the same issue. 

 

edit #2: Failed again after running make bootable - but it booted from it just fine using the windows creation tool. I am going to create one manually now using the .zip and make bootable. 

 

Edit #3: Issue persists on manual creation attempt. 

Edited August 29, 2018 by Froberg
added info

[pwm]

55 minutes ago, bonienl said:

The "hint" that the label UNRAID isn't found, is already an indication that the USB device is somehow wrong.

An alternative is that the USB drive gets disconnected a short while during the boot process (making the machine fail to see any volume UNRAID) and then gets connected after the startup code have already failed to mount the USB.

 

1 hour ago, Froberg said:

But more crucially, it seems like it's missing network drivers or something.

Lots of the required files are on the USB drive. Some of that content is picked up by the BIOS + boot loader on initial boot. But after Linux has started, the volume UNRAID must be found so the startup script can mount the USB drive and so get access to the rest of the files. So it isn't too far off to describe what you get as a system without drivers.

 

Do you see any UNRAID volume after the system has booted? In that case, it's likely to be an issue with disconnecting USB drive and you should try with a different port. If you don't see any volume named UNRAID in the directory /dev/disk/by-label, then it's likely that you for some reason hasn't managed to make the thumb drive correctly.

root@n54l-3:/mnt/disk2/radium/test# ls -l /dev/disk/by-label/
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Jun  4 06:37 UNRAID -> ../../sda1

 

[bonienl]

Other people also had boot problems, related to UEFI. Two approaches you can try:

 

1a. Rename the folder EFI to EFI- (note the minus, this disables UEFI boot mode)

1b. Tell your BIOS to boot in "BIOS" mode (if possible)

 

2a. Keep the EFI folder (this enables UEFI boot mode)

2b. In your BIOS disable ALL bootable devices, except the USB device

 

[Froberg]

Okay I tried two things at once: 

 

New USB drive (Old no-name junky one I had layin' around at 8GB) and setting BIOS to Legacy Only. 

Worked. 

Going to try with the Verbatim again, and see if I can replicate, to see if it was indeed UEFI related, or Flash Drive related. In which case Verbatim Store n' Go should go on the no-no list. Back in a flash. 

[Froberg]

Confirmed: Verbatim Store n' Go 4GB Flash drive is not compatible with UnRAID. 

Unsure if BIOS setting had anything to do with it, but it was set to boot from legacy on USB, not UEFI - so doubtful. 

I had also removed all other devices other than USB boot from the get-go. 

 

I really didn't think this USB would be an issue. Guess I have to buy a couple of USB's from the supported list. 🙂

 

Thanks all!

[Froberg]

Sweet mother mary. This OS is freakin' awesome!

UI responsive, everything does what it's supposed to do INSTANTLY. It automatically created a bond for my NIC's..

I am, I think, in actual love. 

 

Somehow it's also giving me better and more viable information on the state of my drives than both Xpenology and FreeNAS offered. I'm pretty much sold already. 

 

It seems some of my disks are showing pre-fail status or old-age status.. which is probably accurate, most are three years old. Any way I can use UNRAID to stress-test these drives before the 10TB arrives some time next week? Any helpful start-up suggestions? 
I'm planning 1x10TB for parity, with plans on adding a second 10TB parity disk as soon as I get funds for it - and then replacing each 6TB disk with a 10TB disk over time, for a total of 5x10TB disks - with 2x250GB SSD's as cache drives. 

 

I must admit, I am really impressed with this community. I saw positive mention on reddit and other places, but this is far beyond what I expected. 

[Squid]

8 minutes ago, Froberg said:

Sweet mother mary. This OS is freakin' awesome!

UI responsive, everything does what it's supposed to do INSTANTLY. It automatically created a bond for my NIC's..

I am, I think, in actual love. 

@jonp - This would look good on the new website

8 minutes ago, Froberg said:

Any way I can use UNRAID to stress-test these drives before the 10TB arrives some time next week? Any helpful start-up suggestions? 

You can either run a Extended SMART test by click on the drive from the Main Tab, or you can also "preclear" them for 1 or more passes via the PreClear plugin. (Which you can of course get after you install Community Applications  (but you can only preclear before you add the drive(s) to the array

Edited August 29, 2018 by Squid

[Froberg]

A Catch-22 then? So what's the methodology then? Wait for the 10TB drive, initialize the entire array, add community apps and start pre-clearing disks? (I assume this actually drops them from the array?) Cheers. 

[trurl]

3 minutes ago, Froberg said:

A Catch-22 then? So what's the methodology then? Wait for the 10TB drive, initialize the entire array, add community apps and start pre-clearing disks? (I assume this actually drops them from the array?) Cheers. 

You can't actually preclear a disk that is already assigned to the array. And that is a good thing since preclear overwrites the entire disk with zeros.

 

No requirement to have a parity disk or in fact even an array just to do preclears though.

[Squid]

On a brand-spanking new Array, unRaid will calculate and write the appropriate information to the parity drive(s).  The data disks aren't cleared -> only formatted.

 

An extended SMART test can be done at any time which is the manufacturer's extended test of the drive(s).  Takes hours.  A preclear, writes 0's to the drives, and reads everything back and confirms that it's all 0's (and other tests along the way).  Takes a minimum of twice as long as the extended SMART test.  This can only be done on a drive that isn't assigned to the array yet.

 

 

[pwm]

54 minutes ago, Froberg said:

Confirmed: Verbatim Store n' Go 4GB Flash drive is not compatible with UnRAID. 

It is most probably compatible with unRAID. But maybe not fully compatible with how your BIOS handles the USB ports. unRAID depends on the drive being available directly when the Linux kernel has booted - but with some BIOS, the USB port seems to renegotiate (and so dropping the drive) when Linux is starting. This is more common with USB 3 ports, because the BIOS does not have "full" USB support - it has some limited abilities to handle a mouse+keyboard and boot disks over USB but isn't nowhere near the support of the full USB stack in Windows or Linux. So the BIOS often doesn't configure all the USB host controller functionality. And it's hard for Linux to later reconfigure the USB host without confusing the specific USB device.

 

The above is also a reason why a number of people can solve their problems by trying different USB ports. Different ports may use different chips, and so result in different discontinuity situations when the handling of the USB hardware is handed over from BIOS to the Linux kernel.

[pwm]

17 minutes ago, Froberg said:

I saw positive mention on reddit and other places, but this is far beyond what I expected.

It is a quite good forum. Quite far between hostile threads because there are enough non-hostile regulars to calm down potential situations. And since RAID systems are so complex, it's quite important to have access to a great forum - both beginners and professionals will now and then get in a situation where help is needed. And making the wrong decision really isn't something you want to do if you care about your data. So having a free support forum that is way better than most commercial support you can buy for high-end systems really is worth a lot.