Remote drive mounted as a Local Drive Possible?


pronto

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Hey all,

 

7 days into the Unraid trial, I have:

a old dual core 2ghz cpu

2 GB RAM

1x 6TB parity

2x 2TB

1x 1TB

1x 500GB cache

 

I've tried to set up Plex, NextCloud, DelugeVPN, Sonarr, Radarr, Lidarr and Jackett all running at the same time, but the OS would hang/crash all the time, take forever to do the simple tasks. It's a dual core 15+ year old machine, it just can't handle everything at once, I get it. Not Unraid fault.

 

I randomly posted to the local Buy/Sell and got a ASUS G73S laptop, I7, 8GB RAM (for free 😀) and that got me thinking.

 

Is it possible to have the dual core machine souly for the purpose of being the HDD "holder" and use Unraid on the laptop, but have Unraid use the drives as if they were locally mounted (sdd, sde, sdf...)?

 

Trying to stay on the DIY/free side of things, as the laptop only has 1 USB 3.0 slot.

 

Any thoughts or options?

 

Cheers

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2 hours ago, jordanmw said:

You could setup an iSCSI target server with the drives mounted there, then present the iSCSI target to the virtual machine- that would still work.

 

Interesting, I'll look more into that...

My potential thoughts were:

 

Ubuntu server on HDD machine (or something less resource intensive, mind you Ubuntu worked pretty well before)

UnRaid on the Laptop

 

Set Ubuntu to share the "/dev" folder to only the laptop IP (I static IP my network)

Mount the remote "/dev" folder to "/devremote" on the laptop

Within fstab on the laptop, define the drives as sda, sdb, sdc, etc...

 

I tried searching for such a setup on these forums and google, but haven't come up with anything, mind you I'm most likely using the wrong terminology.

 

 

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I'm trying to work with what I got. No surplus of money for parts. The G73S only has a single 3.0 port. The hard drives I have are all SATA connections and I don't have a hub or SATA-USB adapters.

 

I have only trialed UnRaid for a few days, but I like the UI, the simplicity, and how easy things go together. "One stop shop", if you will. If I'm able to configure with the components I have, I will undoubtedly purchase a license.

 

I know its completely out of the norm for a setup like this, but would my "idea" be feasible? I'm going to have a try at it on my own, but if you have any tips or ideas to assist, I would be greatly appreciative.

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And I can't imagine that it would perform any better than what you have with just the old system by itself. There is a lot more to this than just the CPU and RAM. All the storage stuff is mostly limited by I/O, which is going to perform a lot worse over the network between the machines without special and expensive hardware.

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1 hour ago, pronto said:

Set Ubuntu to share the "/dev" folder to only the laptop IP (I static IP my network)

Mount the remote "/dev" folder to "/devremote" on the laptop

Within fstab on the laptop, define the drives as sda, sdb, sdc, etc...

Regardless of your equipment this is is not going to work as the device "files" are special files that cannot really be opened in a meaningful way across the network.

If I were you I'd sell the free laptop and use the money to buy a better server - just about anything you get will be better than what you have, but what you really need is a lot more memory. Linux is very memory efficient but what you want to run won't even fit in 2G of RAM, even if I had the latest i9 on hand. 2G of RAM will not even allow you to upgrade Unraid automatically.

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I was just looking to play around. See if I could make it work with what I got. Thanks for the input guys, I'm going to try a few different things and see what works best. 

 

Its mainly just going to be a Plex server with download capabilities and NextCloud support for personal files. Max simultaneous connections should be 5 at most, 2 local and 3 remote. I suppose I'm thinking a bigger picture than what I actually need.

 

Cheers

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  • 2 weeks later...

Sorry to res this one back up, but i finally found the terms i was looking for to do what i want to do.

 

Have a ubuntu machine with all my drives, and using either iSCSI or NBD (Network Block Device) push the /dev/sd* to unRAID.

 

I've bee searching for a way for unRAID to be an "iSCSI initiator", but i can't seem to find any documentation to add it to Slackware.

I've tried to install NBD via https://slackware.pkgs.org/14.1/slackonly-x86_64/nbd-3.12.1-x86_64-1_slack.txz.html, but i am having issues with dependancies that i cannot figure out. (install libidn.so.11?)

 

I know this is not what is generally used in unRAID, but im looking for any assistance i can get.

 

Edited by pronto
missed iSCSI
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Unraid is a very stripped down slackware and will be missing many things included in a full slackware development environment. In addition to this, some of the lower level details relating to the parity array and user shares is custom code.

 

Have you installed Unraid on your laptop? I think you are going to have a pretty hard time even getting to a point where you can try to work on this.

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