October 20, 201015 yr Author Yea, I will probably do a writeup once I get it figured out. I have already started a little document. jwc
October 20, 201015 yr I came into unRAID having never used linux of any flavor. The little bit of command line syntax I've learned is from checking the wiki and bugging Joe L over and over until I've finally got a few things memorized. Here's the extent of the syntax I know, from memory: cd /boot (change directory to the root directory of the flash drive) preclear_disk.sh /dev/sdX (initiate preclear on a disk, where X is the disk letter (sda, sdb, etc.) ls (list the contents of a directory - not terribly useful) ifconfig (spits out the network configuration of the server, such as the IP address, subnet mask, and gateway - useful for networking troubleshooting) That's it. Everything else I'm able to do by following the steps word-for-word as they are outlined on the wiki (and in forum posts linked from the wiki). My accomplished add-ons in the 1.5 years I've been using unRAID have been modest. I've: Installed BubbaRAID (now out of date) Uninstalled BubbaRAID (see above) Installed unMenu (within the past month) Installed cache_dirs (within the past month) Installed APCUPSD (using package installer in unMenu, again within the past month) I think I also installed a few other packages from the list in unMenu, but I can't remember what they are. I've also changed a few unRAID settings through the web GUI, such as setting a static IP and altering when the cache drive's mover script runs (I changed it to 5:30 AM, and while I can't remember why at the moment, I'm sure I had a good reason). My point in all of this is that you really don't need to know anything about linux or command line syntax to use unRAID or add-ons. You just need to be able to read what is written and type in exactly what you are told to when you are told to. Accomplish this, and you can do nearly anything with your server. Don't lose hope, it does get easier.
October 21, 201015 yr A stock unRAID system will run perfectly on a single core CPU and 1 GB of RAM. If you are going to use a lot of add-on apps then you might benefit from a dual core CPU and more RAM (maybe 4 GB max) depending on what you are doing. Anything beyond that is probably big time overkill. I am running unRAID with a quad-core i7-950 3.06 gig processor with 3 gigs of 1333 meg DDR-3 RAM, which I think is way overkill, but is the computer I had available for the unRAID server build. I would like to purchase a system board, lower-end CPU and memory for the replacement unRAID system. The current unRAID system board, CPU and memory will be freed up for a Linux SageTV computer (I already have a Windows SageTV computer, and plan to migrate SageTV to Linux). What are recommended Intel dual-cores for an unRAID server? How much CPU clock speed is needed? What type of memory speed is needed? Dave
October 21, 201015 yr Author Rajahal, what do you use to connect all the drives to UnRaid? My mb has 6 SATA II ports. Beyond that I am lookin. I have 8 port raid controllers but don't want to use those since they would just be doing pass through. jwc
October 21, 201015 yr I followed the instructions listed in the first post of this thread when I installed unMenu. It worked fine for me. EDIT: I added steps 15-25 so that unMenu will load automatically whenever you reboot the server Here is what I did: These steps can all be performed using any computer attached to the same network as your server 1. Open windows explorer & go to the flash folder on //Tower 2. Create a new folder and name it unMenu 3. Download the unmenu_install136.zip file from here 4. Extract the unmenu_install file to the unMenu folder you just created 5. Login to your server as "root" via telnet/putty/screen (or you can go to the server and do 6-10 there) 6. At the prompt type cd /boot/unmenu 7. Next type unmenu_install -i -d /boot/unmenu 8. Wait for unmenu to be installed, the command prompt will appear after it's done 9. Now type cd /boot/unmenu 10. Then type ./uu 11. Now unMenu should be running 12. Open a web browser 13. Enter the following address //Tower:8080 14. You should now see the main screen on unMenu - congratulations you're running unMenu 15. Now you need to edit your go file so that unMenu will be loaded whenever you bootup 16. Using windows explorer navigate to the //Tower/flash/config/ folder 17. Open the go file using a text editor like Notepad 18. Add the following lines at the bottom of the file: cd /boot/packages && find . -name '*.auto_install' -type f -print | sort | xargs -n1 sh -c /boot/unmenu/uu 19. Save the changes to your go file and make sure that you do not add a .txt extension to it 20. Open the unRAID webGui 21. Stop the array 22. Reboot the server 23. Wait for the server to reboot and the array to restart (you'll know the array has started when you're able to load the unRAID webGUI) 24. Navigate to //Tower:8080 and you should again see the unMenu main page 25. You're done IIRC this is exactly what I did on my server and it worked without any problems. As I said before, I know NOTHING about Linux. I just hijacked this info from other threads and put it in my own words using my personal experience from installing unMenu on my server. If this doesn't work for you then I guess you're SOL.
October 21, 201015 yr Author Well this is interesting. I am copying files from one of the 1.5 TB Seagate drives on my main server to the Unraid 1 TB Samsung. I am getting a sustained 80 MB / sec copy. The gigabit network is running a sustained 600+ (bouncing up to 800) mbit / second, and I am working 2 of 8 cores moderately hard (about 20% total CPU usage across 8 cores). That is a very respectable copy. No parity involved of course. jwc
October 21, 201015 yr Author I followed the instructions listed in the first post of this thread when I installed unMenu. It worked fine for me. Here is what I did: These steps can all be performed using any computer attached to the same network as your server 1. Open windows explorer & go to the flash folder on //Tower 2. Create a new folder and name it unMenu 3. Download the unmenu_install136.zip file from here 4. Extract the unmenu_install file to the unMenu folder you just created 5. Login to your server as "root" via telnet/putty/screen (or you can go to the server and do 6-10 there) 6. At the prompt type cd /boot/unmenu 7. Next type unmenu_install -i -d /boot/unmenu 8. Wait for unmenu to be installed, the command prompt will appear after it's done 9. Now type cd /boot/unmenu 10. Then type ./uu 11. Now unMenu should be running 12. Open a web browser 13. Enter the following address //Tower:8080 14. You should now see the main screen on unMenu - congratulations you're done IIRC this is exactly what I did on my server and it worked without any problems. As I said before, I know NOTHING about Linux. I just hijacked this info from other threads and put it in my own words using my personal experience from installing unMenu on my server. I this doesn't work for you then I guess you're SOL. Wohoo! We have ignition Houston. I am now copying at a blistering rate of speed from my Server across the LAN to a non parity protected drive. It will still be most of the night before the 1.5 TB drive is cleaned off and I can slide it in to be the parity drive. Thanks for the assist with UnMenu. jwcolby
October 21, 201015 yr So I was booting into UnRaid. Added two disks. Got in, got as far as formatting them. Copied a bunch of stuff trying to set up UnMenu. Ended up rebooting and then... no boot out of the bios. Somehow adding the disks pushed the SanDisk flash down in the hard drive order. Finally found that and pushed it back up to drive one and it boots again. I got my key and dragged it over and rebooted, I am now seeing "Unraid Server Pro". Yea. I'm trying to get the UnMenu thing happening but the instructions assumes user / operator linuxness. I have no linuxness. We definitely need a "How to for Windows people". jwc As others already mentioned, you dont need to be a linux guru to get by with unraid. unless of course you run in trouble, but even then there are many people in the community ready to help you. usually, if you encounter a problem, someone else has already encountered it... Also, i agree with the "How to for Windows people" but in another sense. many things we do with our hdds mounted in our windows system cannot be easily done when connecting to unraid. for example since windows do not support indexing of non-ntfs systems, it took me a lot of time to find a solution. also, in windows i knew programs that find duplicate files. it is the next thing i am gonna try to see how to do with unraid (probably my next post in the forums too). I still have some problems with tera copy and unraid ... etc...
October 21, 201015 yr I followed the instructions listed in the first post of this thread when I installed unMenu. It worked fine for me. Here is what I did: These steps can all be performed using any computer attached to the same network as your server 1. Open windows explorer & go to the flash folder on //Tower 2. Create a new folder and name it unMenu 3. Download the unmenu_install136.zip file from here 4. Extract the unmenu_install file to the unMenu folder you just created 5. Login to your server as "root" via telnet/putty/screen (or you can go to the server and do 6-10 there) 6. At the prompt type cd /boot/unmenu 7. Next type unmenu_install -i -d /boot/unmenu 8. Wait for unmenu to be installed, the command prompt will appear after it's done 9. Now type cd /boot/unmenu 10. Then type ./uu 11. Now unMenu should be running 12. Open a web browser 13. Enter the following address //Tower:8080 14. You should now see the main screen on unMenu - congratulations you're done IIRC this is exactly what I did on my server and it worked without any problems. As I said before, I know NOTHING about Linux. I just hijacked this info from other threads and put it in my own words using my personal experience from installing unMenu on my server. I this doesn't work for you then I guess you're SOL. Wohoo! We have ignition Houston. I am now copying at a blistering rate of speed from my Server across the LAN to a non parity protected drive. It will still be most of the night before the 1.5 TB drive is cleaned off and I can slide it in to be the parity drive. Thanks for the assist with UnMenu. jwcolby If you let me know how the instructions might be improved for people like yourself I'll change them as appropriate. As you said, I am a unix guru/expert. I've been using it since version 1.0 out of Bell Labs, probably over 30 years now. I would welcome the feedback on how to improve the instructions to install unMENU. Glad it made it easy to mount and copy your files to a drive outside of the protected array.
October 21, 201015 yr Author I really think it is more a matter of "all in one place" and sequence. I had absolutely no problem doing the download and getting the usb flash booting into Linux. At that point it is "now what?". I did the ///Tower thing and got into the unraid native menu and managed to get the disks mounted and formatted. Except that I was reading advice about how the disks should be "cleared" or zeroed which tests them. In the end I did not do that because it wasn't clear where to find that program, or for that matter how to cause it to run. As I said, I have been at this since the CPM days (and even earlier), I have done the command line thing, but not in a long time. The documentation about all this stuff is scattered around and when found it assumes that you are a Linux head (no offense intended) and just know what to do. I could tell at the end of the boot that I was supposed to log on to do anything natively, but I assumed a username / password, probably some defaults that would then allow me to somehow set my own username / password. Much to my surprise it was just root. I think what is needed is a "sticky" - "start here" in the forums, I was certainly casting around for that. That should at the very least provide a few hotlinks with a very clear "read this first" kind of thing. I was reading about UnMenu but it wasn't clear what it was going to do for me. It was clear that everyone seemed to like it and use it, so (particularly after seeing the ... uh... "sparse" native menu) it became obvious that I probably wanted to get that installed first thing. Not that I had a clue what I would be getting, just that it had to be better than the... uh... "sparse" native menu. And so it was, tho even there gui-ness is not the point (obviously). I guess I expected to boot, add drives, automagically have them added to the storage pool, have a user interface that would allow me to quickly get some shares (spanning disks) set up, drag and drop files, and go back to work. I have read (scanned) the manual and other stuff and it is very technical in a Linux command line kinda way. If I have to do that I can, but I really just want to go back to work with all of this stuff working. (For me) it's not about how cool / fun / technogeeky it is, it's about a solution for file storage. I am in fact a technogeek, but in a parallel universe. I have to say, in this day and age, I am wondering why one of the gui shells isn't being talked about. http://linux.about.com/cs/softofficeutility/a/gui_cli.htm I kinda thought that the Linux community was over the whole "command line way or the highway" mentality. jwc
October 21, 201015 yr i think Joe L. or some of the other developers can give you many more reasons, but here are some reasons why they do not use a gui: a gui requires more cpu, memory a gui makes things more complicated and may introduce new problems that interfere with the usage of unraid most things you need to do can be easily done by the web interface or unmenu it gives you the chance to learn the basics of linux that being said, i, being a windows user, would have sometimes profited by a gui. even so, i would prefer time spent on improving or implementing other features...
October 21, 201015 yr I think the biggest reason is the size of the distribution. unRAID is built on a stripped down version of Slackware Linux. unRAID was originally distributed on a 128Meg flash drive. That size drive could hold two versions, the current and the new. unRAID specifically does not have a GUI, as it would take the stripped down distribution and make it impossible to fit on anything smaller than a 2Gig flash drive. I agree, the instructions need help, but lime-technology does not permit us to edit their manual. The user-interface as you said is sparse. It is why I wrote unMENU. It is an exercise to explore how the user-interface could be improved. Think of it as a way to mock-up ideas we all were kicking around. It turned out to be much more. Because of it we eventually will have the ability to extend the unRAID screens themselves. That is one of the primary goals of the 5.0 release. Joe L.
October 21, 201015 yr Except that I was reading advice about how the disks should be "cleared" or zeroed which tests them. In the end I did not do that because it wasn't clear where to find that program, or for that matter how to cause it to run.FYI - a quick search of the forum for "preclear" and you would have found Joe L's preclear_disk.sh - a new utility to burn-in and pre-clear disks for quick add thread. I followed the instructions in Joe L's first post there and I've been using the preclear on all my disks since. I've even RMA'd a suspect 2TB drive because of what I learned by running that invaluable script. Hearing jwcolby describe his experience reminds me a little of my own trials and tribulations in getting unRAID up and running. The only difference is that he is moving way faster than I did, which is most likely why he's having more difficulty. I started into unRAID thinking that I'd try it out to see if it would work for me. It was my first experience with any home server. So I didn't have a bunch of disks that were filled to the brim pushing me to need a solution quickly. Sure I had a few TB of stuff stored away but I had plenty of room to spare so I could take my time. As has been my experience with many other things in life - if you want something quick it's not usually painless. So it appears that what is needed is something like a "quick start guide" that gets you up and running ASAP. I used this post as my quick start guide. It is not really easy to find. Here is how I came across it: UnRAID FAQ wiki -> 3.1 How do I get started? -> Getting Started with unRAID -> A step by step guide (fifth sub bullet under second main bullet). I kind of just stumbled upon this guide in my research around the forum. Maybe there is a more direct path to it but that's how I found it.
October 21, 201015 yr unRAID specifically does not have a GUI, as it would take the stripped down distribution and make it impossible to fit on anything smaller than a 2Gig flash drive. but why is that, Joe ? i remember i used once a minimal live linux on a usb (called 'puppy linux') that had a gnu environment and its size on the usb was about 100mb...
October 21, 201015 yr Author I think the biggest reason is the size of the distribution. unRAID is built on a stripped down version of Slackware Linux. unRAID was originally distributed on a 128Meg flash drive. That size drive could hold two versions, the current and the new. unRAID specifically does not have a GUI, as it would take the stripped down distribution and make it impossible to fit on anything smaller than a 2Gig flash drive. I agree, the instructions need help, but lime-technology does not permit us to edit their manual. The user-interface as you said is sparse. It is why I wrote unMENU. It is an exercise to explore how the user-interface could be improved. Think of it as a way to mock-up ideas we all were kicking around. It turned out to be much more. Because of it we eventually will have the ability to extend the unRAID screens themselves. That is one of the primary goals of the 5.0 release. Joe L. And I thank you for that. Before anyone gets their nose out of joint, let me say I am OK with all that. As someone said in some thread somewhere, the point is to "just work". A web browser text based interface which is fully functional is just fine. I for one do not intend to run OpenOffice on this thing. In about 40 minutes I will have one 1.5 TB drive cleared off and will insert it into the system. Then I will start the other 1.5 Tb drive copying onto that drive and I will go to bed. In the AM I will pull the second 1.5 TB out of my server and drop it into Unraid and start the parity building. I then have about 300 gigs of photos, music and software source disks and I will be up and running. I still need to figure out how to get my TV (Windows 2007 HTPC) seeing the videos. My kids were not happy that the video library was down. Hopefully by the time they come home from school this thing will be done. In the end it will work, and it will be a huge reliable NAS. I can set up backup software on all the PCs scattered around my house / office and finally have some peace of mind. With luck it will automatically spin down drives to make it a lower cost system than the constantly on WHS it is replacing. jwc
October 21, 201015 yr jwcolby...I edited my procedure for installing unMenu. Go back and reread that post. You need to do some more work so that unMenu will be automatically installed every time you reboot the machine. Sorry, I forgot about that part. Like I said - I'm no expert. I still need to figure out how to get my TV (Windows 2007 HTPC) seeing the videos. Open the unRAID webGUI. Go to the Settings page. Make sure that the Workgroup listed is the same Workgroup that your HTPC is a member of. I believe it defaults to Mshome. Set Local Master to Yes. Now you should see Tower on the network when you open windows explorer on your HTPC. This is what I did to get my win7 HTPC to see my unRAID server. Once you can see Tower on the network then the rest of the changes would be on your HTPC. You're on your own there.
October 21, 201015 yr Author Done. UnMenu is successfully displaying after boot now. I added two new 1 TB disks as well as a 1.5 TB in the parity slot. I also created a Movies directory on each of three disks into which I have copied (or will) my videos, this so I can do a "user share" to group them all under a single share. The parity calc is started. 17 hours according to its calculation. I am off to bed. Thanks for all the assistance. jwc
October 21, 201015 yr What are recommended Intel dual-cores for an unRAID server? How much CPU clock speed is needed? What type of memory speed is needed?Have you checked the hardware compatability page? It gives some general guidance related to selection of CPU and RAM. What hardware you'll need really depends on what you want to do with your server. If you're just going to do media sharing (music, pics, movies, tv) then a Celeron 430 (or E3300) paired with 2GB of DDR2-800 RAM would do just fine. You can find many users on this forum that utilize that CPU. If you're planning to do more heavy lifting (like air video, VMWare, handbrake, etc.) then you might want to get an i3-530 paired with 4GB of DDR3-1066 RAM. The i3-530 is really an attractive unRAID processor because it is so flexible - low power at idle but handles high workload well. If you're willing to try AMD then I'd switch out the Celeron for a Sempron 140 and if you need more performance I'd swap the i3-530 for an Athlon II X2 260. If money is no object then I'd get an i3 no matter what your plans are.
October 21, 201015 yr Rajahal, what do you use to connect all the drives to UnRaid? My mb has 6 SATA II ports. Beyond that I am lookin. I have 8 port raid controllers but don't want to use those since they would just be doing pass through. jwc I also have a motherboard with 6 SATA II ports. I've used several different expansion cards over the course of different builds. I can recommend both of these: SuperMicro AOC-SASLP-MV8 - 8 ports on a PCIe x4, x8, or x16 slot. Definitely the most bang for your buck. Requires special cables. Silicon Image SIL3132 - 2 ports on a PCIe x1 slot. Uber cheap. No special cables required. Between those two cards, you can take most 6 SATA port mobos up to 16 drive support. As long as your motherboard has both a PCIe x4 or faster and a PCIe x1 slot, both cards should work in tandem.
October 22, 201015 yr I really think it is more a matter of "all in one place" and sequence. I had absolutely no problem doing the download and getting the usb flash booting into Linux. At that point it is "now what?". I did the ///Tower thing and got into the unraid native menu and managed to get the disks mounted and formatted. Except that I was reading advice about how the disks should be "cleared" or zeroed which tests them. In the end I did not do that because it wasn't clear where to find that program, or for that matter how to cause it to run. As I said, I have been at this since the CPM days (and even earlier), I have done the command line thing, but not in a long time. The documentation about all this stuff is scattered around and when found it assumes that you are a Linux head (no offense intended) and just know what to do. I could tell at the end of the boot that I was supposed to log on to do anything natively, but I assumed a username / password, probably some defaults that would then allow me to somehow set my own username / password. Much to my surprise it was just root. I think what is needed is a "sticky" - "start here" in the forums, I was certainly casting around for that. That should at the very least provide a few hotlinks with a very clear "read this first" kind of thing. I was reading about UnMenu but it wasn't clear what it was going to do for me. It was clear that everyone seemed to like it and use it, so (particularly after seeing the ... uh... "sparse" native menu) it became obvious that I probably wanted to get that installed first thing. Not that I had a clue what I would be getting, just that it had to be better than the... uh... "sparse" native menu. And so it was, tho even there gui-ness is not the point (obviously). I guess I expected to boot, add drives, automagically have them added to the storage pool, have a user interface that would allow me to quickly get some shares (spanning disks) set up, drag and drop files, and go back to work. I have read (scanned) the manual and other stuff and it is very technical in a Linux command line kinda way. If I have to do that I can, but I really just want to go back to work with all of this stuff working. (For me) it's not about how cool / fun / technogeeky it is, it's about a solution for file storage. I am in fact a technogeek, but in a parallel universe. I have to say, in this day and age, I am wondering why one of the gui shells isn't being talked about. http://linux.about.com/cs/softofficeutility/a/gui_cli.htm I kinda thought that the Linux community was over the whole "command line way or the highway" mentality. jwc Just wanted to make sure it was clear that this forum is manned by community members that have no affiliation with LimeTech besides being users of unRAID. Only Tom himself ("LimeTech") represents the company here - and he is an infrequent visitor (active in spurts as he releases new versions). Althought Tom has discussed giving some community members forum admin rights, it has never happened. No one but him can create stickies. I appreciate you are a new user - and am happy to help answer questions and direct you to resources where your questions can be answered - but want to take exception to the comment about information being scattered all over the place. The FAQ is incredibly detailed and well organized. If you compare it to the available information from when I started using unRAID 2 /2 years ago you'd be amazed at the depth of information available - and it was all done by unpaid community members just trying to be helpful. I should remark, and plan to write a post in the Lounge, that the primary author of most of the wiki was a user named RobJ that suddenly stopped visiting the forums back in June. He had been an awesome contributor and one of the leaders here since I first began. With his departure, and unless someone else takes up the banner, the FAQ is going to become dated and information truly will be scattered. I was, for a time, trying to maintain a "Best of the Forums" wiki which I have not updated in a while. But it does contain some interesting posts from the past couple years that you might be interested in reading (see the link in my sig). You mention that you've been at this since the CPM days - me too! And there's lots of other old codgers () here too so I'm sure you'll feel right at home Best of luck with your new toy!
October 22, 201015 yr Author snip... but want to take exception to the comment about information being scattered all over the place. The FAQ is incredibly detailed and well organized. snip... bjp999, It is hard to discuss this without someone taking exception, that is just the nature of the beast. You guys (contributors in the forums and docs) have a lot tied up in this thing. It is (in the end, once installed and running) a good product which does what it says it will do. That said, what is conspicuously missing is a "start here and end here and you will have a working system". I mean it is there but you have to dig and read and poke around. Go buy an MP3 player. What is the first thing you look for? A "getting started" manual. That manual isn't deep, it isn't all the technical details, it is simply "how to get started" and when you are done with that you can at least copy files to the device and listen to them. We need a "getting started" manual. No one but him (TOM) can create stickies. Yes but there is a WIKI which is where stuff really goes anyone. My reference to a sticky really means "get it out there, conspicuous" With a Wiki in place, forums should be for getting a specific question answered, not getting basic information, and most certainly not just getting the thing up and running. I have my system running now, I am happily copy files over etc, all due to assistance in finding the pieces scattered around. I am intentionally using that phrase, not to incite you but to make clear that from over here it was not trivial. We need to hear and understand that if I am asking questions in a forum just to get it set up and running, something is wrong. Tom's web page has an installation that takes you through getting the flash created and turning the box on and then... It has probably been a long time since you have been on that page but reread it now. If you follow those instructions you end up staring at a linux prompt. Huh? To anyone that has to be unsettling. "What do I do now?" So that is what the new user sees. UnRaid running and unceremoniously dropped off at the curb with a pointer to the WIKI and the forums. I know you have no control at all over that, but that is in fact what I experienced. You end up with booting the server, but it just stops. What about how you open a browser and... what about plugging in drives and assigning them to slots. What about how to test them etc. What about sharing them? So now I am looking at the wiki as I write this. The first sentence says "for a more detailed introduction see the overview page". Click on that (that is what I did). Marketing fluff. Not helpful in getting anything running. If I am going to be dropped at the curb with the Wiki in hand, the Wiki should pick right up and help me get this thing running. OK, so the first major WIKI heading is "Having problems". What??? How can I have problems when I don't yet even have a drive mounted... I'm staring at a linux prompt for crying out loud. Yea, I have a problem. The manual is very good BTW in a technical "explain what every button does" kinda way, but it is not a "how to get started". I am going to stop now. You get the picture. From a new user's perspective the documentation is spread all over the place!!! Since the Wiki (or the forums) are the two choices that the new user has, and since the new user is sitting there staring at a linux prompt after the thing boots... the very first thing that the WIKI needs to say is "getting started", and that page should introduce how to open a browser and get to the UnRaid control. It should include an immediate "to get this thing working" and walk you through numbered or bulleted steps on how to see drives, how to assign them to slots, how to format them, how to test them (a link to easy to read bulleted steps for downloading and running scripts to do this) and finally how to share those drives so that your system can see them. All in one place in a couple of pages, NOT a bunch of links to other wiki pages, or the manual, or a forum post. Right there as the very first major heading on the WIKI. As an enthusiast I was reading forum posts and there is a lot of "how to make this better" but it needs to start with picking the new user up at the curb where he has been unceremoniously dumped by Tom and walking him through making this thing work for the very first time. At the very end of that you can then start pointing him to FAQs, the manual and other stuff. This may sound like a rant but it is not. I really like this thing and I have every confidence it will sit in the corner and do what it is supposed to do for many years. Would I recommend it to my friends? Not unless they are willing to dig. But with a "getting started" manual I would. I am a consultant and a developer. I hate writing manuals. When I do everyone says it is full of technical stuff. I think that is just the way the geek's mind works, but even this geek would appreciate a little hand holding so that I can, in an hour, get the server running, drives installed, tested, formatted and files copying. At that point I will start digging in to the manuals and learning all of the geeky details because I love doing that. But before the geeky details I want my stuff started copying because it is going to take awhile to copy. "Getting started", first line in the WIKI.
October 22, 201015 yr jwcolby, I agree with your conclusions regarding the manual and potential ways to make it better. The thing I found was that all of the information is a little overwhelming at first, until you realize you have to pull the information together yourself into the logical steps that you take to start and operate the server. The forum is great for information, but you have spend time familiarizing yourself with all the available add-ins, short-cuts, best practices etc before running the server. For those that don't like to make mistakes, and want to do things quickly - that is not the most effective method to getting the server started. The manual is the last place I go now for information. A quick start guide would be a really nice start. One that took you through the process once the server was built-from getting the flash created, through the many steps to finally playing files off the server.
October 22, 201015 yr Author jwcolby, I agree with your conclusions regarding the manual and potential ways to make it better. The thing I found was that all of the information is a little overwhelming at first, until you realize you have to pull the information together yourself into the logical steps that you take to start and operate the server. The forum is great for information, but you have spend time familiarizing yourself with all the available add-ins, short-cuts, best practices etc before running the server. For those that don't like to make mistakes, and want to do things quickly - that is not the most effective method to getting the server started. The manual is the last place I go now for information. A quick start guide would be a really nice start. One that took you through the process once the server was built-from getting the flash created, through the many steps to finally playing files off the server. I think that as people use anything, from a car to a smart phone to UnRaid - as they become familiar - they lose the memory of that initial shock, the "holy smoke batman, this thing is a little overwhelming. UnRaid has an additional issue in that it tends to be used by techies to begin with. So the long time users just don't really remember "what it was like", and maybe there is a bit of an attitude of "this isn't for grandma so just use what we have already given you". I can tell you it was jarring. I'm a busy kind of guy, always more to do than time to do it, and now I am trying to find a "getting started" which simply doesn't exist. I then start digging and yea, I can find the info but it takes time, time I really don't want to spend right now, time I wouldn't have to spend if there was just two pages of that very basic info all in one place. And I can hear the keyboards a clacking with "well write one".
October 22, 201015 yr The Wiki you're asking for already exists ... Getting started with unRAID. The problem is that it does not jump right out at you if you are a new user. Here is how you get there. unRAID Wiki -> FAQ -> 3.1 How do I get started? -> Getting Started with unRAID It does seem like there are a lot of new users asking basically the same questions. How do I do this ... where is that ... what does this mean? I will say this though, the users on this forum are so helpful. I've never seen anything like it before. They don't make you feel stupid for asking a basic question. I have yet to see a RTFM on this forum. This sort of makes up for the lack of a clearly identified getting started guide. The information is all there it's just scattered about. I would be willing to contribute some of my spare time to building a getting started guide. I'm just a noob but it seems like all that is required is good organization skills not indepth knowledge of unRAID or Linux. All the smart people have done the work already through the forums the info just needs to be logically organized and put together in a single document. Who is the gatekeeper of the info on the Wiki's?
October 22, 201015 yr Who is the gatekeeper of the info on the Wiki's? There are two sections of the wiki. The "Official" manual is controlled and edited solely by Tom @ Lime-technology. It is frequently out-of-date. We have no way (as users of unRAID) to edit it. Best we can do is send an e-mail to lime-technology to let them know of any issues. The "User-Contributed" section of the wiki can be edited by ANYBODY who takes the time to set up an ID on the wiki so they can log onto it to edit content. I know I frequently update the wiki based on feedback and comments here in the forum, especially if I am providing a link to it when assisting a fellow user of unRAID and I notice it it is out-of-date or might be made more clear. Joe L.
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