Unassigned Devices - Managing Disk Drives and Remote Shares Outside of The Unraid Array

[dlandon]

ok, thank you.

 

edit: Are you sure that it is really not spinning?

Because when I check out my Preclear Plugin under tools/disk utilities it reports the temperature and marks the drive 'green'.

 

 

 

Confirm whether or not it is in standby with the following command:

/usr/sbin/hdparm -C /dev/sdf

 

Then run this command:

/usr/sbin/smartctl -A -d sat,12 /dev/sdf | /bin/grep -m 1 -i Temperature_Celsius | /bin/awk '{print $10}'

 

and you'll see the drive is in standby and the temperature is available even when it is in standby.

 

UD chooses to show '*' to indicate that it is not spinning.  The pre-clear plugin shows the temperature even if it is not spinning.  Just programming preferences.  UD shows the status of the disk the same way as the array drives are shown.

 

Yes I'm sure.

[Marv]

ok thanks for clarifying.

Checked with the commands you posted.

 

Unfortunately the state shows 'active/idle'.

This is also shown for array disks when they are in use.

 

'Standby' is indeed shown for spun down array disks but not for my unassigned device 

 

Sorry for my stupidness but I still don't get it

 

 

[dlandon]

ok thanks for clarifying.

Checked with the commands you posted.

 

Unfortunately the state shows 'active/idle'.

This is also shown for array disks when they are in use.

 

'Standby' is indeed shown for spun down array disks but not for my unassigned device 

 

Sorry for my stupidness but I still don't get it

 

What kiind of disk is the UD disk, and what are the array disks?

[Marv]

all WD Reds 4TB each

[dlandon]

all WD Reds 4TB each

 

Read the second post on this thread about best practices.  There is an explanation about UD showing the disk temperature.  I think in your case this is what is happening.  UD is not monitoring your drive so it looks to be spun down.  Based on your quick test, the drive is spun up.  You need to see what is spinning it up.  If UD is showing '*' then it is not monitoring the disk at all.

[ryoko227]

New version (2016.05.03) is available with nvme support.  I have no way to test so hopefully someone with a nvme disk can give it a go and let me know how it works.

 

Hey dlandon, wanted to give you some feedback on how my experience working with an nvme drive handled under UD. Using a Plextor M8Pe PX-256M8PeG-08 NVM Express SSD M.2 2280 256GB.

 

After install and initial boot, UD was able to detect the M.2 drive and gave me the option to format it as XFS. I formatted it and could see the partition from the GUI main page, but if I tried to mount the partition nothing would seem to happen. I added the mount to the go file, but after a reboot found an error in the syslog stating that the partition was invalid. At this point I couldn’t get UD to reformat the drive, so I then followed the instructions given in dAigo’s post. When I gdisk’d the device it showed MBR:present and GPT:invalid (if I recall correctly). I finished partitioning, formatting, and mounting the drive via ssh then rebooted. UD now shows the drive, its partition, file size and space remaining, though temp is not displayed. The option to unmount is available as well, but I haven’t played with that.

 

I’m not sure if it was something I did, or if there was a glitch when it formatted the drive, but wanted to pass you the info. Also, I had a migraine when I was doing this, so my apologies if my steps aren’t clear or if I missed something.

[Marv]

all WD Reds 4TB each

 

Read the second post on this thread about best practices.  There is an explanation about UD showing the disk temperature.  I think in your case this is what is happening.  UD is not monitoring your drive so it looks to be spun down.  Based on your quick test, the drive is spun up.  You need to see what is spinning it up.  If UD is showing '*' then it is not monitoring the disk at all.

 

Ok so I added the default script to my disk and now UD aswell shows it as spun up and reports the temperature.

Unfortunately I don't use that drive at all and it is empty. So I don't know what keeps it spinning.

Is it possibe to add a line to the script somehow that sets a default spin down delay or something?

 

 

Update: I added '/usr/sbin/hdparm -y /dev/sdf' to the custom commands after wakeup of the S3 Sleep plugin.

Seems like the drive stays in standby now.

 

[RobJ]

all WD Reds 4TB each

 

Read the second post on this thread about best practices.  There is an explanation about UD showing the disk temperature.  I think in your case this is what is happening.  UD is not monitoring your drive so it looks to be spun down.  Based on your quick test, the drive is spun up.  You need to see what is spinning it up.  If UD is showing '*' then it is not monitoring the disk at all.

 

Ok so I added the default script to my disk and now UD aswell shows it as spun up and reports the temperature.

Unfortunately I don't use that drive at all and it is empty. So I don't know what keeps it spinning.

Is it possible to add a line to the script somehow that sets a default spin down delay or something?

I had the same problem and finally gave up and uninstalled Unassigned devices.  I wasn't using it, just liked having its extra capabilities in case I ever needed them.  UD insisted on spinning up the drive constantly, even though I wanted it to just ignore the drive if it couldn't spin it down.  There's a script option that is supposed to change the behavior somehow, but I never tried it (I know I should have, just to understand what it did and what the default script was).  But that meant having to manage the drive and I didn't want to do that, I just wanted it to ignore the drive.  There are times you'll have a drive currently unassigned, temporarily, for any number of reasons, and I shouldn't have to go into UD every time and 'manage' it, assign some kind of script to it, as it's probably a temporary situation.  The script would be problematic anyway, as it's often just a random drive, and how would it know what its drive symbol was, unless Dan is passing its symbols in the local environment passed to the script.

 

I don't think Dan believes that UD is spinning up the drives, and I don't know for sure what is causing it, but as soon as I uninstalled UD, the drive never spun up again.  Ever.  I use the spin down icon in the built-in Unassigned Devices section to spin it down shortly after boot, and it then stays down.

 

It might be nice if both Unassigned Devices tools had a default action for 'unmanaged' drives, drives they don't have anything programmed for.  The best default I think would be to issue a "hdparm -S60 /dev/sdX" to the drive.  That would cause the drive to spin itself down in 5 minutes, and if anything spins it up, it will spin itself down again in 5 minutes.  If desired, the -S60 could be changed to -S180 for 15 minutes, or -S12 for 1 minute.

 

Update: I added '/usr/sbin/hdparm -y /dev/sdf' to the custom commands after wakeup of the S3 Sleep plugin.

Seems like the drive stays in standby now.

Hard coding the drive symbol is not going to work reliably, as it can change on each boot.  How stable the symbol assignments are depends on the particular motherboard and the controllers added, and differs for everyone.  You'll need to use a method that finds the drive by ID or serial number.  When you hard code it to sdf, then the drive that is currently sdf will spin down, but it may not be the drive you expect.

[deuxcolors]

Hey y'all.

 

I don't know why, but I can no longer mount a network drive using UD.

 

I add the drive, and it shows in the list, but when I click mount it doesn't.

The page refreshes and the mount button reappears.

 

There is a folder in /mnt/disks with the name of the networked drive, but it doesn't connect.

 

 

I don't know if there is a log or something else to check.

 

 

Thanks for the help.

[dlandon]

Hey y'all.

 

I don't know why, but I can no longer mount a network drive using UD.

 

I add the drive, and it shows in the list, but when I click mount it doesn't.

The page refreshes and the mount button reappears.

 

There is a folder in /mnt/disks with the name of the networked drive, but it doesn't connect.

 

 

I don't know if there is a log or something else to check.

 

 

Thanks for the help.

 

On the UD page there is a log button in the upper right.  See what the log shows when trying to mount the network device.

[deuxcolors]

Logs said unknow error.

 

I got to work, but I have any clue why. Thanks in any case.

[Nezra]

Need some assistance with UD.

 

First off, I LOVE it. but, I have one small issue.

 

If I mount a network drive, and for whatever reason the network location becomes unavailable, and then available again, it hangs the whole unraid ui/ssh. it completely stops working. it's happened twice now once on 6.1.9 and now on 6.2. the last time I force rebooted the server. this time I posted elsewhere in hopes someone could advise how to reboot the machine and safely shutdown the array.

 

The issue only occurs when the remote location becomes unavailable and available again. it hangs everything up once it starts attempting to remount it. the folders it creates for the mount points persist until reboot when they are cleared, leading me to believe UD is getting stuck, and by association the rest of the emhttp/ssh, when it tries to recreate the folder or when it is remounting.

 

The other thing is it only happens if the remote location becomes unavailable before I unmount it from the GUI. if I manually unmount it, and then make the remote location unavailable, then manually remount it, everything is fine. I have auto-remount OFF as I hoped that would fix it, but has no bearing.

 

I can't always stop the remote locations from being unavailable, or time when it will happen, as they may crash, install updates, or reboot, lose network connectivity, etc.

 

My current setup has a separate NAS I use to back important files up to. it's been flakey lately from a connectivity standpoint, and will be something I am looking to replacing, but when it becomes momentarily unavailable, UD appears to break, and takes both emhttp and ssh with it. I found this out by going to the terminal and killing each of the processes one by one(I know, REAL bad) trying to reboot the machine. once UD's process was killed that indicated it was trying to mount something, the server was running fine again.

 

Is there a bandaid fix or some other way I should look into it?

 

[publicENEMY]

How do I access mounted USB drive from windows? I can see the drive from network, but when I try to access the drive, a dialog box requiring user password pops up. Tried put root username and password, but the same dialog box keeps popping up.

 

In the main unraid web ui, I have enabled share on the drive. In the unassigned device settings, I have select 'No' for 'Enabled SMB Security?'

 

It appears that the owner of the folder(checked from winscp) is root. How do I change it to nobody from the webui?

[dlandon]

How do I access mounted USB drive from windows? I can see the drive from network, but when I try to access the drive, a dialog box requiring user password pops up. Tried put root username and password, but the same dialog box keeps popping up.

 

In the main unraid web ui, I have enabled share on the drive. In the unassigned device settings, I have select 'No' for 'Enabled SMB Security?'

 

It appears that the owner of the folder(checked from winscp) is root. How do I change it to nobody from the webui?

 

Setting the device to share and setting "No" for SMB security shares the device as public.  Root is not a valid SMB user.

[fonzie]

I want to temporarily put my empty NTFS Windows hard drive in my unRAID and set it up as an unassigned disk to quickly copy my media from my unRAID onto this disk.  Then I want to put that disk back into my Windows machine and have it read it.

 

Is this the proper plugin to accomplish that?  If so, what are the steps to make sure this goes smoothly?

 

The reason I want to put it directly in my unRAID machine for the copy is because my network transfer speed is too slow and I have a lot of data to copy over.

 

thanks

[trurl]

I want to temporarily put my empty NTFS Windows hard drive in my unRAID and set it up as an unassigned disk to quickly copy my media from my unRAID onto this disk.  Then I want to put that disk back into my Windows machine and have it read it.

 

Is this the proper plugin to accomplish that?  If so, what are the steps to make sure this goes smoothly?

 

The reason I want to put it directly in my unRAID machine for the copy is because my network transfer speed is too slow and I have a lot of data to copy over.

 

thanks

I use this all the time to write NTFS drives. This plugin only mounts the drive so unRAID can access it, and possibly share it on the network. The copying part is up to you. Do you know how to do the copy?

[publicENEMY]

How do I access mounted USB drive from windows? I can see the drive from network, but when I try to access the drive, a dialog box requiring user password pops up. Tried put root username and password, but the same dialog box keeps popping up.

 

In the main unraid web ui, I have enabled share on the drive. In the unassigned device settings, I have select 'No' for 'Enabled SMB Security?'

 

It appears that the owner of the folder(checked from winscp) is root. How do I change it to nobody from the webui?

 

Setting the device to share and setting "No" for SMB security shares the device as public.  Root is not a valid SMB user.

 

Setting the device to share.

http://i.imgur.com/486aPly.png

http://i.imgur.com/T7ScylG.png

 

Setting "No" for SMB security shares the device as public. 

http://i.imgur.com/lF3pnhF.png

 

This is what I did. Advice?

 

Edit:

 

I have successfully access the device.

 

What I did was change Unassigned Device Settings->SMB Security->'username'->read/write

 

Thanks for the plugins.

[fonzie]

I want to temporarily put my empty NTFS Windows hard drive in my unRAID and set it up as an unassigned disk to quickly copy my media from my unRAID onto this disk.  Then I want to put that disk back into my Windows machine and have it read it.

 

Is this the proper plugin to accomplish that?  If so, what are the steps to make sure this goes smoothly?

 

The reason I want to put it directly in my unRAID machine for the copy is because my network transfer speed is too slow and I have a lot of data to copy over.

 

thanks

I use this all the time to write NTFS drives. This plugin only mounts the drive so unRAID can access it, and possibly share it on the network. The copying part is up to you. Do you know how to do the copy?

 

No, I do not know how to do the copy.  I would like some kind of command line to input so that unRAID will do the move for me.  I feel that this would be the fastest way.

 

The only way I would know how to do it is by mounting the drive and then accessing it remotely through Windows Explorer, but that would defeat the purpose of mounting it in unRAID in the first place because Windows Explorer would work as the "middle man" and cause the copy to bottleneck.

[trurl]

I want to temporarily put my empty NTFS Windows hard drive in my unRAID and set it up as an unassigned disk to quickly copy my media from my unRAID onto this disk.  Then I want to put that disk back into my Windows machine and have it read it.

 

Is this the proper plugin to accomplish that?  If so, what are the steps to make sure this goes smoothly?

 

The reason I want to put it directly in my unRAID machine for the copy is because my network transfer speed is too slow and I have a lot of data to copy over.

 

thanks

I use this all the time to write NTFS drives. This plugin only mounts the drive so unRAID can access it, and possibly share it on the network. The copying part is up to you. Do you know how to do the copy?

 

No, I do not know how to do the copy.  I would like some kind of command line to input so that unRAID will do the move for me.  I feel that this would be the fastest way.

 

The only way I would know how to do it is by mounting the drive and then accessing it remotely through Windows Explorer, but that would defeat the purpose of mounting it in unRAID in the first place because Windows Explorer would work as the "middle man" and cause the copy to bottleneck.

mc (Midnight Commander) is builtin to unRAID. It gives you a 2-pane text-gui which makes it very easy to manage files directly on unRAID. Pretty easy to figure out.

[John_M]

As an alternative to mc you could use either the Krusader or Dolphin docker, either of which would make the experience even more like using Windows Explorer.

[publicENEMY]

As an alternative to mc you could use either the Krusader or Dolphin docker, either of which would make the experience even more like using Windows Explorer.

 

This.

[CHBMB]

I'd actually recommend mc over those personally.  But at the end of the day it's all personal preference.  Try them all and see which you like best.

[John_M]

I prefer to use mc too. It can be a little daunting at first for someone who is only comfortable with Windows Explorer though.

 

[shlomiassaf]

GREAT PLUGIN! Thanks!

 

Is this the place for feature requests? I'll give it a shot

 

I would like to have the option to "hide" some of the devices, this can be done by adding the identification string to a list in the plugin's settings.

 

I have 4 drives that are part of a ZFS array, they are wide open in the Unassigned Devices list, merged with other drives I do use via the plugin.

I have to examine every change making sure I won't do something to one of the drives in the ZFS array.

 

The plugin "hides" drives part of the array, surely it can also hide custom drives specified by the user.

 

Thanks!

[Flick]

There's a good conversation going on in https://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=50516 about how to connect ACD to Unraid. I started thinking, it's just another mounted drive (albeit using FUSE, EncFS) so it'd be cool if this plugin could support it. Thoughts?