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

[s.Oliver]

2 minutes ago, dlandon said:

You have several options here.

- Keep it removed and report the issue on the preclear blog and see if gfjardim will fix the open files reporting.

- Go to the Settings->Unassigned Devices and turn off the rc.diskinfo daemon.

 

The problem is that when preclear is installed, there is a background daemon that provides this information to UD to minimize the disk queries so preclear is not affected.  The rc.diskinfo daemon is not reporting the open files properly.

 

oh well, i'm sorry to have wasted your time here.

 

curiously, something must have changed along the way... i had both plug-ins installed for almost all of my unraid time. there were one, two, three occasions, where the counts were wrong, but always an update of either one of the plug-ins then somewhen fixed it again. now it happened again, so i thought, it's maybe yours which needs fixing.

 

thanks alot for being that patient and helpful. have a good night!

[dlandon]

15 minutes ago, s.Oliver said:

 

oh well, i'm sorry to have wasted your time here.

 

curiously, something must have changed along the way... i had both plug-ins installed for almost all of my unraid time. there were one, two, three occasions, where the counts were wrong, but always an update of either one of the plug-ins then somewhen fixed it again. now it happened again, so i thought, it's maybe yours which needs fixing.

 

thanks alot for being that patient and helpful. have a good night!

I did end up making some changes that caused the duplicate open files to be counted.

[btrcp2000]

On 10/28/2017 at 7:14 AM, dlandon said:

Oct 26 17:25:36 Error: SMB share '192.168.1.138:/mnt/user/r5000://mnt/user/r5000' appears to be off-line.
Oct 26 17:25:36 Error: Remote SMB/NFS server '192.168.1.138:/mnt/user/r5000' is offline and share '192.168.1.138:/mnt/user/r5000://mnt/user/r5000' cannot be mounted.

The 'No such file or directory' message is because the server is off-line and the rc5000 file cannot be found.  Here is a part of the UD log:

UD pings the server at 192.168.1.138 to see if it responds to check if the server is on-line before mounting the share.  You need to see why the 192.168.1.138 IP address does not respond to a ping.

 

There are several issues I see here with UD.  I made some changes to try to help with shares that go off-line by logging those events.  The log entry is showing the wrong information though.  The other issue is UD should not even try to mount a share that is not on-line.

 

I'm going to work on cleaning up this situation.

 

Still banging away on my NFS share issue.  Per your suggestion above, I looked into the question of whether the Win10 VM (which is now static ip of 192.168.1.101) responds to a ping.  The Error entries from the log below are when the WinVM's firewall is active. When it is shut down, that specific error goes away.  Below that is an ssh session first with firewall on where showmount times out, and second with the firewall off, where it sees the share. Below that is the successful ping from UNRAID ssh. Since the ssh showmount command sees the share on the WinVM, it seems like there is an issue with the UD ping?  This is with UD updated to 2017.10.30b 

 

 

[dlandon]

6 hours ago, btrcp2000 said:

 

Still banging away on my NFS share issue.  Per your suggestion above, I looked into the question of whether the Win10 VM (which is now static ip of 192.168.1.101) responds to a ping.  The Error entries from the log below are when the WinVM's firewall is active. When it is shut down, that specific error goes away.  Below that is an ssh session first with firewall on where showmount times out, and second with the firewall off, where it sees the share. Below that is the successful ping from UNRAID ssh. Since the ssh showmount command sees the share on the WinVM, it seems like there is an issue with the UD ping?  This is with UD updated to 2017.10.30b 

 

 

Try this:

/bin/ping -c 1 -W 1 192.168.1.101

and let me know the output.

[dlandon]

After looking at your log a little closer, you have several things going on here.  The ping issue is probably from starting unRAID and the VM not running.  When UD starts it cannot ping the VM.  I suspect your share is set to auto mount.  After the VM is running, the ping is successful because a mount is attempted.

 

After some time I suspect you are then trying to mount the share and get the file not found error.

 

The issue you need to concentrate on is the 'No such file or directory' error on the server.  I don't know how you have the VM set for NFS sharing, but that's the heart of your problem.

[btrcp2000]

 

What is the difference then between UD being able to find the share on its own when I click Load Shares and not being able to mount it?

[dlandon]

3 minutes ago, btrcp2000 said:

 

What is the difference then between UD being able to find the share on its own when I click Load Shares and not being able to mount it?

I don't know because I don't know what is serving the shares.

[btrcp2000]

Some of these were posted earlier, but here are all the settings of the Hanewin NFS Server that is installed on the VM.  Also below is a screenshot of the firewall rule i setup to deal with the ports (although the firewall has been off completely while I'm working on this)

 

[dlandon]

I've helped you all I can with this.  Your issue is probably not with UD and I don't know enough about NFS to help any further.  I would suggest you start a new thread and ask for some help from someone more knowledgeable about NFS.

[btrcp2000]

Ok, thanks for the time you put in 

[ijuarez]

Had a device on UD dismounted it, ran preclear finished no issue, Cannot re-mount the drive, drive shows offline and a little icon to forma. On the tools-preclear plugin it shows the drive green and i can start another preclear but i don't want that. I just want to format it so it can be my new cache drive.

 

 

Edited November 1, 2017 by ijuarez
engrish

[dlandon]

20 minutes ago, ijuarez said:

Had a device on UD dismounted it, ran preclear finished no issue, Cannot re-mount the drive, drive shows offline and a little icon to forma. On the tools-preclear plugin it shows the drive green and i can start another preclear but i don't want that. I just want to format it so it can be my new cache drive.

 

 

Click on the help button while on the UD page and read.  It will tell you what to do.

[John_M]

1 hour ago, ijuarez said:

Had a device on UD dismounted it, ran preclear finished no issue, Cannot re-mount the drive, drive shows offline and a little icon to forma. On the tools-preclear plugin it shows the drive green and i can start another preclear but i don't want that. I just want to format it so it can be my new cache drive.

 

That sounds normal to me. Since you've pre-cleared the disk it is no longer formatted and therefore can't be mounted so your available options are to format it with UD, or pre-clear it again, or you could stop the array, assign the disk to the cache slot, then restart the array and format the new cache disk. I think you want this last option.

Edited November 1, 2017 by John_M
clarification

[dlandon]

3 hours ago, John_M said:

 

That sounds normal to me. Since you've pre-cleared the disk it is no longer formatted and therefore can't be mounted so your available options are to format it with UD, or pre-clear it again, or you could stop the array, assign the disk to the cache slot, then restart the array and format the new cache disk. I think you want this last option.

The issue is that the format button is grayed because of the existence of the preclear log.  Once the preclear log is deleted, the format button will be active.

[trurl]

30 minutes ago, dlandon said:

The issue is that the format button is grayed because of the existence of the preclear log.  Once the preclear log is deleted, the format button will be active.

But if you want to use the precleared disk in the parity array or cache you should let unRAID format the disk after you add it.

[dlandon]

21 hours ago, trurl said:

But if you want to use the precleared disk in the parity array or cache you should let unRAID format the disk after you add it.

The UD partitioning is now compatible with the array partitioning.  So you can go either way.  UD or array format.

Edited November 2, 2017 by dlandon

[trurl]

9 minutes ago, dlandon said:

The UD partitioning is now compatible with the array partitioning.  So you can go either way.  UD of array format.

But if you ADD a formatted disk to a NEW slot in the parity array, unRAID will clear it again and make you format it again.

[dlandon]

53 minutes ago, trurl said:

But if you ADD a formatted disk to a NEW slot in the parity array, unRAID will clear it again and make you format it again.

It's really a partitioning issue.  As a new data disk, unRAID will accept the UD partition and not reformat it.  There have been issues where users would partition/format a disk with UD and load the disk with data, then try to put it in the array as a new data disk and unRAID would insist on a reformat.  The UD partitioning/format has been changed so this no longer is the case and unRAID accepts the UD  partitioning/format.  This only applies to XFS and BTRFS disks formatted with UD.

[trurl]

2 hours ago, dlandon said:

It's really a partitioning issue.  As a new data disk, unRAID will accept the UD partition and not reformat it.  There have been issues where users would partition/format a disk with UD and load the disk with data, then try to put it in the array as a new data disk and unRAID would insist on a reformat.  The UD partitioning/format has been changed so this no longer is the case and unRAID accepts the UD  partitioning/format.  This only applies to XFS and BTRFS disks formatted with UD.

 

What I'm talking about has nothing to do with partitioning.

 

ADDING a formatted disk into a NEW slot in the parity array would invalidate parity. A clear disk has no impact on parity, so it is OK to add a clear disk, but a formatted disk is not clear.

 

So unRAID must clear the drive so parity remains valid.

 

The other possible method, which you could use if you wanted to ADD a disk with data on it, would be to New Config and rebuild parity.

[ijuarez]

12 hours ago, John_M said:

 

That sounds normal to me. Since you've pre-cleared the disk it is no longer formatted and therefore can't be mounted so your available options are to format it with UD, or pre-clear it again, or you could stop the array, assign the disk to the cache slot, then restart the array and format the new cache disk. I think you want this last option.

I got it formatted using preclear, and the reason why is i wanted to mount it and copy what is current cache drive then do the swap as this would avoid some plugins auto install and start fresh and just be able to use my current data. 

[trurl]

10 hours ago, ijuarez said:

I got it formatted using preclear

 

Does the preclear plugin have the ability to format? I haven't used it in a while so I can't say for sure. If it does I would expect this to cause much confusion and problems, since many users don't really seem to know what format even means. A formatted drive isn't a clear drive.

[wgstarks]

Just now, trurl said:

 

Does the preclear plugin have the ability to format? I haven't used it in a while so I can't say for sure. If it does I would expect this to cause much confusion and problems, since many users don't really seem to know what format even means. A formatted drive isn't a clear drive.

It didn’t a couple of weeks ago. My guess, they used UD to format and then Preclear to clear.

[dlandon]

3 minutes ago, wgstarks said:

It didn’t a couple of weeks ago. My guess, they used UD to format and then Preclear to clear.

Yes, but the order would be preclear first, then format to put the file system on the device.   Preclear doesn't format.  Preclear is tightly integrated with UD so it's hard to tell what is preclear and what is UD.

[wgstarks]

14 minutes ago, dlandon said:

Yes, but the order would be preclear first, then format to put the file system on the device.

Right. My bad.?

 

15 minutes ago, dlandon said:

  Preclear is tightly integrated with UD so it's hard to tell what is preclear and what is UD.

Was thinking the same thing myself, especially for people just starting with unRAID that may never have used the scripted (JoeL) version.

[dlandon]

57 minutes ago, wgstarks said:

Right. My bad.?

 

Was thinking the same thing myself, especially for people just starting with unRAID that may never have used the scripted (JoeL) version.

I'm struggling with the preclear integration in UD.  While I think it is handy and seems to make sense, having two plugins provide functionality to UD is quite confusing to users, especially when it comes to support.  Where does a person report an issue?  I don't have an easy solution.