Shouldn't user shares update automatically now?  The only way I get newly added data to show is to stop and the restart the array.

 

EDIT: for spelling.

I have the same problem. If i copy something to eg. disk2\Anime copied files aren't shown in Anime until i stop and restart array.

I should note that I'm running beta2.  Didn't see beta3 was available until just a bit ago.  Any reason to think it may help?

If you write directly to a /mnt/disk1,2,3 it does not show up in the user-shares. 

 

It looks like you cannot write directly to the disks any more.  Instead, you must use the user-share /usr/Movies...

 

The user-shares, as Tom has apparently implemented them, has no clue what you are doing behind its back. (writing directly to the /mnt/disk1,2,3... devices)

 

A bug Tom?  or a feature?  Is a periodic scan of the drives still appropriate?  Do we still need a "scan" button?

 

Joe L.

If you write directly to a /mnt/disk1,2,3 it does not show up in the user-shares. 

 

It looks like you cannot write directly to the disks any more.  Instead, you must use the user-share /usr/Movies...

 

The user-shares, as Tom has apparently implemented them, has no clue what you are doing behind its back. (writing directly to the /mnt/disk1,2,3... devices)

 

A bug Tom?  or a feature?  Is a periodic scan of the drives still appropriate?  Do we still need a "scan" button?

 

Joe L.

 

If the behavior cannot be easily changed to allow writing to the physical or logical disks and have them automatically show up, I would think the scan button would be sufficient.

 

 

Bill

If you write directly to the disk shares, then those changes are not reflected in the User shares.  This is by design.  What you want to do is no longer export the disk shares.

 

There is a reason for this which has to do with symlinks - you can not create a symlink via User share, but can via direct disk share.  This is not relevant for pure Windows environments because Windows SMB does not use concept of symlink.  Can be an issue for those using rsync to back up other *nix systems.  I'll try to write up a tech note on this soon.

I mainly use disk shares when copying files to the box but i'm reading files from user shares. Because when you user disk shares you can choose which disk you write data on. I don't want to spread same kind of data to diffrent disks. Also if by some miracle two disk would break i only lose only one type of files.

That scan disk button would be suffient . But better would be ofcourse have ability to update user shares when you write to disk shares.

I did some quick reading and found that if you add unix extensions = no to samba config files then you won't have that problem right?

I only use windows machines anyway and lot of other people too i would guess and most linux/unix users probably won't need unix extensions with unRAID. So would it be possible to have option that would allow user shares updating and then disable unix extensions at the same time?

I agree that this will be difficult to use for me. I've been trained by unRaid for 2 years to write to the disk shares and read from the user shares so I have control over placing large files. Having to reboot to refresh them will be a royal pain.

I upgraded from 4.1 to 4.2 a few days ago and am enjoying not having to worry about which disk has enough room any longer, I simply write to the share and the disk that data is written to is determined by split level, included disk(s), excluded disk(s), and allocation method that I configured for the share(s) as described in manual http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=Manual I had to read through the documentation a few times to understand the new concept and configuration of shares rather than disks and then rearranged my data to work with this new concept before I upgraded. I think it is possible to still work with the old disk concept by adding included disk(s) to share, I have done this so that I will know where (by disk) non exported share data is located by disk, I just need to remember to write to the share though rather than the disk as before. I also have spent a bit of time configuring media applications (XBMC, Meedio, BeyondTV) to use shares rather than disks, they have all been working well for the past week. I just need to remember to write to shares rather than the disk if I want data to be available to applications mapped to shares, its a bit of a concept change but well worth it in my opinion.

 

Thanks,

Roblkuhnjr

 

 

The difficulties I'm having is in the past, I placed all Media in one folder "Media" on the root of the disk, i.e.:

 

Media

  eBooks

  Music

  Pictures

  Movies

  HD Movies

  Users

 

The beauty of that is I could map, one and only one mapping (net use M: \\tower\Media) on all computers in the house (currently 6) for all users on each computer (4 users, access all PCs). That alone is 24 drive mappings (not running a domain, so I need to do it manually).

 

Now, to get the control I need, 4.2 is steering towards lots of little shares, so taking my example above if I wanted to control say 4 of the shares more tiggtly I now need to map 96 shares manually. Yikes.

 

Basically the only reason I want to control file storage is I have one drive (disk1) that stores all of the really tiny stuff (eBooks, Pictures, Music, Users), 3 more that strore medium stuff (Movies), and then 6 that store the monsterous stuff (HD Movies). I'm just elaborating on the way I use it to give Tom a solid use case. I've read the wiki thouroughly, but it's still a little complex. I'm hoping that by setting "Split Level" to 0, unRAID will never create a new folder to store an object. That is, if I write a large file (say 20GB) to M:\HD Movies\New Movie\ it will always write to any one of the HD movies disks (say disk 5-10 in my on-share example). I'm still trying it, but if it does that I'll be very happy with it.

 

 

 

You can achieve this effect by creating a User share named "Media", and then using Explorer create shortcuts to the other shares.

The way I understand security in 4.1x is that it is defined at the share level which is currently below tower, Media in above example. I believe that means that security settings are the same for everything below Media, and can not be different from one another or share, correct?

 

If this is the case is there a way to change security settings in directories beneath Media to be different than other directories at the same level ? Is there any plan for this in the future if it is currently not possible ?

 

An example of what I might like to do do is create a share called Users with folders that are named user names, containing their "My Documents" back ups, and set security so that only Bill can read/write to his folder, and Joe can read/write to his folder ect. The only way to do that today I believe is to have shares called Bill,Joe, and Sue at the Users level rather than under Users, is this correct ?

 

Users

    Bill

    Joe

    Sue

 

 

An example of what I might like to do do is create a share called Users with folders that are named user names, containing their "My Documents" back ups, and set security so that only Bill can read/write to his folder, and Joe can read/write to his folder ect. The only way to do that today I believe is to have shares called Bill,Joe, and Sue at the Users level rather than under Users, is this correct ?

This is the ultimate goal.  At present all security is at the share level, handled completely by Samba.  We want to implement Windows-style ACL's which would permit you to do exactly what you want.  This functionality will have to wait until after 4.2.

In the meantime when changes are made at the disk level is there a way to re-scan shares?  A command to run?  So far all I have found that works is to reboot.

All you have to do is stop and then restart the array.  IMO Tom should put the rescan button back for the times when people want to write directly to a disk.  It's a bit more elegant of a solution than having to manually stop and restart the array.

I tried the stop and start and it did not seem to make a difference.  I even turned off user shares and turned them back on.

I have also found that writing to the user shares to be far less reliable than writing to the disk directly.  Let me explain, my typical tasks to rip a DVD is to first use DVDycrypter and rip the entire DVD to a local drive then using DVDShrink clean out what I don't want and write the final output directly to the Unraid.  When writing to the user shares I get write errors in Shrink about 50% of the time and need to start the process over.  Writing directly to the disk never causes this, I agree that the user shares are better but only if they are writable in a reliable way.  Until then put the scan button back....

I have also found that writing to the user shares to be far less reliable than writing to the disk directly.  Let me explain, my typical tasks to rip a DVD is to first use DVDycrypter and rip the entire DVD to a local drive then using DVDShrink clean out what I don't want and write the final output directly to the Unraid.  When writing to the user shares I get write errors in Shrink about 50% of the time and need to start the process over.  Writing directly to the disk never causes this, I agree that the user shares are better but only if they are writable in a reliable way.  Until then put the scan button back....

The erorrs you are seeing when writing to user-shares might have been caused by this samba bug... http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=1021.0

 

This bug has nothing to do with writing to user-shares vs. disk shares.  I got the write errors when writing to disk shares using bittorrent while concurrently playing a movie on the same PC...  Tom was never able to reproduce it and it showed itself rarely for me.  I could go days without seeing it, and I never saw it when reading files from the unRaid server unless I was also writing to it at the same time.  Luckily, the error was reported to the samba developers along with a network trace and they figured out the cause and fixed it,

 

Unfortunately, version 4.2 of unRaid has the buggy version of smbd  that on occasion will cause network disconnects.

 

Joe L.