How I Came to Unraid - An Unnecessarily Long Story

[clay_statue]

I last mucked about with linux way back when debian was the hot new distro, well before it spawned ubuntu.  I had a friend was a sysadmin during the heady days before the dotcom bubble burst and he was always showing me cool new things that the gnome desktop could do at the time.  It looked like magic compared to the locked down and stodgy stock Windows environment.  So I did my best to "get into it" and managed to blunder about for a while until inevitably retreating back to the safety and comfort of Windows.

 

In the 80's, French was mandated by the Ontario school system.  Before my family moved out of the province when I was ten years old I had achieved the mighty level of Grade 4 French.  Now, pushing 40, my French is basically zilch but I have a passing familiarity with common phrases.  That is basically my level of linux literacy... slightly greater then nothing but effectively zero.  I can safely back my way out of a vi text editor, but having to actually edit a text file with it is like walking across a beach wearing swimming flippers... I can do it, but it is slow and awkward.

 

Armed with this minimal knowledge, I jumped into Arch linux via Manjaro after two decades plus of solid Windows usage.  The KDE desktop was luxurious.  I enjoyed it enormously.  Got my main go-to apps set up with a predictable amount of headbanging and n00b frustrations... but I was doing it.  I was swimming again.

 

In my tinkering I inadvertently courted disaster.  It started with the mouse cursor.  I set it to some custom cursor, but it was only so over app windows.  When it hovered over the desktop it reverted to its default appearance.  A minor blemish.  Trivial.  But I picked at it more and more... trying to fix it and falling short.  Eventually I scrambled my KDE desktop settings and would have to go and reconfigure it all from scratch.  Rather than deal with this minor inconvenience I tried to revert to a saved image of my system using TimeShift.

 

Well... something happened.  I broke grub bootloader somehow.  Now I could only boot into Windows.  Manjaro still existed on my disk, but I couldn't get to it.  Eventually I figured out how to use my live USB and chroot into my native partition so I could muck about trying to undo the damage.  I must have spent 15 hours on this, trying everything.  In my struggling all I managed to do was tighten the noose and eventually I couldn't even boot into windows.  It was at this point that I reluctantly gave up and just nuked my whole drive with a clean Manjaro install.  I picked at a minor blemish until it festered into a rotten, gangrenous sore and empathy demanded the host had to be put out of its misery.  Fortunately this was all tinkering done on a fresh PC build  (yay covid time hobbies) so all my personal data was still safely on my crusty, trusty Windows laptop.

 

My aforementioned sysadmin friend (who has since moved out of IT) recommended strongly encouraged that I use Windows with VMware to tinker about in linux after hearing of my trials and tribulations with inadvertently killing my bootloader slowly over a ten hour period.  Deep down, I knew he was right.  I am an incompetent custodian of a linux system.  Deeply unworthy of root.  Windows with VMware fit my usage needs and experience level perfectly.  It would give me a solid base with familiar ol' Windows and whatever linux distro I wanted safely sandboxed away from all the mission critical components of the system's architecture.

 

Somehow I don't wanna run bare-metal windows anymore.  Call it pride, or hubris, or whatever... a sudden, irrational predilection towards techno-masochism perhaps.  Needless to say it was deeply engrained;  I wanna install linux bare-metal as a hypervisor and use kvm, qemu, libvirt to run VM's... *because it's just so neat and cool*.  There's a certain invisible aesthetic to doing it this way that I don't have the expertise to fully comprehend or possibly hope to express. 

But I don't trust myself to do it.  I just don't have the chops to pull it off, at least not at this moment.  Like learning to unicycle along the edge of a cliff, always courting disaster.  There has to be another way.

 

What I needed was a linux-based VM manager, compiled and configured from the ground up by wise and diligent geeks whose level of wizardry is lightyears ahead of my own.  Surely that must exist?  That's when I encountered 'the usual suspects'... proxmox, unraid, and freenas.  Except these are all well regarded OS's for NAS, which sort of threw me off a bit.  My day to day usage is so far away from what NAS is supposed to be for.  I have absolutely no need for a server in my life.  A lot of forum posts I encountered poo-poo'd on the idea of using any of the usual suspects for a desktop PC and I was swayed by these sparse opinions.  "Why pay for this when you can do it yourself with any linux distro you want for free?" was another common sentiment.  But to me this sounds like saying "Why go pay $30 for pasta at a high-end Italian restaurant when I can make spaghetti at home?"  I know the pasta I can get at the high-end Italian restaurant will be far superior to whatever I can conjure myself.  Sure, if you are an experienced chef then this type of sentiment may ring true, but I am under no delusions about my linux - or cooking - ability.

 

All credit to SpaceInvaderOne.  Five minutes into his first video I knew I had found my new home.  I know a lot of folks end up here from LinuxTechTips, but for me it was seeing SpaceInvader working step by step through the various processes of unraid and explaining the concept behind parity drives that really convinced me.  The power of having all this in a simple, browser-based GUI = mind blowing.  The amount of google time I would need to spend researching all the command line arcana needed to use KVM/qemu/libvert and breakup the IOMMU groups to do a GPU passthrough would be significant.  Not impossible, but certainly daunting for somebody with my level of expertise.  Without integrated graphics on my CPU, I'd also need to buy a secondary GPU for the host (which seems redundant).  Running unraid headless isn't just possible, it's baked in by default.  I know just enough to recognize the beautiful simplicity masking these deeply complicated and perplexing rabbit holes.  The Mandelbrot also looks pretty basic until you start to zoom in and see what it's really about.

 

I'm pre-clearing my HDD's for the array as I write this, which is my excuse as to why its so long.

[TheMannequin]

Yip! Spot on!
And I came here from Linus' two gamers one pc video....and hooked since then!

Had to re-do my unRaid server once because I just dived in and did not really follow best practice for a few things...but once that painfull part was done, it has been smooth sailing ever since.....by following mostly SpaceInvaderOne's vids 🙂

[JonathanM]

On 11/3/2020 at 11:52 AM, clay_statue said:

my excuse as to why its so long.

Do you write prose professionally? If not, why not? Your story construction and execution is excellent.

 

Also, welcome! Feel free to ask for help any time you feel you may be treading too close to the sand with your flippers. We are slowly but surely attempting to iron out the worst rough spots in the user experience, any feedback on things that could use some polishing is helpful, especially from the perspective of fresh meat.