jwcolby

LOL, that is startlingly useful and clear. I guess a fog was obscuring my vision as I was reading it last. Furthermore now I am seeing little [Edit] links off to the side of each and every section. Pretty cool as well. Good job guys, and thanks!

Les, My daughter is developmentally delayed and has some rather severe disabilities. She loves for me to walk with her through the neighborhood, and tonight we walked up to "Uncle mike's" house, a fella that goes to my church. He was tilling a section of his back yard for a garden, driving a tractor pulling a gas powered tiller. Allie dragged me close (she has a generalized anxiety disorder) so she could watch, and we watched Mike go round and round with his tractor. When he stopped Allie asked if she could ride, and "Uncle Mike" let her sit in his lap and steer the tractor around and around his yard for probably a half hour. THAT is what life is about! I am a tech guy, I learned to fix electronics in the 70s with the US Navy and then moved in to programming in the mid 80s. I love computers and I love what I do, but I don't have time to do everything, and watching my nine year old daughter drive (steer) a tractor makes life worthwhile. "One more time" is Allie's favorite phrase and "Uncle Mike" got conned into many "one more times" around the yard on that tractor. I pretty much had to drag her off the tractor so we could get home for the bed time routine. Earlier today I took an inmate out on pass for two hours to visit his sister who has terminal cancer. I had never met his family but it was enjoyable to sit and visit with his parents and sisters for a couple of hours. The sister looked pretty good (for terminal cancer) but we never know whether she will be here next week, and being in a position to do that for him and his family makes a real difference to them. So yea, I got a bit frustrated with the time I spent here trying to do the Cache Disk thing. I truly have more important things (to me) to do. And no, figuring out how to do the Wiki isn't one of them and isn't going to happen (for me). I am 57 years old, I adopted two kids (2 and 4 years old at the time) when I was 48 and I don't have enough time left for editing Wikis. That is just my personal decisions. It doesn't make me "entitled or superior" eh? Just more important things in my life. I t would be nice if someone did, but maybe editing Wikis just isn't anyone's priority. I can certainly understand that! Spend as much time as you are able with Mum and Mum-in-law. Now is all there is.

I read this many times. Nowhere does it actually say how to create a cache disk. My point in all of this is precisely that what is obvious to one person is not so obvious to another. Once it was pointed out to me, that there is a disk slot down at the bottom (completely off the page of my monitor, I had to scroll down to see it) suddenly it was easy. I had been to every page of the "Gui" and I just did not see the CACHE DISK slot. And nowhere in anything that I ever read was it ever mentioned that such a thing existed, nor the page to go to to find it. Anywhere! And I spent a ton of time clicking on "links" and reading and moving on and reading and everything kept telling me that could be done but not how.

Boof, I am not struggling at all, and you are the one who seconded the fact that the docs suck. Why should you fix them? Good question, and to each his own I guess. You are not inclined, but I am not either. I understand your position. I didn't get that you were a "drops by once a year" person. That is precisely what I am. It sounded like you were a regular, and if you are not then learning and fixing the Wiki is also an opportunity cost to you as well. I am not asking you to fix the docs for me. I am asking anyone who is a regular, who is over the top knowledgeable (which decidedly does not include me) to think about spending the time required to learn how to edit the Wiki and when you answer a question to write the answer down. It is in no way for me, it is for the next thousand folks who come looking for that answer. Forums are good but have you ever tried to search them for something. NOT a fun experience, NOT proper documentation. Not in fact of any use at all except for the person who received the answer. Boof, I am talking to you specifically when I say that I do appreciate YOUR (individual) effort to answer my question. You gave me the final answer that allowed me to figure it out. You got me off the Google train and my Cache disk in place. I do not in any way think that you don't have "anything better to do" nor do I think that however I serve people is any more important than how you serve people. What I thought (apparently in error, excuse me) was that you enjoyed answering questions in this forum, that you spent time here on a regular basis. People who do that are the perfect candidates for improving the user edited Docs. People who come in to get an answer and then leave (me) are the worst possible candidates to try and shore up the docs. I have explained the reason, because I don't know much if anything about UnRaid, the last time I was even in this forum was when I needed to do something with it, probably a year or more ago. Why would I give myself a pep talk about improving the Docs when I am not here, know nothing and will not be here tomorrow? OTOH giving the regulars (the gurus) a pep talk may pay for itself, at least for the folks who drop by in the future. How much any of us make or don't make is irrelevant except in the context of opportunity cost. If I make a thousand a day and I hang out here for an hour a day answering questions, then I can spend 150 dollars (an hour of my time) learning something about UnRaid (or how to edit the Wiki for example) and then it pays for itself over the next year as I spend another hour a day helping people here. That hour learning the wiki is amortized over 300 hours over the year as I help people and and then document the system. If I earn a thousand a day (and I don't), and I spend an hour figuring out how to edit the wiki, and I make one edit, and I leave and don't come back for a year, well my single edit just cost $150 because I can't amortize it. We each choose how we help people. This is not how I do it. There are people who do drop by daily (it appears) to answer questions and those people are performing a very valuable service. That service would be magnified by an untold amount if the answers were written down in a clear logical manner somewhere other than a thread in a forum. Information provided to me in this thread was great. But if I had to ask it here, how many others will as well? And in a day it will be buried down below a hundred other threads and never seen again by most of those needing the information. So recognized. It's not for me, it is for those who follow me. I have my answer. And given my position it is a decision I make that my doing DOCS here is not a reasonable thing (for me). I am in fact nowhere near as capable as (some) others here.

LOL. Guys the docs are bad. Bitching about me bitching about bad docs doesn't change that. Here's the deal. Any time that a person helps another person, that's a good thing. I appreciate the assistance here, I truly do. And... the docs suck. In fact the Docs don't exactly suck, they just don't do what I need them to do, tell me how] to do stuff. I do my own thing as far as helping people goes, it just isn't here. I was a foster parent for the state of Connecticut and adopted my two kids (Robbie 11 and Allie 9) out of the foster care system. I choose to do volunteer work in the prison system here in North Carolina (where I now live). I spend about 2 hours every Tuesday and about 5 hours every Thursday bringing AA meetings into the prison camps near my home. I check out three prisoners every week to take to my church on Sunday. THAT is where my heart and time goes. When I was done at the prison last night I met a friend at my church and worked on the gas stove to get it working reliably again. I choose to help people in other ways. I am not a "bad person" because I don't have the time to go fix the Wiki for UnRaid. And I am not a bad person because I point out that the docs are less than stellar. Now consider this. There are a bunch of very helpful people in this forum that just love helping others here. That is a *very* good thing, and I thank you. A Wiki can be many things. There are wikis where all you are trying to do is learn something about something. Not how to DO something, just learn about some artist or whatever. They impart information. The Wiki for UnRaid should be fundamentally different however, it should also give step by step directions for how to do this stuff. Telling me that it can is a useless as tits on a boar if I can't do it quickly and easily after reading the stuff. So every single page of the Wiki should have a "Here's how to do it" section which details in precise steps how to actually make it happen. I haven't read the entire Wiki but I have read a lot of it, and I have not seen that anywhere. So basically the Wiki is marketing literature, not a user's manual. It tells me what can be done, not how to do it. Understand that I come to the Wiki to figure out how to do something and it doesn't tell me. So what's the point? If you want to be helpful to me, you can tell me how to do something. You did and I appreciate it but guess what, the next guy won't have that information because you didn't document in the Wiki the answer you very helpfully wrote for me. If you truly want to be helpful... every time you answer a question think about what section of the Wiki needs to be expanded and go do that. Write down step by step how to do it so that specific item is now documented. In a very short time you can stop saying "yea the docs suck but we are here to help" and start pointing to the specific section of the wiki where the answer (that you very helpfully wrote) actually lies. Folks, I am not the problem. My bitching about the docs is not the problem. The problem is that the docs are often unhelpful and instead of fixing them you answer the same questions over and over ad nasium and jump on anyone that disparages the docs. If you don't like the reality (sucky docs) then fix the sucky docs. Don't expect to tell every tom dick and harry that comes in asking a question to go fix the docs. The emperor has no clothes guys. Ranting at me doesn't fix that. And my "thing" is not here with you guys. I have other missions in life and I am never going to fix the docs, and I am not feeling guilty about not fixing Unraid docs. And finally, if you are here answering questions (helping people - a good thing) then any time you spend learning how to edit the wiki is useful to you over and over and over. No opportunity cost there, an hour spent to learn plus dozens of uses of that knowledge making small edits over time. If I spend my time learning how to edit the wiki (and getting the permissions) then I just spent my time to make one single entry in the wiki and I am gone. That is opportunity cost to me. UnRaid is a wicked system, I have used it for years. But any time I need to do anything I cringe because I know how many hours I am going to spend, and I just don't have those hours to spend (on this). Fix the Wiki guys, you can do that and you can take pride in your part of making the wiki as wicked as UnRaid is. Instead of listening to folks lament the bad docs you can listen to people praise the docs, and know that you were part of that! And whether or not you choose to fix the Wiki, thanks for taking the time to help me and so many others.

>But, in seriousness all the things that you're upset about you can now directly fix to your 100% satisfaction. That has to be tempting. LOL. First of all you apparently haven't a clue what I am upset about. and second, it is tempting. So I went to the wiki. No obvious link for editing the thing. I have never edited a wiki before. I clicked "view the source" whereupon I am told that I am not allowed to edit it because I am not a member of the group "users". So now I get to chase my butt to try and figure out how to edit a wiki, and of course how to get permissions? So that I can fix sucky documentation for another company's product? When (apparently) you already know how to edit the Wiki and (if you cared) could have edited that thing in less time that it took to write an email chastising me for being upset about sucky documentation and telling me I needed to do it myself? You should understand that I am a consultant with a family to feed. When I chase my butt I am not earning money, which is what I am upset about. I already spent the better part of two full days on various UnRaid butt chasing, which equates to ... around $1000 in lost wages. It's not my Wiki, it's not my product, I seriously doubt I am going to lose yet more money on this. >This is very much a case of do as I say not as I do This is very much a case of "no one really cares enough to make the documentation right". Throughout my dealings here, there has been an attitude of "yep, the documentation sucks, deal with it." >As I said above there are the docs poor? yes. Are the community docs patchy? Yes. But do we care??? It seems not. I use UnRaid because it is cheap and just works. Except that if I lose 2 days butt chasing then it is suddenly *VERY* expensive. I spend all those hours butt chasing because that is what we do when we don't understand stuff, Google and read. It's not as if I didn't do my homework. My problem with all of this is that all of that time is simply wasted. I am not, nor do I care to be an UnRaid (or Wiki) Guru. I just wanted to do something that seemed simple, and in fact was simple once you pointed out where to go to do what I needed to do. But all the hours I spend reading UnRaid stuff are just wasted. I need to be reading on how to use Delegates in C#, how to Insert a record in SQL Server and get back the generated AutoID. Those things are what I need to learn to earn money, things that I will use over and over again. ANYTHING that I learn trying to get something working in UnRaid will be forgotten because I will never use it again. And the most galling part about it is that I spent hours dutifully searching through "documentation" that simply did not contain the answers, ANYWHERE. In business it is called "opportunity cost", time spent NOT doing what you need to be doing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost I kept reading because I just knew that the answer was in there somewhere. Not! So it becomes obvious that I need to just go back to work. I understand. Thanks for the attitude adjustment! I got my (very expensive) cache drive and I do thank you for your assistance.

OMG I just never looked all the way down at the bottom of that screen. Now I see the "Cache drive slot" it all makes sense. My irritation with UnRaid in general is that the documentation has all of this glowing "we can do this" kind of thing but it is extremely short on explicit steps. Take the following: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=1731.msg11937#msg11937 It has an entire huge page of what a wonderful thing it is but nowhere (that I can find) does it ever explicitly state. In order to create a cache disk using the GUI: 1) Stop the array 2) Click on "Disk" at the top. 3) Look at the very bottom of the page in the Disk Devices section for a disk 'slot' labeled Cache (the very last slot). 4) Select any disk not in the array into that slot. 5) Start the array Likewise in: http://216.119.154.106/wiki/index.php/Cache_disk I am here to tell you that had the numbered list that I include above been in either of those places this thread would never have occurred. >Once *you've* done it to your satisfaction you can write the howto yourself. IMO all that really needs to be done is have those two places edited to include the "how to" I created above. That at least gets the CACHE drive integrated into the UnRaid system.

I see all this stuff about "you can use a cache drive" but I am not finding any "this is how you CREATE a cache drive". I emptied my smallest disk and removed it from the array and stopped the array. I am now searching through the GUI and see absolutely nothing in any of the 5 links - Main, Users, Shares, Settings or Disks that has anything to do with the cache drive. One would assume that it would be under Settings or Devices. Nothing that I can see. I have read the main part of this: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=1731.msg11937#msg11937 I have read this: http://216.119.154.106/wiki/index.php/Cache_disk Wouldn't ya think that it would be in here somewhere? I mean we are telling you all about this great feature... except ... how the hell do you actually DO IT? Lots of "you can" and absolutely no "and this is how you do it". Is it just me or is UnRaid UnFriendly? And what makes me feel like a real idiot is that I keep seeing messages about people who have done this. Which leaves me asking where they found the information to do so.

Any chance you could do a "to add a cache drive do this" to this thread? I have moved back and forth through the many threads and nowhere do I find anything about actually setting up the cache drive. Tons of "you can now add a cache drive" and " a cache drive does this" but I just am not finding the "Follow these steps to take an existing drive, clean it off, remove it from the array and reassign it as a cache drive" kind of post. I mean it *must* be there somewhere but like so many things UnRaid related, there is an enormous underlying assumption that we are all Linux kinda folks. Sadly I am not. I have my smallest drive at the end of the drive list (500 gigs, drive 15). As it happens I had stuff on it so I dutifully moved everything off. Boy was that fun. I poked around until I discovered the move command and then moved disk15 to disk 14 and... hmm... it looks like I moved everything twice. Once to a subdirectory called disk15 on disk14 and again to the root of disk14. SIGH. I do know that it took a long damned time, and this was using the command line in UnRaid. So anyway, Disk15 is now empty. I then removed it from the array. Unraid now tells me that it is missing and that dire things are going to happen because the array is missing a disk and please add the disk back as soon as possible. I cannot for the life of me figure out how to tell UnRaid that I know it is missing, because *I REMOVED IT*. SIGH. I want to recalc parity to restore my system to it's normal robust state. I do use UnMenu (or whatever it is called). I click on Array Management and then click the "Check and correct parity". Nothing obvious happens. It continues to say that parity was checked yesterday and that parity is fine. Yea, except that I just removed a disk from the array. And UnRaid is telling me everything is NOT fine! And I just clicked the Check Parity button. One would assume that it would at the very least tell me that it had checked parity a few minutes ago and that parity was fine. SIGH. Do we get that UnRaid is my favorite "sits in the corner and runs" system... until I have to do anything on it and then I would rather pull my own teeth with pliers than look at this thing. Did I mention that I am not a Linux kinda guy and the underlying assumption (AFAICT) is that *everybody* is a Linux kinda guy. I just wanna do a cache drive! It shouldn't be this hard. And I get the distinct feeling (from reading the threads - yep, I really do, and yep I am extremely computer literate), that once I get the damned cache drive installed and recognized I am going to spend another day figuring out how to make it recognized by all my shares. SIGH. If I sound unhappy, let me say that as long as I don't have to do anything to it, I LOVE this thing. It is exactly what it says it is, it does exactly what it says it will and it just works. I have 13 terabytes of disk half filled with all kinds of valuable stuff and I trust this thing with my life. Good job Limetech. Now... 1) how the heck do I get my array back up after removing this drive. I mean it is up... but it scared the bejeesus out of me with that "not protected" stuff. Is it protected? 2) How do I make the disk I just removed be used as the cache drive? 3) How do I get it used by all of my shares? In fact I write directly to individual disks (and I have 14 of them). So if I write to any of my disks will it just automatically go to the cache and then be distributed from there? Thanks for understanding my frustrations and for any assistance you can give. Just as an aside, I am a consultant, database analyst programmer in the MS world - C# and SQL Server. I was told by a friend reading my documentation for my system that "I can't write my way out of a paper bag". I think that when we are inside, when we know the stuff too well, then we are just unable to appreciate that instructions have to be *really basic* for outsiders. Step by excruciating (to us) step, every keystroke because the outsider is going to do exactly what they are reading and when a step is missing... In this case the entire chapter is missing! Or buried deep in the bowels of a WIKI somewhere? I found this thread and was so excited that I was finally going to get the missing instructions...

Well, I was having general funkiness with Unraid so I stopped the array and rebooted and I am now seeing my share info etc. The last thing I saw I posted in another post - too many files open - where the log file was telling me that there were too many files open, and all of them were photos. My duaghter loves to look at the photos and videos on the named shares and often fails to close them behind herself. I can't imagine that she would open so many that Linux would run out of file handles but... I did a reboot and everything seems normal again. jwc

My daughter Allie loves to look at pictures and videos. If they are of herself, even better. Unfortunately while she knows how to open files, she does not understand that she needs to close them as well. I am attempting to address that but she is developmentally delayed so it may take a bit of work training her to close the pictures before she opens another. In the meantime, per Unmenu/Main - system log last 6 lines: Jan 11 13:42:09 Tower shfs: shfs_readdir: opendir: /mnt/disk4/Photos/100OLYMP (24) Too many open files Jan 11 13:42:09 Tower shfs: shfs_readdir: opendir: /mnt/disk4/Photos/100OLYMP (24) Too many open files Jan 11 13:42:09 Tower shfs: shfs_open: open: /mnt/disk4/Photos/100OLYMP/P9220083.JPG (24) Too many open files Jan 11 13:42:09 Tower shfs: shfs_readdir: opendir: /mnt/disk4/Photos/100OLYMP (24) Too many open files Jan 11 13:42:09 Tower last message repeated 23 times Jan 11 13:42:35 Tower shfs: shfs_open: open: /mnt/disk4/Photos/A70/IMG_2183.JPG (24) Too many open files And I am having funkiness with UnRaid generally. I have not rebooted Unraid but I am wondering if there is a setting that I could increase to allow more open file handles or something. Is it time to reboot?

I have had my server up for many months and it has worked flawlessly. I set up named shares and they have been working flawlessly. Suddenly my named shares don't show anything in Windows Explorer. If I go to the physical location, the data is there. This has been working, I have a handful of named shares - software, movies, video, photos etc. None of them show any files or directories in them. The disks seem to be fine, though it has been a month or so since I did a parity check. Any ideas other than deleting the shares and recreating them? Thanks, jwcolby

I need a medium large, fairly secure NAS. I store all of my ripped videos as well as family photos and videos, the source files for all of my software (for installs) and so forth. I was using WHS but there file duplication sucks, they are always shuffling files and so forth. After much study I decided UnRaid is the ticket and I have to say I am happy so far. I purchased a Norco 4020 about 6 months ago and had some back plane problems but the RMA handled it and now it works fine. The air flow in that version of the case wasn't stellar but the nice thing about the UnRaid is that it spins down drives not in use which really helps reduce the heat load, noise and power usage, so that NORCO case will work well for the UnRaid. I'll post pictures when I figure out how to do that. jwc

I happen to have an areca 8 port raid controller card laying around, so I dropped it in and added 4 640g drives I had laying around (more still available). I went in to the Areca boot bios and made the drives pass through. I intend to eventually drop in the supermicro 8 port: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816101358&Tpk=Supermicro%20AOC-SASLP-MV8 Does anyone know if you can just change the cables over to the new card and boot? Is it that simple? jwcolby