TraderStav posted:

Just moved houses and reran Ethernet everywhere. All I did to my UniFi network rack was cut the patch panel and put a new one in here. Was banging my head for an hour trying to figure out why my Poe devices wouldn't work despite maxing my internet speed on my laptop directly wired to the drops.

Forgot the 16 port poe switch only has eight powered ports! Swapped a few and BAM! I'm back baby.

Thanks for listening.

codo27 posted:

So I was in asking about a drive cloning solution and came up with Macrium. I'm actually in disbelief at how easy it was.

Popped in the NVMe drive, booted up, installed Macrium free, set up the clone which was also super simple. Figured it would take til this evening sometime just due to it being a lovely old hard drive. I told the user to advise me if there were any error popups or anything. Contacted me within 30 minutes I'd say, I expected it had failed. Nope, clone complete. Shut down, pull out the HDD, thought for sure, no way would it just boot up fine. Booted up fine with no further input required. So, so easy. Very pleased.

hbag posted:

not sure if this is the right thread but i couldnt find one that did fit and the thing i want to do is ON a NAS so whatever
would i be able at all to set different seeding rules in qbittorrent for different trackers, or can i only set that for all torrents

That Works posted:

Is there a "best practices" sort of thing for saving the config and setup for an UnRaid server? Or, some practical way to store a minimal image of the OS and VM and associated settings somewhere?

Just thinking of if there was a catastrophic failure of some kind I'd hate to have to set up each of my docker configs again from scratch since some of them were pretty fiddly. I also have a VM running Homeassistant on the server that I'd like to preserve if possible. I am not a real strong computer toucher so I am wondering if there's some kind of standard protocol or guidance here.

hbag posted:

i got two 2TB drives in my DS220+ (running SHR so its 1 logical volume of 2TB) and despite being just under half full i already want to put bigger disks in it

i dont even have the money for that

modeski posted:

I am researching my next NAS. Currently I'm running Windows Home Server 2011 with Stablebit Drivepool on some 4Tb/8Tb drives on an Athlon FM2 with 8Gb of RAM. I built the server in 2014 and it's time for a new one (and new drives) I've never cared for RAID much as I prefer to maximize storage. Maybe only 500Gb-1Tb of user-created pics/vids/documents is important to me and I back that data up elsewhere. I can always redownload Linux ISOs and re-backup my media, but I do want at least 30Tb of usable space.

Research has got me looking seriously at Proxmox, although I'm still getting my head around it and would love some advice if you'd be so kind. As I understand it, Proxmox would be the main OS on the machine, installed on its own SSD. I'd have a bunch of spinning disks for bulk storage.

Then I'd have a VM for a NAS OS, pointing that towards the spinning disks, and sharing that data over my LAN to my main desktop, HTPC, phones etc. Does this sound about right? So I would have a VM running something like OpenMediaVault (which I've played with a little) for the NAS side of things.

Is OMV the best OS for the JBOD approach? Is there a better approach I could be taking altogether? Thanks, goons.

redeyes posted:

You can always do what I do and use Stablebit Drivepool on Windows 10 Pro. Been rocking and rolling for me for the last 4-5 years that way after WHS died.

Thwomp posted:

I felt the same when I got two 4TB drives in my QNAP about 4 years ago.



I just put two 10TB drives in it last month.

modeski posted:

I am researching my next NAS. Currently I'm running Windows Home Server 2011 with Stablebit Drivepool on some 4Tb/8Tb drives on an Athlon FM2 with 8Gb of RAM. I built the server in 2014 and it's time for a new one (and new drives) I've never cared for RAID much as I prefer to maximize storage. Maybe only 500Gb-1Tb of user-created pics/vids/documents is important to me and I back that data up elsewhere. I can always redownload Linux ISOs and re-backup my media, but I do want at least 30Tb of usable space.

Research has got me looking seriously at Proxmox, although I'm still getting my head around it and would love some advice if you'd be so kind. As I understand it, Proxmox would be the main OS on the machine, installed on its own SSD. I'd have a bunch of spinning disks for bulk storage.

Then I'd have a VM for a NAS OS, pointing that towards the spinning disks, and sharing that data over my LAN to my main desktop, HTPC, phones etc. Does this sound about right? So I would have a VM running something like OpenMediaVault (which I've played with a little) for the NAS side of things.

Is OMV the best OS for the JBOD approach? Is there a better approach I could be taking altogether? Thanks, goons.

Matt Zerella posted:

Are you familiar with Virtualization? Honestly I dont recommend this approach at all.

If you want free and ZFS, go with FreeNAS (or whatever its called)

If you want some flexibility, and dont mind paying, with the added benefit of basically being hands off (while still having a ton of features if you want to go nuts), pay for Unraid.

Paul MaudDib posted:

I'm trying to play around with setting up a toy implementation of iSCSI / PXE / network booting and tbh I'm so far out of my depth that I don't even know where to start and all the documentation is flying above my head. I can't really find a "PXE for dummies" type thing and there's just so many approaches and options and moving pieces.

Internet Explorer posted:

I think this is pretty far outside the topic of the NAS thread. Not that it's too off-topic, but you might not get as many eyes on it as you could. Maybe linking in the IT thread might get some more. But I'll take a crack at it. You're definitely asking fairly complicated questions, which there's a lot of enterprise solutions to help do what it sounds like you're trying to do.

hbag posted:

man getting anything done on my DS220+ is kinda a pain in the rear end when NZBGet's trying to download an entire season of something
would be nice if i could limit its volume utilization because at the moment it just uses 100% all the time when its downloading poo poo

Takes No Damage posted:

You'd probably get more details in the Usenet thread, but does limiting the max download rate not keep it from thrashing your system resources, or is it more verification/unpacking traffic? Pretty sure you can also just set up a schedule of times it will use to do stuff, so it could run 100% overnight but back things off during 'office hours'.

hbag posted:

limiting the network speed isnt gonna limit the volume utilization
and my sleep schedule is so disjointed that a schedule wouldnt work probably

modeski posted:

I am a little bit familiar with virtualization, I have a couple of VMs going in Virtualbox for various things. I don't mind paying for things if the functionality is good; so I'll definitely check out Unraid also.

hbag posted:

man getting anything done on my DS220+ is kinda a pain in the rear end when NZBGet's trying to download an entire season of something
would be nice if i could limit its volume utilization because at the moment it just uses 100% all the time when its downloading poo poo

Paul MaudDib posted:

what do you mean "volume utilization" here? that sounds like disk space, but from context it sounds like you're talking about CPU utilization or disk access time.

if you're talking about bandwidth or cpu, you can set a bandwidth limit in nzbget and that will reduce these. Look at the throughput you're getting at peak and set a limit to maybe 75% of that. You probably won't notice the difference unless you're actively sitting there waiting for something specific to finish (and in this case you can release the limits and reset them later) but it will make it behave a lot better for other stuff that needs some resources.

for cpu and disk utilization the repair and unpack may be an additional factor. These will typically go as fast as either disk or CPU will let them and they are cpu-intensive steps. What you probably want to do is set "nice" and "ionice" values for the par2 and unrar steps, these will make the process more willing to yield CPU and disk to other processes. Higher niceness value is "lower priority" and you can probably just set them to idle/highest niceness (which is iirc 19 for nice and 3 for ionice). If NZBGet does not directly allow this, you can probably do a script like this that does it. (you can combine nice and ionice in a single command too, like "nice -n 19 ionice -n 4 unrar $1" or whatever the script does, and the par2 script would look similar)

Note also that iirc nzbget does have a "pause for X minutes" option so if you are gaming or something and you don't want it trashing the network for the next hour, you can just pause it entirely.

hbag posted:

Matt Zerella posted:

Are you familiar with Virtualization? Honestly I dont recommend this approach at all.

If you want free and ZFS, go with FreeNAS (or whatever its called)

If you want some flexibility, and dont mind paying, with the added benefit of basically being hands off (while still having a ton of features if you want to go nuts), pay for Unraid.

modeski posted:

I am researching my next NAS. Currently I'm running Windows Home Server 2011 with Stablebit Drivepool on some 4Tb/8Tb drives on an Athlon FM2 with 8Gb of RAM. I built the server in 2014 and it's time for a new one (and new drives) I've never cared for RAID much as I prefer to maximize storage. Maybe only 500Gb-1Tb of user-created pics/vids/documents is important to me and I back that data up elsewhere. I can always redownload Linux ISOs and re-backup my media, but I do want at least 30Tb of usable space.

Research has got me looking seriously at Proxmox, although I'm still getting my head around it and would love some advice if you'd be so kind. As I understand it, Proxmox would be the main OS on the machine, installed on its own SSD. I'd have a bunch of spinning disks for bulk storage.

Then I'd have a VM for a NAS OS, pointing that towards the spinning disks, and sharing that data over my LAN to my main desktop, HTPC, phones etc. Does this sound about right? So I would have a VM running something like OpenMediaVault (which I've played with a little) for the NAS side of things.

Is OMV the best OS for the JBOD approach? Is there a better approach I could be taking altogether? Thanks, goons.

Keito posted:

Why can't you recommend virtualization? It's pretty great.

TrueNAS would be a poor fit here, because modeski wants JBOD and it doesn't cater to this use case at all. I thought OMV sounded like a good fit for them, what does Unraid bring to the table other than a price tag to make it worth consideration in this case?

withoutclass posted:

You can emulate jbod in TrueNAS by just having a bunch of individual disk vdevs in stripe mode, then add them all to a pool. The redundancy/raidZ stuff is optional. TrueNAS has the benefit of running jails/plugins on the bare metal too.

Paul MaudDib posted:

synology’s support documentation basically says that’s how much of the time there was a request pending and if it’s high but other things are fine then don’t worry about it. When you have multiple parallel workloads running it’s pretty much gonna be 100%.

That’s a disk IO metric though, so if your interactive workload feels bad when it’s downloading then you probably need to add an ionice to the nzbget worker process (basically, “idle” priority in the disk access subsystem). You may have to edit whatever container script to add the ionice to the launch command, but you should be able to run the command at the shell to test it in the meantime (ionice -n 3 -p PID, get the pid from ps -A). also you will want to make sure the repair (par2) and unpack processes are running at the higher ionice level, not sure if child processes inherit the ionice value, you can check this with something like top or iotop if available, or use “ionice -p pid” (no -n) to look it up for the child process pid.

It is likely this won’t make that “volume” metric go down, and if the total number of IO requests is up then your disk utilization % will probably rise as well. There will also of course be a performance hit on the nzbget process. But if overall it feels more responsive for your interactive workload that’s a win to usability.

If you are running multiple parallel download workers that will increase disk traffic too. Downloading four file segments at 1x actually pulls way more IO then two at 2x, etc. If you can make it work with ionice that’s obviously better, as at some point this will have a performance impact, but more threads isn’t necessarily better here, and may be amplifying the IO problems.

There is sometimes also an option to pause downloads during an unpack or PAR2 repair and you can consider the performance vs IO consequences (repair and unpack jobs often run in an additional thread which is more IO, and potentially a lot more CPU/memory - these are relatively heavy operations). This may help to keep performance from really tanking when those heavier steps kick in - but either way do make sure that the child processes are being ioniced properly too, you still want them to run at ionice 3 (idle) even if it’s the only worker running.

Note also that prebuilt NASs usually ship with “minimal” amounts of RAM and running multiple containers and more concurrent/parallel workloads tasks will tax ram harder and will benefit from having more RAM available. If you are starting to swap out to your spinning rust that will affect your other IO a ton too. If you see swap utilization start to happen it should be cheap to figure out what ram it uses and just order 2x4GB or 2x8GB or something. Depending on your workload it will probably help performance/responsiveness to add ram even before you start to swap.

I have the quad core version of that and I noticed swapping at 8GB while running at the windows desktop. I didn’t at 16GB (this is not officially supported, but it works on my NUC if you stay within the (global) requirements of 2400 C16 memory), it is a very nice little light desktop with a bit more memory. Don’t skimp on memory though, 2GB really is not a lot for a server even on Linux.

NZBGet is really fantastically lean for a nzb client though (apart from par2/unrar, which you can’t really do anything about), it’s like 70 or 90 mb running from what I remember - I used to run it on the OG shitbox Model 1B raspberry pi, the 700 MHz one with 256MB RAM. The power of actual good C coding in action. Samba is reasonably light weight too, if it’s just those two you will be fine.

The J4025 is actually not godawful as far as prebuilt NASs go, which is basically high praise. It is only 2C2T but I really like those Gemini Lake chips, they are reasonably fast (above core2 IPC, around midrange core2 performance) and have AES-NI which helps reduce CPU utilization of SSH connections, SSL endpoints (whether downloading or hosting), and they have hardware transcoding for Plex, and an advanced media encoder/decoder/IO block (backported from XE/Icelake, including hdmi 2.0b), and Intel’s Linux drivers are massively solid (and open source). I have a couple NUCs with the quad core variant that I picked up for $125 a pop (plus ram/ssd), and I really like them as low power servers, or light desktops, or TV PCs, they just are super nice low power processors with a wide feature set. They are like my Athlon 5350 server I used for a lot of years, solid and fast and cheap. I’ve watched Intel do their thing with Baytrail and Cherry Trail and so on and own a lot of the iterations there (Liva/Liva-X/etc) and it was ok but not really that great, it kinda fizzled out but the new Silvermont/Goldmont variants are actually great. Gemini Lake actually slaps for a low power architecture given the wattage and performance and the featureset, and the high clocked desktop variants (J-) are competitive with Core2, no poo poo.

My (fellow) here is sitting on a core2duo sleeper loaded with all the instructions and encryption sets and media codecs and protocols that core2 never knew about.

BlankSystemDaemon posted:

ZFS stripes data across vdevs, so you end up with a RAID0 with a bunch of devices which means you've lowered MTBDF.
On FreeBSD, I'd recommend gconcat(8) - it may also exist in TrueNAS but you won't be able to use the WebUI for any of it.

Keito posted:

Why can't you recommend virtualization? It's pretty great.

TrueNAS would be a poor fit here, because modeski wants JBOD and it doesn't cater to this use case at all. I thought OMV sounded like a good fit for them, what does Unraid bring to the table other than a price tag to make it worth consideration in this case?

Matt Zerella posted:

Full drive size mix and match JBOD with Parity (max drive size is only limited by the size of your parity disk, and you can do dual parity if you want) Cache drives (can also be dual mirrored), Docker app based "plugin" system. A non poo poo community full of helpful people and actual support from the company who makes it. And it has virtualization on top of it.

There's a shitload more.

Matt Zerella posted:

Full drive size mix and match JBOD with Parity (max drive size is only limited by the size of your parity disk, and you can do dual parity if you want) Cache drives (can also be dual mirrored), Docker app based "plugin" system. A non poo poo community full of helpful people and actual support from the company who makes it. And it has virtualization on top of it.

There's a shitload more.

SolusLunes posted:

Plus a feature-unrestricted trial.

SolusLunes posted:

The major downside with Unraid is simply how it stores data- it doesn't stripe in the main array, so you are limited in read/write speeds for a single file to single-disk speeds, and there isn't native ZFS support.

Keito posted:

If their goal is to maximize available storage space as stated in the original post, it sounds to me like parity isn't really needed or wanted in this specific case. As for OMV, Docker support is there while cache drives are not. No idea about virtualization, but regardless of OS choice they should then go with the original idea of running their NAS OS on top of a hypervisor instead of going the opposite way about it.

Competing against feature-unrestricted non-trial software, yeah.

Isn't that supposed to be its strength? That home users get to haphazardly mix disk types and sizes? No idea why you'd be using that OS for any other reason, it seems like the worst possible place to decide you want to run a ZFS setup.