Sunday 28 September 2014

unRaid 6beta10

Nice to wake up this morning to a fresh build of unRaid. And easy to install as well. Previous updates required manual download and installation but this one shows up in the UI and it's just a matter of clicking the update link (and restarting the system).

This is not an earth-shaking release but it does have a couple of UI changes that are undocumented. Most noticeably, the links to the VM management tools are now moved to the main menu;


Secondly, the output of the newly-named 'System Devices' function under tools now includes discrete listings of USB and disk devices in addition to LSPCI output.

It would be nice if the updated was notified via the UI (rather than having to go into 'Plugins' and clicking the 'Check for Updates' button but otherwise this seems like steady progress.

UPDATE: Beta10a is now available - some misc fixes for Xen auto-start and other bits.

Saturday 27 September 2014

Thinking Outside The Box

Right now I've got my system stacked with expansion cards;

1x GPU for unRaid booting
3x GPUs for passing through to VMs
1x 2 port SATA expansion card
1x Octopus Tv tuner PCIe card
1x Octopus expansion tuner (no slot required)
1x PCI M-Audio Delta card

The Gigabyte 990FXA-UD5 is a great board with 5x full length PCIe slots, a single 1x PCIe slot and a single PCI slot.

However, there's a problem: the 1x PCIe slot is tight up against a heatsink and any cards with any overhang at all simply won't fit. The ideal card in my setup to occupy this slot is the Octopus TV tuner but I can't get it in there. Therefore, I've got that card in a 4xspeed  full-length slot and a 2-port SATA expansion card in the 1x PCIe slot.

Saturday 13 September 2014

The Perils of Beta Testing

Regular viewers will be aware that I've been using beta versions of unRAID 6 to run multiple virtual machines on MediaServer8.

I haven't been cursing edge with the betas, mainly due to time constraints, plus I was stuck on beta5 for a while as there as a kernel issue in beta 6 that prevented it from recognising my Marvell motherboard SATA controlllers.

However, I have been updating regularly and most recently installed beta 7. This allowed me install BtrFS on my cache and install multiple drives to cache as well. Indeed I'd done this to play around with Docker which up to beta 7 required BtrFS. Frustratingly, this requirement was removed in Beta8 so my time was somewhat wasted setting that up, or so I thought.