Tuesday 4 October 2016

unRAID 6.2 Update

The 6.2 update came out a few weeks ago following a couple of months of public beta. I usually dive right in to the betas but my unRAID system has become so fundamental to our house that I couldn't risk downtime and general family wrath.

However, with all parties out working or playing sports this weekend, I had a couple of hours so, after backing up my unRAID stick, I ran the update.


There are a few significant changes from version 6.1.9 which I was running to version 6.2. There are changes in Docker, there's dual parity and a few under-the-hood KVM updates as well. I use the DVB Edition of unRAID which is a specially maintained 3rd party version that includes hardware drivers for certain TV tuner cards. This is required to allow the TvHeadEnd PVR plugin function.

I was a bit anxious. The unRAID announcement thread is full of warnings about chages and things that need to be updated and the DVB edition has been through a lot of revisions which I hadn't applied.

In the end though, I all went pretty smoothly. Following the instructions in the various release threads and taking the opportunity to clean up my config and go scripts and remove deprecated plugins etc., I had an updated system running in about half an hour.

I did encounter an issue with VM network access (I still have the remnants of Xen bridge configurations hanging around but this post saved the day.

Next project is to set up a VM to run openhab. (I tried the dockers but the setup instructions were obtuse or missing - some work needs to be done on Docker support threads. I find that authors combine multiple dockers into a single support thread which is a complete nightmare for the user as you've gpt to read through irrelevant overlapping conversations. Additionally, the initial posts in these threads seem to assume an awful lot of knowledge - a step by step set of instructions to get Docker newbies going would be super useful in each thread)

Anyway, I'm swapping out old X10 automation controllers for ZWave and, having had a look around at controller options, I think OpenHab looks super flexible and very configurable. The adventure continues....

1 comment:

chbmb said...

"I use the DVB Edition of unRAID which is a specially maintained 3rd party version that includes hardware drivers for certain TV tuner cards. This is required to allow the TvHeadEnd PVR plugin function.

I was a bit anxious. The unRAID announcement thread is full of warnings about chages and things that need to be updated and the DVB edition has been through a lot of revisions which I hadn't applied."

Great to see a mention! I got back into Unraid and HTPC Linux because of this blog and now I'm mentioned on it.