Release 2.060706 available


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Version 2.060706 of the UnRaid software is now available.  The only change in this release vs. previous (2.060324) is a critical bug fix related to upgrading a disk.  The release may be found here.

 

Thanks to forum members Joe L. and rharvey for valuable input in isolating this problem.

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If you have more than 8 disks in your array and are still running the original 1.050930 release you might run into a bug in the GRUB loader program when you attempt to use the fix18 script Tom provided.  This bug will basically overwrite your flash drive with garbage and you will not be able to recover if you did not first make a backup of the drive using "dd" (and even then Tom has offered to simply send a replacement flash drive since it can be complicated for non-UNIX-guru folks.)

 

The solution is easy, unplug all the drives, then boot off of the USB drive, run the fix18 script, then power down and plug the drives back in.  Better instructions are in the thread describing the 324 release.

 

Tom: the readme.txt in the new release does not mention the issue with more than 8 disks in the array and the fix18 script.  Couldn't hurt to add a note in the release zip folder.

 

Joe L.

 

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First off, thanks Tom for the update! Was a piece of cake to install. One question, however. Although I haven't run into any trouble booting my unRaid, I didn't see the 'fix18' script anywhere in the updated .zip file. Am I looking in the wrong place?

 

Thanks again! (Both Tom, and Joe L.)

 

-PGPfan

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First off, thanks Tom for the update! Was a piece of cake to install. One question, however. Although I haven't run into any trouble booting my unRaid, I didn't see the 'fix18' script anywhere in the updated .zip file. Am I looking in the wrong place?

 

Thanks again! (Both Tom, and Joe L.)

 

-PGPfan

It is there, it has the "hidden" attribute set, so unless you have windows explorer configured to show "hidden" files you will not see it.

 

If you are up and running then you probably don't need it.  As I said, the folks who wrote GRUB apparently did not envision us with more than 8 drives installed, or, rather they did not test it too well with more than 8 drives installed.  The fix18 script can trigger that bug in GRUB if you have more than 8 drives installed.  If so, follow the directions in the 324 thread on how to safely run it without it trashing your USB drive.

 

I've installed the new release and I am currently booted up on it.  It went very smoothly for me. I've yet to try to upgrade a disk in the array.  I'll try that tomorrow with a drive I have that has never been formatted for unRaid and see how it fares.

 

Don't forget, if you edited your old "go" script, you will need to edit the new "go" script as well. (I needed to re-add the two lines I added to the bottom of mine to alert me over the LAN using a YAC client of any unRaid failures.)

 

Joe L.

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Don't forget, if you edited your old "go" script, you will need to edit the new "go" script as well. (I needed to re-add the two lines I added to the bottom of mine to alert me over the LAN using a YAC client of any unRaid failures.)

 

Joe L.

 

Hi Joe,

 

Thanks for the reply! I guess I don't really need it after all. Regarding the YAC client script, any chance you could post a quick 'how-to' on setting that up? I'd love to be able to have the same thing on my server.

 

-PGPfan

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I've installed the new release as well with no problems. I'm currently in the process of upgrading a drive from 120GB to 400GB (using the same drive that always showed as Disabled with the older releases), and it seems to be working fine (although it's currently predicting 1300+ minutes to rebuild the drive - yoiks!)

 

-mike

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Don't forget, if you edited your old "go" script, you will need to edit the new "go" script as well. (I needed to re-add the two lines I added to the bottom of mine to alert me over the LAN using a YAC client of any unRaid failures.)

 

Joe L.

 

Hi Joe,

 

Thanks for the reply! I guess I don't really need it after all. Regarding the YAC client script, any chance you could post a quick 'how-to' on setting that up? I'd love to be able to have the same thing on my server.

 

-PGPfan

Check out the user customizations sub-forum. I put the how-to there.
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Tom,

 

Well from my testing today it looks like you killed the nasty bug.....!  I'm only 22% completed in the  data rebuild but never even got it to do this before.  Same conditions as always, 300GB going to a 500GB raw drive (no partition or format).

 

A couple of comments on the process however ALL from an end users point of view.  I found the information in the management Command Area to be less than informative and in some cases quite confusing actually.  Here are some thoughts:

 

  • When I first powered up the array with the larger drive in place it came up as "New" not "Wrong" as it always did before, I'm not sure that's bad but it was not what I expected and did not indicate to me that the system noticed that I put in a different drive.
  • The wording in the command area at this point I found somewhat confusing, it said...! "Start will expand the file system of the previous disk, bring the array on-line and then start rebuild of the new disk" I know what your saying here but it was so cinfusing I had to read it a few times before I was willing to check the box and move on
  • Once I clicked "Start" the mounting started, after a few seconds I did a refresh and the new drive showed as invalid as it should.
  • From that point there was about a 5 minute period where there was really no information at all in the Command Area other than the word "Starting".  All drives were mounted as normal etc.  It almost looked like something locked up, but a quick look at the drive light showed me that was not the case however not everyone is going to be able to see the lights. It would be helpful to provide some sort of informational feedback during this time like "calculating re-build parameters, please wait"
  • After that 5 minute period BOOM the Command area indicated that data rebuild was in progress and much like a parity check it shows speed, position and estimated time left, very nice.
     

 

So I'm assuming at this point that the re-build will complete in about another 6 hours and all my original data willl be restored.  Big bad bug dead.......!

 

I do also have one last question, how did you get from version 324 to 706 with no additional fixes or enhancements....?  I'm not a developer per se but I do understand the process, however this would suggest that nearly 400 versions were compiled (with mods) prior to 706 which had ZERO changes other than this nasty bug fix.

 

UPDATE - Re-build here also successful however the time to re-build a 500GB drive is about 9 hours OR about 1/3 longer than a normal parity check is that normal....?  Sure sounds like a long process.....!

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I can confirm the 706 release has killed the replacement/upgrade drive bug.  Successfully upgraded a 160GB drive to 400GB fresh out of the box earlier this afternoon ... took about 6-1/2 hours to rebuild.  Doing another one tonight.  Thanks, Tom!

 

Kevin

 

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I would do one more step, and that is before you do anything else, make an image copy of your current flash drive contents using

the instructions given here:

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=7214997#post7214997

 

Odds are you will not need this image file, but you never know.  It might be able to get you running if you really messed up.

 

Then, copy the image file you just made from the unRaid server to some other machine on your LAN (It will be a little bit easier to get to if is not on the unRaid server)

 

copy the fix18 file from the temporary folder containing the unzipped contents of the new 2.060706 release to the flash drive as described in this thread, but DO NOT RUN IT.

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=40.0

 

Then proceed as you described.

 

Stop the array

Power down

Unplug all drives

power up

log in using telnet

run the fix18 script as Tom described.  It should only take a few seconds to run.

 

power down

plug drives back in

power up

continue with upgrade process as Tom described.

It sounds harder than it really is.

 

Joe L.

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Joe L.

 

I have upgraded both of my unRaid servers to the 2.060706 release and the installation went fine.

 

Since I had already done the fix18 when upgrading to 324, I did not have to do that part of the upgrade.

 

One thing that occurred with both servers was that the reboot completion bar never went totally green. It stopped about midway and never continued to advance. So I waited until all of the drive lights quit flashing and then did a page refresh that caused the web page to update showing a successful completion. What gives?

 

Regards,

TCIII

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I think Tom mentioned that in one of his notes.

 

The unRaid management page does not self-refresh. So... you did exactly right, a manual refresh of the web-page would show you the current status.

 

Glad everything went well for you.  I was the one who found the issue the fix18 script repaired.  It was me who was unable to boot on the 315 release until I moved things around on the flash drive to put all the files needed below that imaginary 64K line. 

I was the one who reported that ominous "Error 18: Selected cylinder exceeds maximum supported by BIOS" to Tom.

 

I only had 4 drives in my server, so the fix18 worked just fine for me. Apparently, it is a bug with the GRUB loader when confronted with more than 8 drives that overflows some variable and it then clobbers your flash drive as it writes a master boot record to the flash drive that was way bigger than it should, clobbering the unRaid files in the process. Can't blame that one on Tom, he instead gets the credit for figuring out the work-around.

 

This new release is very timely with the prices of 500G drives falling and folks upgrading their servers.  It would have been really bad if someone had an actual disk fail, and find the replacement process broken as it was. 

 

I don't know about you, but I'm really happy Tom got involved once we narrowed down how to duplicate the problem.

 

Joe L.

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  • 5 weeks later...

Stop the array

Power down

Unplug all drives

power up

log in using telnet

run the fix18 script as Tom described.  It should only take a few seconds to run.

 

power down

plug drives back in

power up

continue with upgrade process as Tom described.

It sounds harder than it really is.

 

Joe L.

 

Just checking: is it essential to unplug the drives? This step doesn't appear in the readme quoted in the Release 2.060324 thread, so I'm not sure if there's some newfound reason for doing this. The reason I ask is that 11 of my drives are not in trays, so unplugging is not a trivial process in my server, which doesn't have the tidiest cabling you'll ever see  :)

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Stop the array

Power down

Unplug all drives

power up

log in using telnet

run the fix18 script as Tom described.  It should only take a few seconds to run.

 

power down

plug drives back in

power up

continue with upgrade process as Tom described.

It sounds harder than it really is.

 

Joe L.

 

Just checking: is it essential to unplug the drives? This step doesn't appear in the readme quoted in the Release 2.060324 thread, so I'm not sure if there's some newfound reason for doing this. The reason I ask is that 11 of my drives are not in trays, so unplugging is not a trivial process in my server, which doesn't have the tidiest cabling you'll ever see  :)

I think the reason it was not mentioned in the 2.060324 readme is that it was discovered that the fix18 would trash the flash drive at around the time that release was made. (actually, it is the gimp loader program failing and trashing the flash drive, not anything Tom wrote )  Tom then wrote about it on this web-site, but may not have updated the readme with the release.

 

If you have already run fix18 in the past, or have a newer release than 2.060324 currently you do not need to run fix18 at all.

To be certain, simply unplug the IDE cables from the motherboard and secondary IDE controllers leaving them connected to the drives.  It will have the exact same effect and is much easier.  You should only have to unplug 6 cables rather than 12 drives.

 

As jharvey discovered, it will be impossible to recover from a flash drive whose contents have been scrambled by fix18 unless you have a image of it.  (he did) See other posts in this forum on how to use "dd" to create such a backup image.  Then copy the flash image file to a windows box.  Then upgrade.

 

At least then, if anything happens, somebody can assist in re-loading your flash with the original contents.

 

Joe L.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hrm, Fix18 failed to run for me - unable to find the device.map file in the var/temp directory. I was running 2.060315 and have upgraded - yes I did a DD of my Flash :D Fingers crossed that all works out...

 

Okay status on WEB page says 2.060706 and all is mounting. I noted that in the fix log there's something about solving a problem with some programs writing to the server. I hope that this is a speed increase as copying and some other things can be painful.

 

System is up!

 

Do I still need to run Fix18? I have 9 drives total in my system at the moment.

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System is up!

 

Do I still need to run Fix18? I have 9 drives total in my system at the moment.

Odds are you will be fine.  If there was a problem you would not have been able to boot to the new version and it would have reverted to booting on the old version you had moved into the previous folder. (Verify the version on the Admin page shows the new version, and not the old to be sure)

 

Joe L.

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  • 2 months later...

Just got round to trying this,....yes I know, bit slow.....

 

I was running the original software, successfully applied the fix 18, rebooted, copyed the original software to previous and the new to  current. Now if I try to boot to the new current it gets as far as mounting the drives and then gives a message

 

shell.cmd: killall -w smbd nmbd

 

I then can login to root and reboot but thats it, cannot access the drives from explorer or telnet?? (It seems its not finished loading but I may be barking up the wrong tree)

 

I can still reboot to the previous version and this still works as expected but I'd like to know where mu upgrade has gone wrong.

 

Thanks for any help.

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No the management utility does not come up and I cannot connect via telnet.

 

A liitle more info, the system boots and then mounts all the disks, st this point I can logon to root. After 2 minutesthe previous error message appears (this happens whether I do anything or not). I tried the samba start command but it doesn't change the abilty to logon or access the shares.

 

I have considered the upgrade to 3.0 but haven'y yet got around to getting the required flash drives. I have a disk upgrade to do which I believe should be easier under the 2.060706 version so though I'd try that first.

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I seem to remember that Tom copied the 'go" script to a sub-folder on the flash drive as part of his first upgrade release.  Perhaps you could look at its release notes to make sure you copies the files as needed.  It might be as simple as the "go" script not being in the folder it should be.

 

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=31.0 gives directions on how to do the upgrade, I notices 2.060706 does not.

 

By far, it will be easier to upgrade to release 3, even if it means getting a new flash drive. If you do not get one soon,

perhaps Tom will have an idea why you cannot get the Admin page or log in via Telnet in your attempt at the upgrade to 2.060706.

 

Joe L.

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Thanks again Joe,

 

The new go script is already in the "current folder" and the old go sccript is still in its oiriginal location for booting the old version.

 

I agree the v3.0 is probably the way to go, I'm just concerned about attempting another upgrade when I cannot make the original upgfrades work. I wanted to use this as a "confidence boost" but its not going well. I consider myself pretty competent with windows but this is a whole new world.

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