[HN Gopher] What Is Unraid?
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What Is Unraid?
Author : aargh_aargh
Score : 57 points
Date : 2022-03-31 06:47 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (wiki.unraid.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (wiki.unraid.net)
| elliotpage wrote:
| I've used UnRAID for just over two years and it works a treat.
| Well worth the cost of entry.
| 4kelly wrote:
| +1 for unraid. I've been using it for about 4 years. IMO it's
| usecase sits in between synology and a completely self
| administered server.
|
| I found synology features great, but was frustrated about the
| hardware lock in. I also didn't want to spend too much time
| tinkering with a bare bones server. Enter unraid.
|
| I use it as a backup server, fileshare, time machine backup. As
| well as plex and other popular self hosted docker images.
| Cyph0n wrote:
| I've heard great things about Unraid, but ended up choosing
| Proxmox to manage my home server. I am fairly tech savvy and
| don't need anything "complicated", so Proxmox works perfectly for
| me.
|
| But I'd love to hear any thoughts from others who have tried
| using both!
| pocketsand wrote:
| Agree. I went to Proxmox and virtualize TrueNAS. Best of both
| worlds IMO and not at all any more difficult to manage.
| nuker wrote:
| Why not just TrueNAS?
| pocketsand wrote:
| Virtualization on TrueNAS/BSD leaves a lot to be desired
| and in my experience just wasn't nearly as mature as on
| Linux with KVM/qemu, etc. Likewise, BSD jails seemed to me
| to be really well thought out, but when it came to getting
| them to work for me to run little apps/services like I
| could with Docker, or even a full-fat VM, I quickly gave up
| because the juice didn't seem worth the squeeze.
|
| Whereas on Proxmox it's a cinch for me to run like 20
| different VMs/linux containers that I use for various
| projects/jobs/etc. Huge ecosystem and really easy to take
| advantage of massive community of linux/Debian
| users/Docker/etc.
|
| TrueNAS Scale, which is based on Debian, I think reflects
| an acknowledgement of the pain points of working around BSD
| for the types of services a lot of people want to use their
| NAS for. I don't think I'm ready to switch yet, but maybe
| in a year or two it will be a great solution.
| xoa wrote:
| Don't disagree with you that using TrueNAS Core as a
| general server/VM platform (some other things as well)
| has pain points. Some of which are BSDisms, some just as
| you say due to the plain fact that the community is
| vastly smaller. Even simple stuff like ports frequently
| being a bit out of date, or lacking the diversity you'd
| find elsewhere. Nothing that can't be worked around, but
| always some extra time on a whole different thing which
| in more popular environments (be it Proxmox/KVM/ESXi or
| whatever) would just be there and then get out of your
| way.
|
| That said I do think though a NAS is one of the things,
| even in a lot of homelab environments, that's actually
| worth its own hardware separate from the VM if one can
| swing the extra cost & space. I virtualized NAS for a
| while too but since I wanted to run VMs themselves off
| the NAS as well as a lot of other stuff, have a good
| backup/restore story etc, I found it started to get
| unpleasantly circular in terms of bootstrapping from a
| cold start or restore. Also, the hardware requirements
| for a good NAS are fairly distinct from a lot of what I
| wanted for virtualizing. It's not impossible to cram lots
| of hot swap drives _and_ full size PCIe cards including
| GPUs for passthrough _and_ tons of CPU _and_ tons of RAM
| into a single 4U by any means, but splitting things out
| made it a lot simpler to optimize each side better. The
| NAS could be smaller, cooler, quieter and good at its own
| thing. After all-in-one I ended up with 3 distinct boxes:
| router /gateway (OPNsense), VM system, and NAS system. I
| know others have gone totally different directions, from
| AIO boxes to wild K8s clusters doing it all, but I feel
| like those provide a decent balance of flexibility and
| stability/isolation, I can mess with stuff and feel
| confidence in basic network connectivity or storage.
| Isolation also means not feeling quite the same pressure
| if one platform isn't as good at something as another, so
| long as it's good at its own specialty.
|
| > _TrueNAS Scale, which is based on Debian, I think
| reflects an acknowledgement of the pain points of working
| around BSD for the types of services a lot of people want
| to use their NAS for._
|
| I'm a bit bummed philosophically there. I've used BSDs
| for a very long time, like much of the philosophy if not
| all the warts, and fundamentally losing diversity in
| software platforms even if open source is concerning. At
| the same time it's hard to get around the raw power of
| network effects in tech, and Linux has a ton of resources
| and eyes thrown at it at this point. I have no plans or
| interest in moving in the near future either, but it's
| hard not to feel like the headwinds are building a bit
| for TrueNAS Core. Though FreeBSD continues to put out
| excellent releases, and it's gotten this far. I've found
| myself on the underdog "but I think it's technically
| better!" losing side of a lot of tech in my life though
| :). It's always a balancing act in how much it's worth
| working on a tool itself vs using the tool to do other
| work.
| recov wrote:
| Slightly on topic, a nice low maintence (other than a
| daily/weekly backup/scrub script) option without the need for a
| specific OS is mergerFS, combined with snapRaid. The main benefit
| is you can add and remove drives/directories willy-nilly. It's
| been stable for me for the past 3 years, it just works.
|
| https://github.com/trapexit/mergerfs
|
| https://github.com/amadvance/snapraid/
| shmoogy wrote:
| I moved from FreeNAS/TrueNAS after 5ish years to Unraid. So far,
| it's been a lot easier to get things working the way I wanted.
| Worth the cost of entry
| unixhero wrote:
| I just use Proxmox and ZFS on an honest to god X86 box.
| vdfs wrote:
| Proxmox is better for running VMs and LXC containers, You can
| run TrueNAS or unRaid on top of it with disks passthrou
| mise_en_place wrote:
| I was using it as a headless KVM server but the PHP panel is
| rather buggy. Starting a VM doesn't always kick it off, and had
| numerous issues with updating. It just lacks the polish of a
| commercial product.
| hnaccount141 wrote:
| I've been using Unraid for a few years now and while it's served
| me well I hesitate to recommend it. Were I to start over today
| I'd definitely be looking at TrueNAS Scale or rolling my own.
|
| Unraid seems to be targeting a rather niche market of people who
| are used to building PCs for running Windows and would like to
| have a home server and self host some apps (usually Plex and the
| 'arr stack if we're being honest). It does a good job of making
| all this accessible via a nice web UI with basic hypervisor and
| container management features. The app store they have for Docker
| containers is great for exposing new users to what's out there.
|
| The problem I've found is that while it does a good job of
| offering a low barrier to entry, the ceiling is quite low as
| well. It seems to me that the type of user they're trying to
| attract is also the type who would want to learn more and tinker,
| at which point Unraid's limitations will start to chafe.
|
| If you've used other Linux distros you'll find the lack of a
| package manager and other atypical features frustrating. Once you
| want to go beyond their app store for containers the web UI
| becomes limiting. There's no first-party docker compose support.
| The hypervisor UI is quite limited as well, lacking even the
| ability to create and manage snapshots. Of course you can manage
| all this from the command line, but at that point you may as well
| use another OS with a more performant and reliable filesystem.
|
| There are also some bizarre security choices that they've seemed
| to have had difficulty moving past. The web UI is only accessible
| as root, for example.
| tylergetsay wrote:
| In the same boat, I recently switched to running a VM on top of
| unRAID and treating that as my app server and unRAID as a
| software raid host, it feels safer than rolling my own
| Sparkle-san wrote:
| Unraid is interesting. I considered it years ago but didn't want
| to spend the money at the time so I went with OpenMediaVault. But
| at this point, I just run snapraid + UnionFS.
| Ir0nMan wrote:
| I have been an UNRAID user for years now and I have been very
| satisfied with he product.
| vanchor3 wrote:
| I've been using unRAID for a while now, and it feels more like a
| community GitHub project rather than a closed-source commercial
| product I paid for. There are plenty of weird issues that don't
| really make any sense but are apparently "by design", and support
| usually hasn't been helpful in my experience.
|
| I ran into an issue once where the Web interface wasn't working
| properly. I looked online for a way to restart the service via
| SSH, since none of the commands I could think of worked. I then
| came across the amazing answer from one of the official forum
| moderators that basically said "you don't need to know how to
| restart the service, just stop having the problem." I could have
| rebooted the entire system, but there were several Dockers
| running as well as other systems that had the storage mounted
| that I didn't want to interrupt for a simple web server issue.
|
| There's also the fun BTRFS and Docker issues. Maybe it's just me,
| but filling up a file system shouldn't completely corrupt it.
| There are rules you can set such as "don't copy a file unless
| 30GB is free" but somehow it seems to ignore this. You later find
| your Dockers no longer work if you restart them, giving the
| unhelpful error of "Error code 403", despite them working fine
| moments ago. Sometimes it just seems to do this for fun without
| the disk filling up.
|
| I could go on and on about all the weird issues and odd design
| choices.
| slickdork wrote:
| I've been using it for about 4 years and agree that it the
| community feels like it's an open source project... and then
| you remember you've paid for it, and there hasn't been a (non
| beta) release in almost a full year, and all development is
| happening behind closed doors.
|
| I still really enjoy unraid for what it does, but I also feel
| like I can't recommend it any longer.
| n42 wrote:
| it's such a pet peeve, but the unRAID community normalizing the
| usage of "Dockers" for "Docker containers" makes me twitch.
| remram wrote:
| I regularly cringe when people refer to "Docker images" as
| "containers" but this is a step further.
| vanchor3 wrote:
| That's a good point. I never thought of that before,
| unfortunately I tend to pickup bad habits like that by
| watching the way others write. Though I do have to wonder if
| the Docker team would have used that term were it not already
| a registered trademark. I suppose it does sound a little
| silly.
| n42 wrote:
| that's not your bad habit, that's just how language evolves
| naturally. like I said, a pet peeve. the part that makes me
| twitch is that the evolution of the term is happening in a
| hobbyist community, where I've never heard a professional
| use the term. when I read it it doesn't make linguistic
| since to me -- a "Docker" is not a thing, what is its
| plural?
|
| anyway, you do you.
| aborsy wrote:
| What does Unraid offer over Xpenology?
|
| Synology is perfect as a NAS. If you want NAS+ general server,
| you are better off separating the two.
| francislavoie wrote:
| My biggest annoyance is that they don't provide users a first-
| party way to run their own containers from a source Dockerfile.
| As a maintainer of an open source project, this is incredibly
| annoying because our plugin system is build/compile-time, and
| many users need to use certain plugins.
|
| They also flip the order of Docker port mappings, where `-v
| "8080:80"` would become "80 <- 8080" or w/e in their UI. And a
| bunch of other idiosyncrasies with configuring containers.
|
| And yeah, as others have said, "dockers" terminology hurts me
| deeply.
| hanklazard wrote:
| The port mapping flip in the UI is seriously baffling. Not even
| that it happened but that it continues to be case.
|
| I feel that overall my unraid experience has been good and they
| certainly make the implementation of some basic services and
| plug-ins really easy. However I do find myself looking at more
| fully manual, open-source "home server" solutions and wonder if
| it would be worth a switch ...
| yumiris wrote:
| I used unRAID a while back for nearly two years. It's
| delightfully convenient for managing Docker containers, multiple
| disks w/ data parity, network file sharing, and even VMs with
| passthroughs. The last feature, especially, is absolutely killer
| with how easy it is to accomplish in unRAID.
|
| Whilst a lot of unRAID's functionality can be achieved with a bit
| of tinkering and reading, its UI does save a lot of time and
| keeps things very simple. For example, I have yet to figure out a
| way of achieving GPU passthrough on an Optimus laptop without my
| hair going grey -- a part of me feels like unRAID might simplify
| it, despite it being an OS for servers rather than laptops.
|
| One thing I'd absolutely wish for is ZFS support. I haven't
| looked into how ZFS's licence might interfere with its
| integration, but if integration is possible, it would be
| magnificent.
|
| Nevertheless, unRAID is splendid at what it strives to do and
| buying a pro licence for it was absolutely worth it!
| tomschlick wrote:
| There is a zfs plugin now. Here is a video outlining it:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umKXHO-hr5w
| flatiron wrote:
| I got lazy in my old years. I just use rclone and google drive.
| jpgvm wrote:
| Tried it. Decided for my needs that my Arch + ZFS based NAS is
| still the way to go.
|
| At the end of the day it's critical data for me that while backed
| up to tarsnap would take a very long time to restore. By just
| using ZFS and having regular scrubs etc scheduled properly I have
| very high confidence my array will always be online when I need
| it.
|
| I could probably build a similar level of trust in another
| product but ZFS (Under OpenSolaris, then Illumos, then FreeBSD
| and finally Linux - all the same pool btw!) has earnt my trust
| over many years.
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(page generated 2022-04-03 23:00 UTC)