I’m sure you’ve probably noticed that for most of the day the site has been under maintenance, down, or maybe even serving up various PHP guts…I don’t know.  Downtime is now over.

I decided that I didn’t have to transfer my domain to get on the new host…I just created an add-on domain and redirected the nameservers to my new InMotion Hosting account.  Waiting for my old host to propogate the DNS changes is where the majority of the wait has been…I finished moving the site several hours ago.

I did a little behind-the-scenes cleanup of the ImagesByName and Downloads file folders, so if you encounter any broken downloads, please let me know…I manually edited all of their new locations, so I could have hit commited a typo or two.  In fact, if you see anything around the site misbehaving, please let me know about it via the Contact Form.

Update:

It took quite a bit longer than 8 hours for the DNS to change like my previous host had stated.  Sorry about that.  Aside from that, things appear to be working well.  I’m just now fixing my email accounts so that they make use of the new MX records and am receiving my first round of ‘bug reports’.  Please continue to send those in using the Contact Me page if you find anything strange.  I will fix it right away.

I’ve already had one request for what I did to move this site…anyone else interested?  I think I can remember the most important points.  There honestly wasn’t a whole lot to it.

Although I could not get it to work properly (I will say I did not have time to fiddle much with it either though), I came across a nice-looking WHS add-in before I took a break that some of you fellow unRAID users may be interested in.  This add-in, basically, can monitor and control many of the most important features of unRAID…right from the WHS console.  It even ties into the clean shutdown script.  If you’re interested, take a look over at the unRAID forum thread about it…I’ve included screenshots (courtesy of Tom) below.

I don’t know if it’s that I never paid attention or just didn’t have any interest in it, but I just now noticed that Windows Home Server w/Power Pack 1 is available via MSDN subscription.  I’ve grown a bit bored with my 2008 Server, so I’m considering a migration to WHS.  I’m actually considering shifting a few PCs around so that I can retire at least one.  My ESXi server was a nice little project, but I don’t know how necessary it really is since I can pull the duties it provides on other systems without really putting any strain on them.  It only hosts my WSUS VM and has a Vista development VM for compiling Media Browser, but there are instructions for installing WSUS on WHS and I can put the Vista VM on my C2Q box using Virtual PC.

I have no intentions of replacing my unRAID server.  It works perfect for what I want…I just think that WHS can nicely fill a niche in my home network  that the 2008 Server just isn’t designed for.  I’m going to be moving our 2003 Servers to it at work soon, so I’ll get my daily dose of it there (while using it as it was intended).

I’ll have to wait and see what happens…the WHS will come first, regardless, and that will just mean a new avenue for content here.  I probably won’t get time to do it until the New Year’s break, so check back for any updates on this…I get wild notions every once in a while, so it could happen at any time.

I just received a link for the Vista and Windows Server Service Pack 2 Release Candidate standalone downloads from Microsoft.  Many of you have already downloaded and installed previous release candidates, but this is the one that will probably be RTM.

Get it here if you haven’t already.

I’m going to have to backtrack a few days now that the server has been up-and-running since Wednesday. I had planned a very thorough setup, but I’m not going to go through with that anymore. The Project Gallery entry gives enough background so that I don’t have to do that. Plus, I followed the unRAID installation instructions to the letter, so I don’t see any point in repeating them. I will, however, explain a few of the “gotchas” I encountered on the way.

The first problem I encountered happened to be with only one of three drives being detected within the BIOS. I knew the enclosure was not the issue as the populated bays were all orange when powering it on for the first time. That left the connection from the rear of the enclosure to the SATA ports on the motherboard. After closer inspection, I found the culprit. The eSATA cables I bought were not capable of being plugged all the way into the ports on the back of the external enclosure. As you can see, the ports are located very closely to the edge of the cutout in the back of the enclosure.

The eSATA cables were not really at fault since they’re all pretty much made the same way. The molded shroud was hitting the back of the case and not allowing it to be inserted all the way. The two top ports were fine, but it was the two bottom ones that I was having difficulty with. Therefore, only SATA01 showed up. I used a utility knife to cut back about 1/10″ off of the offending part of the shroud. After plugging it back in and entering the BIOS, it was a success. I then continued on to configure the remaining pages of the BIOS, which is where I encountered my second, and more frustrating, issue.

After setting the BIOS according to the recommended settings by the unRAID installation manual (as well as using some technical common sense), I was ready to save and exit. This is where I would begin the immediate reboot and loading of the unRAID OS…except all I received was “BOOT ERROR”. I knew that I had prepared the flash drive correctly. In fact, I initially used the same flash install that was working at work with my VMWare setup. I took the flash back upstairs to my office, reformatted it, used syslinux to set the boot record, and copied the unRAID OS to it once more anyway…just to cover the bases. It was futile. I received three different types of error messages – all indicating no boot device or invalid boot ID. I must have changed settings in the BIOS 30-40 times over the next couple of hours with no love. Even though I was sure that I had set it once before (I don’t know how it would be possible for me to miss after all the combinations of settings made), I enabled a setting that forced all removable devices to appear as fixed disks. I saved and exited and was finally met with the unRAID OS/MEMTEST x86 screen! Success!

After finally making it to the login prompt and connecting to the web administration for the first time, I continued to set up my new unRAID server. I assigned two drives to the data slots, then mounted and formatted them. I did not initally setup theparity drive though. After weeks of reading in the unRAID forum, I came across a tip that saved me several hours of data transfer time. By not enabling the parity drive prior to data migration, transfer rates can be at a maximum since the parity calculation is not taking place concurrently. Since there is the original storage target, there is no need to have the redundancy feature enabled on the unRAID server yet. This definitely helped as I found a transfer with the parity enabled only went about 100Mbps (it would hit 400Mbps+, but fluctuate to nearly a halt while the parity was being computed), whereas without it I average nearly 400MBps over 1TB of data.

After several hours of transferring the data to the drives, it was complete and I could enable the parity. That took about another 5 hours (I’m not real sure as I just let it run, but unRAID estimated 5 hours).

At the moment, I have not assigned my HTPCs to use the unRAID server. I’m just letting it run through a “break-in” period. I’ll probably switch a single system to it first just to see how it’s going to handle the disk spin-down feature. I’m curious as to how long the delay will be for that. I really love the idea since this is an “always on” system and the disks can spin down overnight, when not in use. I have it set to a 2 hour period of inactivity now, but that will be moved up to 1 hour if the delay does not cause issues.

Well, that’s it for my unRAID server build. Please feel free to leave comments, questions, or words of advice.