where is best to install the plugin jail?

fizzgig656

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like the title, where is the best place to install the plugin jail etc. would it be better to install it to a usb pen seperate to the FREENAS drive and the standard share drive?
 

joeschmuck

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This depends on your needs or wants. Let me explain... If you plan to have your hard drives run all the time then I'd recommend creating a location on one of your pools for the plugins to reside. They are quickly accessed and are safe from hard drive failure if they are in a RAIDZ1 or better.

If you plan to sleep your drives then my personal advice is to place them on a fast Flash drive if you have one. If you are buying a new flash drive for this purpose then you should also look into a small SSD as the cost might be reasonable (under $50.00 now days). You don't need a fast SSD, they are fast with respect to this project. If you buy a $5.00 USB Flash drive, you will not be happy with the write performance. Find a drive that has a sustained write performance of around 10MB/sec or better.

I have been running my plugins on a separate USB Flash drive. It all runs fine. This drive is formatted for UFS.
 

isaac82

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I run my freeNAS OS from an 8GB USB stick, is it possible to repartition it to have a partition for a jail?
 

joeschmuck

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Not yet, or should I say it's not supported and I have never done that. There is a request in to update the installer to allow drives larger than the minimum size to utilize the excess space. This would become handy for those who do buy a SSD and want to use the extra space for a jail, ZIL, or L2ARC.
 

fizzgig656

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Does the plugin keep writing back to the drive ie USB? Isn't USB not good for constant write backs?
 

ben

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The plugin jail writes at least as often as config changes are made and may also write very often for logs. It's designed and expected to be run from the primary storage pool. There is no officially supported way to put it on the same USB key as the OS and would very likely be wiped out at every OS upgrade if an unsupported method was used.

The best place for the plugin jail is a dataset in the main storage pool.
 

joeschmuck

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Does the plugin keep writing back to the drive ie USB? Isn't USB not good for constant write backs?
I recommend you do some homework and search the internet for studies and tests on the write life of a common USB Flash drive just so you can prove it to yourself. Here is just one such a test which had over 90 million write operations before the drive failed. This really has to do with wear leveling. http://www.bress.net/blog/archives/114-How-Long-Does-a-Flash-Drive-Last.html and here http://www.cfgear.com/how-long-does-a-flash-drive-last/

If you have an old flash drive, I wouldn't use it for this application, but a newer generation fast flash drive, that is good. I also don't know how often the USB gets written to. Lets be real honest here, if you only have your plugins on the flash drive, and it dies, what have you lost? The way the plugins are configured, you don't lose much of anything unless you have some custom code installed. If you did that then you should have it written down on how to recreate the custom code because everything breaks eventually. Of course you may not want to take the risk and that is acceptable but it's a trade off.

Again, I would use your normal storage pool for plugins if you are not sleeping the drives, but if you plan to sleep the drives... It's up to you. My personal favorite is a SSD that is also being used for a ZIL and L2ARC.

@ProtoSD
Thanks for that link, I didn't realize /var wasn't in RAM within the jail. This could be helpful to some people but I doubt most people here would know how to take advantage of this change. It might be nice to see this be an option in the plugins.
 

fizzgig656

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ok thanks, im a bit green to freenas (as im sure you can tell) I know usb do have a write lifespan, im using a lexar firefly as my plugin jail, but after reading that im asuming a few years use before failure. Am i right in thinking mount points are just a shortcut for the plugins. so that shouldn't cause too many writes?

if any one can help with my other thread on minidlna as i cant get it to work, the mount point is working but i cant see any files from the minidlna name on the network.
 

joeschmuck

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Answered your call for help with respect to MiniDLNA.
 

fizzgig656

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Thanks. I've stopped pulling out my hair for a mo.......
 

huberte

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If you plan to sleep your drives then my personal advice is to place them on a fast Flash drive if you have one. (...)

I have been running my plugins on a separate USB Flash drive. It all runs fine. This drive is formatted for UFS.

If I may ask further. I wanted to clarify some things.

Yes I want my drive to sleep as much as possible

Right or wrong ?
1. Installing the jail is not a problem, on a ssd or flash drive, so the drive stop spinning, or thaht you don't have to shut down modules all the time from freenas gui
2. Installing sbnzb is not a problem, but you may need an ssd, because of the amount downloaded. you just have to copy past the downloaded data then. But if you chooose to download toyours drives, will they spin until sabnzb is sut down or will they stop if the download queue is emty ?
3. firefly will be a bit tricky. you'll have to synchronize the music you want to be in a safe place with the repo on your ssd drive. Otherwise, the time firely is on your drives conitune to spin (I don't know if this is correct, depending on the refresh on firefly ? Does the drive spin during listening on the music or will they until firefly is shut down ?)
4. Where I'm lost is with DLNA, because you can't copy a big amount of movies on your ssd, again, are the drives spinning when you're playing movies or all the time you have DLNA on ?

depending if I'm right or wrong, it would be pretty much useless to buy a 80 € SSD drives if you can install the jail on a speedy 16Go USB 3 key. For me it's crucial, when the raidz1 can sleep ?

NB :

The plugin jail writes at least as often as config changes are made and may also write very often for logs. It's designed and expected to be run from the primary storage pool. There is no officially supported way to put it on the same USB key as the OS and would very likely be wiped out at every OS upgrade if an unsupported method was used.

The best place for the plugin jail is a dataset in the main storage pool.

why that if you have a second usb flash drive ? And for people who needs a storage pool that is putting to deep sleep more often ?
 

joeschmuck

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@huberte
Anytime data from the hard drives needs to be read or written to the drives will spin up. One thing you must temper is how many times the drives spin up as that typically will shorten the life of the drive by constant spin up as it draws a lot of current to spin these up. All drives are not created equal and some of the newer drives have much better motors which last longer. It's best to minimize these cycles. For example my drives will spin down after 3 hours of non-use but I schedule all my computer systems to backup their data so the drives are active for many hours before they have the opportunity to sleep. My backups are currently scheduled twice a week while I'm at work.

As in postings #6 & #7, the var is written to a lot. Because of this you can either make modifications as in #7 or just use a SSD for the entire jail. Based on what you have questioned I would use the SSD but realize you cannot place all your data there.

The other option for you (very expensive) is to create a RAIDZ1 out of SSD's. You have many options but you need to experiment. If you find out something that works well and you think others could benefit, please create a posting for it and explain your story and how you solved it.

Myself, I'm still using a USB Flash drive but that will change soon once I've finished some speed tests for my system as I expect to free up a 128GB SSD and then use that as a UFS drive and put all my plugins there. Not sure what I will do with all the extra space but it will be available for whatever I need.

Whatever you do, ensure you have a backup of your data before you do anything.
 

huberte

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@huberte
Anytime data from the hard drives needs to be read or written to the drives will spin up.

So if you have all modules on (firefly, sabnzb, miniDLNA) but nothing "on" (database scanning or listening to your firefly music, donwloading nzb (here not so sure that sabnzb do not scan the nzb folder which should then go to the flash drive), seeing movie or scanning the video database : then the pool can idling.

Is this correct ?
 

joeschmuck

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So if you have all modules on (firefly, sabnzb, miniDLNA) but nothing "on" (database scanning or listening to your firefly music, donwloading nzb (here not so sure that sabnzb do not scan the nzb folder which should then go to the flash drive), seeing movie or scanning the video database : then the pool can idling.

Is this correct ?

I personally can only speak to MiniDLNA, yes if you are not streaming music or video using MiniDLNA then your drives will sleep. You should load those plug-in items up and test them. If you feel you don't have the time to test these yourself then you shouldn't be using FreeNAS IMO.

-Mark
 

huberte

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Sure I like to test, but not loose my entire pool just with un installing jail like I just did. See in noob section :-(
 

joeschmuck

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Sure I like to test, but not loose my entire pool just with un installing jail like I just did. See in noob section :-(
I don't see why you would loose your pool just for uninstalling a jail or plugin. I'll have to check out the noob section.
 

huberte

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Here (sorry on my phone, I couldn't paste the link : http://forums.freenas.org/showthrea...and-strange-error-in-module&p=47547#post47547

OK, so I did the following :

1. Adding an usb key, formatting in zfs
2. Creating two datasets for jail and software as the wiki says
3. Installing firefly and sabnzb
4. Adding two mount points for music and download
5. Stop scanning on firefly
6. Added a cifs share on usb stick for nzb folder, so thaht sabnzb can non stop scanning and not wake my pool.

I'll post my result here, if I get how to know if my drives are idling properly.
 

Christopher Joyson

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May 22, 2014
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Hi

I am quite new to all this, but I cant see the point of putting the Jails on the memory stick, surely if all the data is on your drives and SABnzbd is downloading, it will be writing to those drives, MiniDLNA will also be reading the data from the drives, when in use, so the drives wil be spinning while the music is playing.
the only advantage I can see is the programs may be running faster on USB ratehr than from disc.

Or am I missing something here?? I am a newbie (noob?) therefore my logic could be all wrong, if there is any logic in what I am saying.

By the way constant spinning of any motor is normally better than having it starting and stopping, it is the starting from rest that does the most damage to a bearing.
 

cyberjock

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This thread is from 2012....
 
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