hey there everyone thanks for joining me today for another apricorp tutorial video so today i want
to talk about something a little bit different i want to talk about an operating system and
it's an operating system it's called unraid and i've been using it for about three years now
when i first sort of looked for a new operating system for a server that i wanted to build
for home use i contemplated quite a few different options to be honest with you and a lot of them
really just didn't match what i was looking for i was really looking for a server that could
not only run multiple applications and multiple web applications at that but also be able to run
a significant number of different tasks on the one machine and to fulfill different arms of
services that i wanted to get out to friends and family so for example one of those is plex
and plex is quite a useful um media server it's really compatible seems to work with a
lot of things and i wanted to be able to share that with family now back in the days i used
to have plex just installed on a laptop now that obviously has changed a lot since then um
slowly you know building more and more advanced sort of servers and
and coming up with different ideas with that and uh this one that you're looking at here is my
so far my most powerful server that i've built and it's you know about
a year and a half old now recently upgraded his ram but otherwise it's been really really
superb so back to my main point which is unraid so what is unrate well unraid
is another operating system based on linux it's a linux system kernel underneath and
it has a variety of different options in terms of data redundancy but at the same
time not necessarily working in the usual and typical raid array fashion hence its name unrate
what it is actually is it allows you to have separate disks
and a parity disk or multiple parity disks as well as a cache or multiple cache disks
as well as the flash drive the flash drive is actually where unraid lives and is installed
the flash drive is the operating system
so you don't actually install unrate onto a particular device or disk in the array it actually
lives on the flash drive now that provides some significant redundancy already
but it also increases the load time and may by a huge amount because really when you think about
when you think about it the data doesn't have to load from the disks anymore it's loading straight
off the flash drive which acts as a front end and everything is controlling the back end
so as you can see we've got four disks here
technically there is five total however one has to be the parity at least at least one so
and that one parity disk has to be the same size as every as the largest disk in your array so
the largest one here is six terabytes so i actually ended up having to buy another six
terabyte disk so financially speaking it would have actually made more sense to you know sort
of think about this at first and just do it all at once and make sure that the the parody was
uh upgraded first but nevertheless it saves those files as actual whole files now if i
just take you over to zeus which is the name of this server
it's really really obvious you'll see straight away
i mean if i look at this through here you're looking at individual files okay
and they live on only one of these disks now that's this that's the intelligent part of it here
it is not striping a file across multiple disks it is storing individual files and individual folders
across separate disks but it's very smart you know for example if you add a tv show
uh let's just go back to our zeus here so if we go into a tv show
you know i know i can set it in here in unraid itself
at what level i want it to store files together in what's called shares this share here is tv
and i have it set currently if we go into shares and into tv you see the split level right here
automatically split any directory as required so you basically tell on right do whatever you want
then down here i can say automatically split only the top level as required
automatically split only the top insert number level directories as required
manual manual do not automatically split directory so i've got it set on tv shows and tv shows have
the name of the tv show then the seasons of that tv show then the episodes
so what i've basically told here with this setting is i want at least the season to remain as a whole
so it tells it basically okay when you get to the season level add the entire season
don't just add individual files across multiple disks take the whole season and put it on one
disk somewhere now there's both you know benefits and costs to that but
i would say more benefits and i would say that it's certainly more redundant in the sense that
you know if you lost the entire tv show that would probably be a little bit of a pain in the butt but
no pun intended as a season might get lost that's fine we can we can resource that season again and
get it back in there problem solved so that's just one of the settings uh one of those sorry
features of unreal that really makes it stand out and i would highly recommend that you read up i
i'm not going to be as informative here in this video because i really just wanted to introduce
it as a as a top level and i will go into detail in a future video obviously as you can see we're
just getting started here so we just want to just ease you into it so you've got your users
then we've got just a plethora of settings i've just recently updated to the release candidate 2
of version 6.9 so i'm actually discovering some new features myself but plugins galore
that you can get to really customize this operating system now you might be asking
how good is it at running vms i can tell you right now it's almost bare metal performance it's really
great it's really really great and it's so easy to get started it's simple i mean really add vm
the vm these are obviously just templates you can insert a custom one doesn't matter windows 10.
fill in the description you can pin particular cpus and say look i only want this to use
these cpus instead of using the entire available resources same with the memory minimum and maximum
then you have your isos where your isos will be stored pick one of those and etc etc you can
change your network mac you can you know have it spoof something else if you really want to
what bridge you want it on etc and off it goes there started you know and they work quite well
but i think if i had to say the most impressive feature of unraid
it's probably the docker i have to give it hands down to docker
and the reason i would give it to docker is it's just so darn easy
with docker you know if you're new to this sort of thing you know i was very new to it when i first
started looking into it and i started thinking you know how does this work what's what's what's
the go with this you know can i make it work for me how does it all run what's the benefits the
pros the cons now let me tell you basically a docker you know if i had to explain it in
everyday terms you have a piece of software
even better
sorry for those watching this in the dark obviously it's going to be a little bit bright
i'm just going to scale it down
so you've got this piece of software but to get this piece of software to run you need
these other pieces of software and each piece of software wants to talk to this main
part these dependencies to speak to the main application to get it to run
and let's say in this case that application might be
let's pick one jellyfin okay just an example jellyfish now gelatin might actually also require
something you know as a database application so you know maybe it's it's it's database
application here it might need a uh php front end it may need some other you know end jinx
part of it so you would if you were to install this on and operate uh you know a
base operating system let's say microsoft windows microsoft server um linux you would be installing
these dependencies with this app and all of these would have to be up and running and
working for this app to work well that's just a big pain if you ask me that's a huge pain instead
what docker allows you to do just one of the features i'm actually
still quite a beginner here and i don't claim to be a pro by any means
docker has everything inside
one particular file and when you run it it goes and runs all those applications within it
when you close it it closes all those applications and you run
it again and it starts and you run again all is one one unit
you can then map particular drives and locations to it and say i want you to store any data that i
store within this docker i want it to actually be stored here on my host on my host computer
which means you could kill this you could destroy it you could load a virus into it whatever might
happen it might all crash and never work again meh who cares you don't have to reinstall your entire
operating system because it doesn't reach out of that boundary it stays within the docker file
and if you've mapped these file paths to your computer or the host
you have access to those files anyway so you're not worried about that pretty much
at all anymore so that eliminates that so it's just really really good to get things started now
if that wasn't easy enough unraid has an app store yeah an app store so these are docker images
in the app store and you can basically look at any of these and say you know what i want to try
something new something i've never seen before you know let's go let's have a look what top
installs are top new installs what's going on there scroll down you say oh well there's plex
maybe i want some plex you know there's no discrimination here on creators all these
hard-working people put this stuff up on the app store which also gets us results from docker hub
which is important and i'll cover that in a later video sometimes you might find a application that
just fits your needs it's just perfect but it's not on the app store here in unread
that's not the end of the road so basically all the app store is if you really break it down is
people have created a template and that template goes and grabs the docker usually from docker hub
for you and allows you to have parameters already set up that you can fill out and make it easy for
yourself so someone's done this one for example binhex a very good developer in the community
he or she has already put our media and our trans directory mapping here for us so other
you know when you're running a docker these would be a key and if you were going to look up that
docker that file you know it would usually have instructions so i'll even show you real quick here
okay here's an example so here's one here's one on docker hub
which is one we actually use it is not in the app store but we
made our own template to get it to work which again i'll cover in a later video
now this one in particular is a little bit different because
it has a lot of stuff that you configure through a configuration file rather than
in the actual app but most of them will have if we come down to docker here you will see
the parameters that are usually mapped in docker
and i feel like we've picked a not so good one so we'll just go back to home
explore
and we will go with you know let's say ubuntu and you can load ubuntu
as a container as a docker image it's amazing it really is amazing so come down here
and again it's not really what we want what is it that we
want something with a little bit of okay here's an example now this here is using uh docker compose
we don't want to use compose here is what we're looking for environment variable so what you're
looking at here this mysql root password is something that is put as a container variable
and in unread you can add as many variables or paths as unite as you
like paths ports labels a particular device even
that's another feature of unraid that just makes it so easy but again you can go and grab
anything that's on docker hub and get it to work on your unraid pretty easily i'll cover that later
in another video then you have all sorts of tools and and
it's really overwhelming at first when you come in here but i highly recommend you check out unraid
it is an amazing amazing operating system um if you're like me you just want to run something
from home why not you know run an unread server look at all these applications that are running
okay have a good look there quite a few and now look at our cpu we're not doing anything
we are not doing anything here so it is going really really really really
really easily and is handled with little to no problem so that's probably about it for
today i'm just going to leave it there just wanted to introduce it you know there's a
lot of details that goes into unraid and i'm not going to claim to be one of those people
if you are really interested in unraid i highly and highly recommend you go see
space invader one he has a youtube channel i'll put the link down below in the description um
really really worth going to check his work out i learned pretty much everything in unread
from batman and you know i would absolutely give credit to him for his work so
uh if you like unread you like the idea of it you want to try something different give it a go
there is a free trial of unread that you can install and you know so there's no
cost involved i think it's 30 days from what i remember correctly here some quick look
so here we go yeah so you've got a 30 day trial now you need a usb key you need a usb and
unread gives you a tool which you just download and that tool creates the
usb for you so you don't even have to worry about that or getting another application
like rufus to do that it's all within this one application here insert usb you'll be able to
select it right to it it will create it for you then you plug it into your uh computer or server
boot from the usb and go from there and it basically opens directly into
something that looks similar to this once you set a admin password you know so you
actually get stuck into it straight away it has to be connected to the internet i believe
while it's on trial but a 30-day trial that's pretty good i think you'll know whether you
like it or not within 30 days um don't give up on it if you get stuck don't give up give it a good
give it a good crack and just have a look poke around install some docker you know containers
uh there's youtube's on your videos on how to get the app store to come up it's just a
simple step you just installed one plugin the rest is done through unrate itself easy peasy
and that's all for today so i look forward to sharing more with you soon
and thank you for tuning in to improcorp our main site ibra called the io uh is
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