Not seen Nagato in a while

For added theatrics, after they pay you can slowly fade the site back in over a few days too, as if websites need bill money the same way humans need food, and it is slowly getting better after “being starved”

The fade should be slow and subtle. At first the client thinks they are just imagining it, but then they start getting customer support calls about the site being faded, and their bosses are pointing it out too in meetings, and as it happens more and more the panic really begins to set in.

Finally they reach out to you in a desperation when there’s barely anything left of the site and ask you to urgently fix the problem, and you just shrug your shoulders sympathetically and explain it’s happening because they haven’t paid - but not like in a way that suggests you are doing it on purpose, but a way where it’s simply an unavoidable natural consequence, like if you didn’t pay your electricity bill your power would get cut and the site is slowly “dying” and fading away because of that.

They’d pay so fast.

My biggest problem is security updates.

The “x years of upgrades” model is okay when it’s for an app, where you can just keep using it with the old feature set and no harm is done.

But Unraid isn’t an app, it’s a whole operating system.

With this new licensing model, over time we will see many people sticking with old versions because they dont want to pay to renew - and then what happens when critical security vulnerabilities are found?

The question was already asked on the Unraid forum thread, and the answer from them on whether they would provide security updates for non-latest versions was basically “we don’t know” - due to how much effort they would need to spend to individually fix all those old versions, and the team size it would require.

It’s going to be a nightmare.

Any user who cares about good security practice is effectively going to be forced to pay to renew, because the alternative will be to leave yourself potentially vulnerable.

Yup, my comment mentions the parity disk :)

Good to emphasise that a bit more though.

I agree as far as the feature set is concerned, but software unfortunately doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

A vulnerability could be discovered that needs a fix.

The operating system could change in such a way that eventually leads to the software not functioning on later versions.

The encryption algorithms supported by the server could be updated, rendering the client unable to connect.

It might be a really long time before any of that happens, but without a maintainer, that could be the end.

The clue with Unraid is in the name. The goal was all about having a fileserver with many of the benefits of RAID, but without actually using RAID.

For this purpose, Fuse is a virtual filesystem which brings together files from multiple physical disks into a single view.

Each disk in an Unraid system just uses a normal single-disk filesystem on the disk itself, and Unraid distributes new files to whichever disk has space, yet to the user they are presented as a single volume (you can also see raw disk contents and manually move data between disks if you want to - the fused view and raw views are just different mounts in the filesystem)

This is how Unraid allows for easily adding new drives of any size without a rebuild, but still allows for failure of a single disk by having a parity disk - as long as the parity is at least as large as the biggest data disk.

Unraid have also now added ZFS zpool capability and as a user you have the choice over which sort of array you want - Unraid or ZFS.

Unraid is absolutely not targeted at enterprise where a full RAID makes more sense. It’s targeted at home-lab type users, where the ease of operation and ability to expand over time are selling points.

Been using unraid for a couple of years now also, and really enjoying it.

Previously I was using ESXi and OMV, but I like how complete Unraid feels as a solution in itself.

I like how Unraid has integrated support for spinning up VMs and docker containers, with UI integration for those things.

I also like how Unraid’s fuse filesystem lets me build an array from disks of mismatched capacities, and arbitrarily expand it. I’m running two servers so I can mirror data for backup, and it was much more cost effective that I could keep some of the disks I already had rather than buy all-new.