Hi folks
Trying to get to grips with dockers apparently its the future.
I have roon running in unraid, I can connect to the server. When I attempt to add a share, which apparently should be very easy in a docker I cannot find it.
How do I add my shares to roon in an unraid docker? the share name is unsurprisingly ‘music’
I am no Docker expert (I pretty much avoid it if I can, since it’s really not as hot as the hype suggests it is), but check out “Spaceinvader One”'s YouTube channel. He has lots of “how to” guides for Unraid, including setting various things up in Docker. I doubt he has one for Roon specifically, but his Docker videos should at least point you in the right direction.
Note that if you only link out of the container for the raw music files, then when you have to rebuild the container (and you will, because Docker…), you will lose ALL your Roon settings, since Docker containers are meant to be code only and no data, and are replaced in their entirety. What you want to do is figure out how to tell Unraid’s Docker to pass two shares through to the container, which will be seen within the container as virtual mount points. One is your music share, which you would pass through as read-only to something like /mnt/music. The other is a share you should create for “Roon Config” and pass through at /var/roon (note all lowercase!) within the container so that all the Roon settings and metadata get saved outside of the container. You also might consider creating a third share for “Roon Backups” and pass that through to say /mnt/roonbackups and then configure Roon to save its automatic backups to that.
Much smarter is to use a VM instead of Docker, however… Unraid also supports KVM/QEMU-based VMs.
Hi thanks for that,
What I am find ing is that either unraid or the docker system is crippling slow, I worked out how to find the folder of music in the end and set roon to it last night, This morning its still only half way through. Its a fair amount of data but before trying unraid I used OMV and had only just set that up, and the import took about an hour.
So this is probably not a long term prospect to be honest.
My own experience using Docker (and unRaid) in general (not specifically Roon) is that it is nearly as fast as using a native application, and much superior to using a VM. So if your data is not actually on the unRIAD device my suspicion would be this was a networking issue, wouldnt it make more sense to store the music directly on the unRaid device ?
Hi bringing this back from the dead because I want to try this again.
Yes all music was stored on the unraid device
So for clarity I have a big dell workstation with twin hex core zeons, 48gigs ram etc its a bit of a beast. I have used it for various things because I am a tinkerer.
I have run OpenMediaVault on it directly giving me 24 cores of goodness and obviously roon ran like a total champ on that. Importing 6 gigs of music took about an hour total, and by this I mean in the scanning of audio files and everything.
I have also used the same system to run ESXi hypervisor. In here I had a virtual running OMV and Roon, and here I was restricted to 8 of the cores as I have the free ESXI, obviously things take longer and the audio scan certainly takes over night.
However on Unraid, I installed the docker, it seems to run, I can import music, but I left it importing over night, but it was so slow it had not even finished scanning the files for import. Baring in mind this is now utilising all 24 CPU cores and 48 gigs of ram. All music already on the drives, it should have flown but clearly something was very wrong.
Because of the speed issue it was touch and go to even get an app to connect to it, I never got as far s trying to play music to be honest.
FWIW I installed a Plex docker as well, which was to all intents and purposes equally bad.
The unraid was happy all the drives were good, so really I was at a loss and returned to ESXi, but I do like the idea of unraid so want to get this going.
If anyone has any thoughts would be appreciated.
I use Docker on my system and roon is very fast and reliable inside a container .
The short answer is : start roon container with host network and high privilege all set .
This is not usual , and pretty insecure , but is the fastest way to get your Roon container ready to use any share managed by whatever in your network
Since you say Plex was bad, too, it’s clearly something with the Unraid Docker setup. But Unraid also does KVM-based VMs, so why are you even bothering with that Docker garbage?
Make sure your appdata folder is on an SSD, and that it’s limited to your cache drive would be my first guess. Second would be to make sure you aren’t simultaneously scanning and building / rebuilding / checking / parity.
I would agree but compared to esxi the interface for vm on unraid was daunting
Hi yes I had two 1tb ssds in raid 0 I believe for the cache, app data was stored here
Make sure the appdata share is cache only. Should look something like this (and the exclamation mark is a good thing):
And make sure your array isn’t doing parity work - that’ll slow things down considerably. If you installed unRaid, then went into Docker right away and installed Plex and Roon and asked that to scan your media without waiting for the parity building to be done (which can take upwards of 12 hours, it’s “read everything then write as much data as the size of your parity drive”), it’s very possible that’s where the issue was.
I’ve never used cache pools in unRaid, so I’m not sure how that’d work out (or if it could create problems). You might want to ask in the unRaid forums. That you’re having issues with both Plex and Roon points to something being wrong somewhere, though.
If you’re going to figure it out and stick with unRaid, another thing that helps is having your music library on a single drive (so restricting your music share to a single drive) if possible. You’ll still get parity protection, but instead of spinning the whole array up, and eventually spinning the unused drives down when it figures out you’re not accessing anything on them, then spinning everything back up to access a file on a different drive because you’ve jumped to that, it’ll spin a single drive up. Less latency, less electricity, and less wear and tear.
If it can be of help, here’s my Roon docker config. Notice how the folders map directly to the individual drives, rather than the shares (so /mnt/cache/appdata/ and /mnt/disk9/Music, rather than /mnt/user/appdata and /mnt/user/Music).
Thanks when I am back home I will give it another try, I accept it seems to only be me with the issue so I did something wrong.
Incidentally I let the build of the raid happen before doing anything
Incidentally I use the same set of apps (Plex and Roon) on my machine. Unraid’s gui is very limited so it’s actually easier to use cli for that. Basically what you do is pass multiple volumes to the container, one for application data, one for backups and one for actual music files and then you’re golden. Here’s what it looks like on my machine:
/usr/bin/docker \
run --name %n \
--net=host \
-e TZ="Europe/Warsaw" \
-v /home/ubuntu/roon-app:/app \
-v /home/ubuntu/roon-data:/data \
-v /mnt/Drive/Music:/music \
-v /mnt/Drive/RoonBackups:/backup \
steefdebruijn/docker-roonserver
HI I am currently in the US but will be back home int he UK over the next few days its my intention to get on an purchase unraid and get this thing going.
I love ESXi, but it does not read info from my H700 raid card, so I have no idea when drives are going tits up and indeed in the past two months one went bad, I keep back ups so not the end of the world, but still it would be nice to see it coming.
If anyone has advice on setting up a VM I think I would prefer that over DOcker. But when I delved in last time it seems to want command line stuff. I can struggle through that but I am not comfortable with it.
OK I am in the process of setting up the unraid here is what we have
Dell workstation with 2 zeon processors @ 24 cores
48 gigs ram
I want to say H300 card but not sure in any case its not set to raid an unraid sees all the drives.
6 drives for storage at a total of 18tb
3 disks as cahce, currently set to mirrored. Not sure what to do here I am thinking just go with 2 in raid 0 and put the other into the main.
Currently unraid has finished provisioning and the spare disk is all set up, everything is running
Currently uploading the music, its slow going I made the mistake of tuning cache on without a full undertstanding so essentially 1,5tb of music is being copied twice. There is around 5 tb of music to upload.
Anyway once this is done Whats the plan do I cog docker or do I install a VM? If I install a VM how does it access the uploaded music?
Any advice here on in would be appreciated.
Start with Docker.
Settings / Docker
Enable: yes
make sure both your Docker vDisk and Docker storage locations are set to your cache disk.
Then follow the guide here.
The UnRaid forum folks should be able to get you sorted if you run into issues.
Docker is hot garbage; use a VM. I’ve never personally used Unraid, but I’d expect you’d need to do a network mount from the VM to the host share to see the music. If you haven’t seen it, go look at “Spaceinvader One”'s YouTube channel. He has LOTS of videos specific to Unraid, including things like configuring VMs on it. Probably the best Unraid resource I’ve seen on YouTube…
Given Roon’s security model (meaning the complete lack thereof - this is another reason to NOT use Docker, since Roon is completely insecure and runs as root, and Linux still doesn’t have full kernel namespacing support), make a “Roon” user in Unraid. Give that user read-only access to the music share. Create a separate share for Roon backups, and give the Roon user read/write to that share. Ensure the Roon user has NO access to any of the other shares you create in Unraid.
Well two trains of thought there! i will have a think
My instinct is that VMs work for me I just need to be totally sure of how I tell the VM the music is here! in VMWare you set up the vm and its harddrive then copy the music to it, in this instance I am doing that backwards
THanks for the spaceinvader heads up, great resource and I am confident to install windows now, will give it a try (I want to install windows so I can run zero tier)
ZeroTier also exists for Linux…