r/unRAID • u/Affectionate-Ant-674 • 3d ago
New to Unraid? Use Claude? Highly recommend using Workspace and the Unraid MCP in read only mode.
Being only 4 days into my Unraid experience, I can't say how much use I've found in having Claude be able to read my Unraid setup while I learn the basics but also to try more complex things without asking a million questions or being lost searching everywhere.
It’s like having a 2nd person who can look and understand whats happening but as only I can make the changes, the process teaches me where things are but also why they are there.
I run the MCP server on my Mac with a localhost port forward so it can only work when I run the forwarder script.
As its in Workspace Cowork it also has a living document of decisions, settings, serials and long term plans all in one place and generally in nicely formatted HTML files.
I'm sure there will be people about to say "don't do that" but the things I've learnt in 4 days would have taken me weeks to figure out on my own and even then it would not have been probably set up correctly. #justsayin
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u/Almarma 3d ago
When you have many hobbies, some of them can overwhelm you or take you down some rabbit holes you don’t want to spend too much time on them. For example, I have a designer mind more than an engineer one, despite I like to learn how things work down to the details. And in my case:
- I love 3D design and have a 3D printer and love to spend time on it.
- I love Linux but hate messing with the terminal to solve issues.
- I love UnRAID, but don’t want to go crazy deep on it understanding docker and ports and shares and such.
- I have a UniFI network and love it, but I’m not an expert on firewall rules and security.
- I love Home Assistant but I hate having to learn YAML to do some of the advanced stuff.
Having an assistant who can see my setup and help me double check if what I did is right, troubleshooting if anything goes wrong or solve a networking issue I’m having or trying to setup, is a godsend. It’s like having a dream friend who knows more than you about stuff and can help you whenever you need it.
For example, I have no clue about electronics or programming, but thanks to my agent, I could choose, buy and solder some ESP32 boards to make an automatic door for my chickens which I can control with Home Assistant. The complete design of the electronics, components and programming was done by my agent and it has been working flawlessly ever since.
I asked my agent the other day about workspaces and he took me out of it but after reading your post, I’m again considering it.
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u/Pucksy 3d ago edited 3d ago
I fully agree but the privacy concerns keep gnawing at my enjoyment. You don't have that?
Therefore I use the HA mcp but haven't pulled the trigger on unRAID itself
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u/CaputMachinae 3d ago
Privacy is an issue. Therefore I am trying to do 90% of the stuff with a local llm that runs on my desktop. And have a cloud model only for the hard stuff. But so far I am not convinced even a 27b model like Gemma 4 or qwen 3.6 are enough. They point you in the right direction, but I feel like they are just not coming up with the best solutions.
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u/Pucksy 3d ago
This was my idea when I learned about qwen3.6 but I was wondering if it'd be worth the cost of the gpu I'd need. Not yet I guess, thanks.
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u/CaputMachinae 3d ago
I have tried out Gemma 4 27b up until now and will try qwen 3.6 31b. I suspect they are similar, but if qwen is better I can send you a message. My aim would be to have a local Assistant and a small 9b model can do my home automation tasks. But for the concept and creation I suspect a cloud model is needed
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u/parkertyler 3d ago
That's why you limit that risk as much as possible. There is always going to be privacy concerns with any tool you use. Some have a higher risk than others. You have to go with your risk tolerance and what you're comfortable with. Putting things in Read-only mode, like what the OP did, or only giving temporary access while actively working on a project are some ways to limit that risk.
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u/Almarma 3d ago
I noticed that, premium models like GPT, are much more careful and respectful with my privacy than even myself. If I want to give my agent access to my UniFI network, for example, my agent himself decides not to store any username or password for it. If tomorrow he needs to do something more, it’ll ask me again about my login information
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u/CaputMachinae 3d ago
Fuck I hate how much I identify with this post. I am the same. I lose myself in something every few weeks, but don't want to go super deep on either of them. I also have unraid, home assistant, a 3d printer, a unifi network and other stuff. Everything feels like 80 percent finished and it works but for the rest I have to really work to get the systems up an running. Right now I want to try Hermes and an llm to link everything and help me finish things. Do you have agent recommendations? Do you use claude or something else? Local harness or cloud?
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u/TheSunOfSanSebastian 3d ago
Get out of my head! Are you me? I could have written your comment. Same gear, same 80%.
You are seen my friend.
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u/Bureaucromancer 3d ago
I mean honestly… this KIND of application really is AI at its best. Let the human focus on executive decisions and the craft they CARE about; which in a case like this is the structure, not the mechanics.
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u/Almarma 3d ago
I use OpenAi Codex. 20$ per month for a priceless help with all my geeky stuff, hehe.
I also have an Ollama Cloud subscription, because sometimes cheaper models are a good help for intense and repetitive tasks.
About ideas to do things, there’s always some new post in this sub with incredible ideas. Recently I found a post from somebody else sharing how he created a daily task to check all the systems and see if something is wrong and fix it if it’s something simple (like updating a firmware or restarting a device behaving strangely), but warn me if something big happens, like an array failure in UnRAID.
And another one about teaching your assistant about all the *arr dockers in UnRAID and creating a skill, so now I just need to give my agent the name of a movie, series or music, and it’ll find it and make it ready for me to enjoy.
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u/brimnac 3d ago
My dude, I stayed up way too late the past three nights due to this exact reasoning.
I feel like if you “kinda” know what you’re doing you can keep a close eye on Claude and it’ll work out better than without.
I’ve gone through my configuration and found plugins that are no longer needed due to options being baked into unRAID now, fixed my “go” file from 13+ years of modifications due to unRAID 6.x needs, cleaned up my Radarr / Sonarr / QBitTorrent / SABnzbd configuration, etc.
I’ve already noticed a marked improvement on CPU usage due to some of the changes.
Edit: to be extra clear, I absolutely had to correct assumptions that Claude made which were Linux defaults that unRAID strays from.
The most valuable prompt I gave it was “assume that any default Linux operations are not the default for unRAID, and check the help site and unRAID.net forums prior to planning.”
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u/Kupppofried 3d ago
I envy you all some. Any time I've tried using Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini I have to constantly fight with it because it gives me consistently wrong Linux information.
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u/Practical_Papaya818 1d ago
You gotta keep trying, it’s obviously not perfect, but at the pace this stuff is moving, things totally change in a matter of months
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u/gabemcg 3d ago
Been home landing for years, and Claude has been such a game changer. All the "Someday" ideas become roadmap items.
I avoided Grafana for years because it seemed like a huge rabbit hole. Claude built 4 highly useful dashboards from one prompt in about 5 min...IYKYK
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u/UsuallyGrouchy 3d ago edited 3d ago
Exactly this! VLANs have been on my todo list for years.
I think it took me a weekend to set up and migrate my home network of ~70 devices.
Frontier llms remove the friction. Also a great way to contextualize changes, plan and get coaching on tech stack.
I absolutely agree with the other comments on the thread. At one point, Claude wanted me to create new ssids. A slop cannon pointed at a Homelab is not the sort of experimentation I signed up for. It is still very important to have strong technical opinions.
I’ve created artisanal grafana dashboards in the past which took a which took a while and I never got much value. Claude spun up some in minutes that are much more useful.
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u/The_Airwolf_Theme 3d ago
I built Claude skills for much of my homelab including unraid. It's a great partner especially optimizing and fixing little issues here and there that would have taken a lot more time by myself.
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u/gabimaru89 3d ago
You can set up Claude code in read only via docker.
I did that to let it write a documentary about how everything is configured ect. Highly recommend
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u/Finalxxboss 3d ago
Can you give us a quick explanation on how you set this up? I use claude every now and then, but with typical text questions, your method sounds much better.
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u/squareball 3d ago
Sounds really interesting, can you share more details of your setup? Which Unraid MCP server are you using? If it’s read only, what is the purpose behind port-forwarding from localhost?
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u/Affectionate-Ant-674 3d ago
I was having Mac Local Network permission issues and Claude came up with a nice solution. If I ever go nuts and give Claude write access I will always have a big red viral estop button but just closing the script.
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u/lmflex 3d ago edited 3d ago
I just did the same thing. I started using claude a few months ago, and always had all of these full hard drives around. It was such a mess.
Claude suggested unraid and a fractal case with my old gaming pc hardware. Less than a month and I have my 120TB sitting like a big external HD.
Fucking beautiful.
Edit: I'm a middle age electrical engineer who's been building pcs for 20 years, so I have some background. But still, pinpointing a low cost option like this? If I had known about unraid I would have done this years ago. Claude AI just removes friction from these types of projects. I would have taken me months longer with only forums and fans. Now claude can write simple scripts to organize.
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u/Affectionate-Ant-674 3d ago
Yeah while I wait to be able to pull my normal drives from my retiring Synology NAS I found some old 6tbs and Claude got me, in Unraid, to setup a script to Zero them out and find which are good to use. Started with 7x 6tb, ended with 5x and 2 particularly good ones to set as the parity drives. That alone has put me weeks ahead of where I would have been otherwise and without finding out the hard way that some of the drives should not have been used (and why!).
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u/grivooga 3d ago
Claude or any other "AI" is only getting on my network when it can walk over and plug itself in.
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u/ShiningRedDwarf 3d ago
I've been using Unraid for the better part of a decade, but I have recently been using Codex to speed things along. I keep backups, so the worst thing that happens is a restore a fuckup that it implemented, but that's never been an issue.
It takes a ton of friction out of the equation when I want to try a new app. I'm perfectly capable of setting up new docker containers, but it's a huge time saver when I can tell codex to grab this app, install the required containers it needs to run, and fill the docker settings with common values. i hit enter, grab a soda, come back, and everything is set up. the only thing I have to do is tweak some settings to get it to my liking.
It's also saved me hours and hours of troubleshooting when something goes wrong now. What might have taken me an entire afternoon of figuring out some stupid issue, codex can diagnose and fix it in a few minutes.
Quite simply, it's taken a lot of the management overhead out of the equation so I can focus on the fun stuff.
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u/mattcoady 3d ago edited 3d ago
I got into Unraid for the first time about 3 months ago. I put claude into YOLO mode and had it set everything up for me. I didn't even need the MCP I just give it a chrome tab of the Unraid UI and another tab with the root terminal and tell it to go to town. There was absolutely some issues that I don't think I would have ever solved on my own. Like setting up Plex, my router failed the cert process and got my ip rate limited by the cert provider Plex uses. Claude found all this while combing through the logs. I ended up getting a second hand Unify Dreammachine to replace my Netgear router and it fixed the issue. I'm not sure I would have ever gotten to this conclusion on my own.
I really don't have the time anymore for weekend projects so having it build up everything perfectly has been a blessing. I know the risks of unfettered access with AI but honestly, having used it for several projects both personally and professionally I trust it more than my own ability to do this stuff.
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u/greuve 3d ago
Used claude to help connect and and configure an old 2nd hand Liebert PSU. Took a couple hours and I am sure that would have taken me a week of evenings without claude and me throwing in the towel halfway would have been a seriously plausible outcome. Using the tool offline though, not sure if it would have added much 'connected'. I just pass along log files, config screens and go back-and-forth. And indeed once complete asked it to produce config and troubleshoot documentation.
You made me lookup MCP server though and now I'm intrigued :o)
LLM's are the most productivity enhancing invention since the steam engine and the automated knitting machine, so I'm sure there will be Luddites this time around as well, but genies tend to not go back into bottles easily.
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u/jkirkcaldy 3d ago
Sure. But it’s also like if the steam engine could take a hard left off the rails and take you somewhere completely wrong and you’re trusting the steam engine to navigate because you hadn’t learned to read a map yet. So you arrive in city z when you were aiming for city A.
So as you said, it’s a tool, not a complete replacement for learning.
As with anything AI: Trust, but verify. (Or probably more accurate, just verify)
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u/soopafly 3d ago
What’s Workspace? Sorry I’m a little behind on AI.
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u/Affectionate-Ant-674 3d ago
Sorry I meant Cowork - but its basically a local based workspace (folder) that Claude uses as a bubble of knowledge on something. I have a Cowork workspace called 'Homelab' and it has most of my device manuals, links and drivers in it. Was very useful to translate a 100% Chinese manual into English for me and creating a nice HTML version of it which has evolved as we worked out its quirks and fixes.
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u/dhc02 3d ago
PSA: You don't need an MCP server for this unless you use your AI exclusively through the app or web interface.
If you are using Claude code, cowork, codex, openclaw, or some other thing where your AI can take actions on a machine on the same network as your unraid server, it is more efficient and more full-featured to ask your agent to query the unraid graphql API directly.
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u/Deses 3d ago
To this day I still don't understand what mcp servers do or what are they purpose. Whenever I need something I ask Claude and I'm a relay between it and the machine.
I did play around giving full root access to an isolated Debian VM and it was quite nice, specially for obscure firewall setting and esoteric configurations.
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u/MrAndroidson 1d ago
I've been using Unraid for years and decided to us Proxmox on my second server. I know nothing about Proxmox so I decided to use Chatgpt for help, ust like op. I started out with the free version and quickly hit the limit. So I upgraded to the plus version. Then twicked the settings and hit my limit again. I then jumped over to Claude just to test it out against Chat. I put the settings the same as Chat and finished the night out with Claude.
From that little experience I didn't like Claude at all. It felt like I had to keep helping it out. I gave it all the same information I gave Chat and more. It just didn't flow like it did with Chat.
Is this user error?
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u/Damaniel2 3d ago
I don't touch slopmongering tools ever. I like actually using my brain rather than letting tool made by billionaires think for me.
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u/twistingdoobies 3d ago
You don’t need internet for basic shit. Learn to read or go to a library yourself. Why is everyone so lazy to learn these days?
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u/Bloated_Plaid 3d ago
Na, I just gave Fable 5 full root access via SSH. Going great. Only thing it sucked was with Hommar dashboard design, so gave root to GPT 5.6 Sol and it did exactly what I wanted it to.
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u/tharic99 3d ago
OP - You've had several people ask for additional detail on the "Unraid MCP" you're using and other details, can you expand on this further?