How to Setup a LAN / Steam Cache with Pre-Fill & DNS on Unraid 

Prefill dev here. Great work on the video! Always cool to see my stuff out there in the community.

😀 The voice has a face! I thought it was an advert to start with! Strangely weird knowing the voice for the last 5 years or so. New studio looks cool! Edit..... Just realised I'm about a month behind the drag curve...... In my defence, I've got a big build on too..... Can't wait for more.... Make it so, No1....

Another reason to set this up is for those pesky ISP data caps. Idk when Comcast slipped it into my contract and I didn't figure it out until I tried to re-download my entire Steam library to my server. I've been meaning to set this up and I always have better success following your content, thanks for this one

Hey man, it's so common to have a hosted Pihole or Adguard DNS instance, that it would be super helpful to have an all-in-one tutorial in how to integrate a LAN cache DNS with Pihole, etc. Still trying to figure out how to make that work. Anyhow, great vid and thanks for all the work you do. *EDIT: Oh, I see you can change local files in Windows to point Steam to a specific DNS!

I would not have been able to run Unraid without your tutorials, Ed. Great work. I am very pleased with Unraid and how it developes. The Community is also great. One wish though is a paid Support Service. Some times I get stuck in a problem that I can´t solve or find answers to in the Communty pages. Then a paid Support Service would be good solution.

Exactly what I needed. Quality as usual Ed! So glad you are up and running again. After setting up my first UnRAID server 4 years ago and now looking back you are the reason I got into UnRAID in the first place, and the reason all the services runs so smoothly. I will be a Patreon for the foreseeable future. Any chance you would do a video on secure file transfer like sftp?

If I ever ran in to this man in person, I'd probably tear up and try to give him a hug. I wouldn't have figured out anything about Unraid without his videos.

I was originally using the lancache-bundle. Didn't realize this newer video was posted, so I dropped lancache-bundle and have everything setup per this video. I need to get you another beer!

Good to see the face behind the voice!!! Keep these videos coming!

You're one of the best channels that does this sort of stuff. I had to unfollow you so I could follow you again, so it felt like I followed you twice. Best of luck to you with all of this man keep up the good work.

Hey, u look a lot younger than u sound. Gr8 vids. Many thx for your tute's. Got a pretty respectable setup now. All the best 2 u m8!

Another quality video! Thanks very much! Was missing host override in my setup.

Depending on how fast you need it to download, you don't need an SSD. I actually used a WD black and it was more than fast enough for this purpose and it was perfect. What I did was I created a cache pool with only the WD black and then I created a share that only used the cache pool. You just don't want to use the array since it's slow but a dedicated drive is still way faster than the array, and the WD black is way faster than any drive on my array. It was doing 250 MB/s. It's still slow compared to an SSD but more than fast enough to saturate a gigabit connection. It may even be fast enough for 2.5 gigabit connections.

The Legend of the Unraid has a face! All Hail Ed! Excellent tutorials as always :) Thank you for all you do!

Love your work! Your videos really helped upgrade my home setup.

I'm too early for 1080p. Super hyped for this :D

Woah, you dont look how i pictured! Thanks again for the videos

Your editing reminds me of 90s or early 2000s editing.

Excellent tutorial, I use PiHole and Unbound for my DNS and didn't want to have to add an extra step in DNS resolving, great to find out I can override things in pfsense. One quick question if you happen to see this comment. My pfsense is a VM on my Unraid with 2 physical gigabit ports, one for WAN and one for Lan and my Pihole is a docker on the Unraid. Does traffic for between pfsense and PiHole travel out via the physical port and back into the the unraid machine or does it communicate internally? I'm assuming it travels out, if so how can I adjust things so that traffic moves internally.

I am new to steam and really love this idea of caching games. Using the prefilled or doing normal download will cache the game with this method. Is there away to remove a particular game from cache that I never ever want to play again? Or does deleting the game from steam also clear that game’s in lancache. Sorry for the noob question for I am new to this.

A better way to test if the lancache is getting hit correctly is opening a terminal in the monilithic docker and executing this command: "tail -f /data/logs/access.log | grep "MISS"" To see access that didnt hit the lancache and got forwarded to the internet. Otherwise only execute the tail command without grep and you can see all the traffic that hits or misses the lancache

Thank you very much!! I'll try to set this up right now. I wonder how to make a prefill of ubisoft games work, it seems there is no option to enable ubisoft in the prefill container settings...

Is there a lan-cache for PS-games? BTW happy to see a video from you again.

I like the new Style of this Video. 🙂

Great Video! I like the Video effects 🎉

This is great! works perfectly!

Question, what if you are using adguard home or pi-hole on your network? How would you go about using both that and the lancache dns?

Nice video. Nice to see your face spaceinvader!

how much lan could a lan cache cache is a lan cache could cache cache

can't i blacklist or whitelist certain games?

At 4:56 your Main tab shows a ZFS Master pool with buttons to "Show Datasets", "Scrub Pool", "Export Pool", "Create Dataset". This is a community app "ZFS Master" Beta from Iker's Repository. Is this stable for critical data? Should we create the pool with terminal commands, export it, and this app can import, display and manage the pool? PLEASE let us know your experience and procedure with this app.

@Spaceinvader One, for some reason i cant get the dns to take over the request for steam etc. Every time i do a ping or lookup it uses the standart ip even tho the dns is connected. I also can use lancache prefill without any problems. Do you have any idea what to try out for a fix?

Great video as always. Ran this and it downloads only 1 game successfully. for the rest in the queue throws the following error "Manifest request timed out for depot {gamename}- {id}. Retrying... Downloads the next one in the queue if i wait for rest of the failures and run the commands again.

Danke!

dude i want that background the one at 0:48

Will this work for 3 separate steam accounts that use the same games on the same LAN? Also, can I still use my pihole dns and this at the same time?

not everyone has unraid

can someone help me? this is very confusing to someone that has never programed anything or run any command lines or networking. All these instructions are assuming everyone knows the basics and start ahead of an average NOOB. I have a mechanical engineering degree and build aircraft for a living and I love to learn but dang. People in the computer science world that code and sit in front of a computer all day, really suck at techical writing instructions and giving examples for people to follow that are new to expereiced levels. I write work instruction all the time that direct people from 0 level expereince to 40 years on how to install and build structures on a plane or repair issues. My CAD and engineering Drawings are crearted the same way. With my little rant out of the way lol WTH does when using the prefill container we need to use the DNS and the lan cache conatiner at 25:59 point. You only type the dns IP conatiner and mention the Lan cache conatiner but never input that info or show how to do it. The way you say it, makes it sound like the IP for the lan cache container needs to be added with the DNS one., is that correct? I have pulled all info from all sources and there is so much conflicting instructions trying to set this up, from the Github, Wiki, youtube, Reddit, unraid and the lan cache website. This is ridiculus lol I feel like I need help and use my Lean Six Sigma skills to help the community with their techincal instruction skills and quailty of instructions smh lol

At 33:20, your writes are continuing even though you paused the download. And when you resume the download in steam, it speeds up briefly. To me, this indicates that it is technically downloading from the lancache, but the lancache is simultaneously downloading the file from the internet. When you pause the download in steam, you're basically letting the download buffer. You unpause, you get all that buffered data, then it slows back down as your download is waiting for the lancache to download.

Your tutorials have litterally made UNRAID for me. Thank you so much!

One question I have is how would you set up the DNS for the LanCache while using something like PiHole in conjunction? Or would it be something like the dns override?

I'd highly recommend setting up secondary/fallback dns for your DHCP to your router or pihole etc. That way you don't lose internet if the VM/container goes down.

Additionally you can use pihole as dns and just populate dns files to pihole .

There’s another reason for single computer users. I don’t get much time to game, however I do have a dedicated gaming machine which only ever gets turned on when I want to game. When I do game I don’t want to be sitting there waiting for yet another monster multi Gb update which still takes a long time even on a decent broadband connection. So I build a cache drive basic AND created a basic VM which won’t be used for gaming but used as a “game update monitor” it will run steam in the background and download updates as they come up. This means that when I get a chance to game, I can boot my game PC and it will download in mere minutes rather than hours.

This is the first time I see my teacher after using unraid for 5-6 years. Thank you very much for helping us how to use unraid correctly.

I had a totally different face in my head. Fun to see the reveal! Very good video as always and great effects with the cool new studio!

Another Great Video Mate... Just wondering if you've managed to get any of the UI's to work with it?

Why can’t you just put a second dns in your router to fall back to? Does that stop it from working right?

Good video as always Ed! Thanks for sharing it with us! and Merry Christmas!🎄🎁 Jp

so THATS what you look like. wow... I imagined much more grey

We are using a 10gb nic for the lacache . When we have lots of users hitting the cache the ping on our game servers go up even trough our cpu and ram usage is low . Is there anyway to dedicate a network card to an individual docker/lancache and separate the traffic ??

When spaceinvader posts a video, you know the day is gonna be good !

Hey, thank you really much without your help it would be impossible to run unraid as good as it is with your tutorials. But unfortunately I am struggling hard with Epic Lanchache i tried serverl reinstallation but didnt got it work as it should be. My Problem is that everytime i try to download something over EpicGames the first few gigs working fine with a fully gigabit but then it stops to zero and says it has problems to reach the network. I run into several forums but didnt find any solution which fits in my case, because SteamCache is working very fine. So maybe you or the community could help me by my problem.

Great video! I have been trying to get a lancache going for a long time ! Thanks a lot for this

Does lancache work with PlayStation? Also can I point lancache to go through my DNS server ie Technitium DNS?

Thanks a ton for the incredibly tutorial. I was able to get everything up and running and prefill worked perfectly until I restarted prefill and now it won't let me log in properly. Is there an easy way to start from scratch on prefill tried uninstalling it then reinstalling it but still has the same issue.

possible reason for slow transfer with god of war is the number of small files. Small files will slow down rates. larger files will always download and transfer faster due to compression and ssd and hard drive read rates, as opposed to read and seek which will cause a bottle neck

Every time I enter my Steam password in the prefill the connection times out. Does anybody have any tips on how to get past that?

Wow a face. I honestly thought you must be some old guy in a dark room avoiding his wife. Not true!

Hi, would it be possible to limit the network bandwidth of the prefill docker?

Does it also cache updates of games and steam app? Also is there a way to limit the max size of the cache?

A lot of the sony studios games have this very issue dont know the reason its just silly!

Tried that out, it works on steam but not on epic... very strange

Does the gamedata still updated (patches etc.) when its in the lan cache?

Is there a similar tool to DNS override on Unifi?

Awesome video as always. Since lancache bundle isn't working anymore, i was looking for an alternative. However, i'm missing 1 key feature.... how can i tell lancache DNS what the forward DNS ip is? Because i like having it route everything through pihole.

How does it manage game updates? if the version in the steam server is newer than the one on the lancache? does the steam client then think its a different game and doesnt use the cache and goes off to the internet?

What if I want to use a PiHole as well? Is this possible?

I have been waiting for this how-to, just one question though, could you use pi-hole as the dns for lan cache? I do believe that you can add local dns resolves on pi-hole, so it should be doable. I haven't tried to mess too much with either, so maybe that could be a quick part 2? Other than that, great video :)

Installed on unRAID, lancache-prefill is asking for a password when su $USER, thoughts?

Will be building my new server within the next few weeks, waiting for some parts to arrive. I really hope Unraid works this time, as currently using Truenas and I do not like it at all. This is something I will be looking to setup, if Unraid works.

So much useful information!! Thanx.

Once you have a bunch of games downloaded in lancache, how do you go about finding and deleting the ones you don't need anymore if you need to make room for other games? Thanks.

Did you notice when you hit that 18GB RAM limit, the God of War download speed tanked?

So, how would I configure things if I also have pihole running?

A side by side screen cap of both the steam window and the unraid ssd information, this shows the lan cache doing its job by seeing the data usage going up as the game downloads. Separate informative videos would be helpful with regards to DNS, Resolving names, LAN settings with unraid. Powershell is something you should move to using when making videos for us, it's a level up for promts.. Great work, really well done. Thank you for the effort.

Excellent tutorial! Thank you very much. You make UnRAID approachable and fun for novices like me. 😁

Does anybody know what DNS server is hit after it goes through lanchace DNS docker? I know is hitting the lancache server but if it is for something that isn't in steam my lancachedns doesn't have that data so were is it pulling it from? I would like if it hitted opndns servers after a no resolve form lancache DNS. this video is fantastic I was able to set it up and is running flawlessly, I thank you so much for your quality content video after video!!!

For pfsense DNS resolver do I need to make a new host overwrite for each CDN I want to add or do I add "additional names for this host"? I'm looking to do Windows, Blizzard, and Steam

If you're privacy / security conscious I'd suggest hiding your SSIDs as it's possible to geolocate someone with reasonable accuracy using the info in your video

it's kind of confusing for me in every video, i always imagined to your voice an english banker in a suit.... for years... i dont know why xD thank you for all your content, where would our unraids be without you :D

Finally, I can always rely on Spaceinvader1. I could not get prefill console commands to work but that is not a big deal. Many thanks!

I was just going to complain that this will disrupt using Pi-Hole as your home DNS server when you came to the part about DNS resolver solving that issue. Thanks!

I would fly across the US to hang out with this man. Helped me sosososososoSO much in my UNraid journey. A Continent is a bit too far for me though, :D

I have no idea how I missed your tour video and the change in format, but I really really like it and I'm glad you are back. Now I need to catch up on your vids.

Thanks for the great information as always. Now I have pi-hole and lancache working perfect.

How do you view which games are cached? How can you clean up cache by removing games?

i hate it when i go to log into the game and there update i got wait for net speeds, reading from you server and have it down load games seems a lot better and you just get it off the servers when need be sounds so much better. keep up the good work

The issue I'm having is that port 53 is in use and cannot be used with lanchache-dns. Not sure what to do about that.

I like your new Presentationconcept, you got a really nice Setup an it matches you. :)

when starting the caching i get : Unexpected download error : Unable to get available CDN servers from Steam! Skipping app.... it does this for all games. any ideas?

how can prefill epic games

Hallo Spaceinvader One würde gerne deine Videos in Deutsch mir anschauen gibt es da eine Möglichkeit? Deine Videos sind der Hammer da ich neu bin was Unraid betrifft wäre deutsch super! LG Frank

Nice to see u, never change ur style!

Great to see a face to the voice!

19 minutes ago??

Loving the new look!

Great tutorial Ed!

YESSSSS!

ED, would a group of RAID 0 HDDs give the same performance as an SSD but with the storage size HDDs?