The half-terabyte array, re-thought
Posted on September 21, 2006
Filed Under All, Technology, Gulker labs |
With 5 months under our belt using the half-terabyte array, we are re-thinking completing the project by adding 2 more 250 GB NAS drives. These SMB shares (aka CIFS as the Mac prefers to ID them) have a way of dropping off the network. Often, they can’t be remounted without restarting them (this takes me back to the early days of network servers).
Given the cost - cheap - I guess I can’t complain, but things like automated backups fail when the NAS won’t mount. You can imagine preventable disasters while on vacation etc. under these circumstances, especially given Murphy’s near-perfect batting average.
Macs have problems with SMB shares, IMHO. I see this at work frequently enough. But then, Windows has problems with SMB, though perhaps less often (also observed at work). I wish I could say that Mac OS X Server’s AFP was take-it-to-the-bank solid, but I’ve had some issues there, too (on Server 104.x anyway - I think Server 10.3.x is better). And, the last time I tried, NFS was not particularly mature on OS X (that was a while ago, though). I’ve had good luck with netatalk Appleshare-over-IP on Linux in the past, but that defeats my plan to move the whole gulker.com LAN to our 2 Minis. Sheesh… new plan in the works… upgrade the drives in our AMD Linux box?
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[…] With the Mini finally upgraded, we can get down to the fun part, architecting the new LAN. First stop will be to learn a bit more about DNS behavior, and then doing the back-of-envelope diagrams that serve as a starting point. The half-terabyte array, an SMB share, is proving to be problematic on our Mac network. The drives drop off mysteriously, and copying large directories is problematic - SMB doesn’t accept many characters in filenames that are OK on Mac and HFS, so a copy operation like a full-drive backup frequently fails. The debate is whether to bring back Mac OS X Server, or netatalk on Linux. […]
[…] Earlier we had thought our inexpensive half-terabyte array and some lightweight software and a couple of Mac Minis would take over our LAN chores and experimental work. But, as we’ve chronicled, the NAS SMB shares are not particularly stable on our Mac LAN, and copying large directories (e.g., the contents of all our old hard drives) is a minor nightmare: SMB doesn’t support the same character set as Mac HFS, so the copy process stops dozens (or hundreds) of times during a large transfer when a filename contains an ‘illegal’ character. […]
[…] Now that we have a big, easy-to-access, Mac-friendly storage device on the LAN, we’ve begun to move the contents old hard drives over. Last night I moved the contents of a previous server (The mighty ‘Mainframe’, a G4) onto the mini. 40 GB of files from 1999 to 2003 are now at my fingertips, indeed, even searchable via Spotlight. Amazing that a server once had a ‘big’ 40 GB of storage. Previously, we moved an old server HD to our NAS (the 1/2 terabyte array), but the experience was a bit unhappy and, it turns out, Spotlight doesn’t index mounted SMB shares. Search is the whole point of paperless document-keeping. […]