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Thread: Another NAS advice thread...

  1. #97
    Senior Member watercooled's Avatar
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    Re: Another NAS advice thread...

    ========UPDATE==========

    OK so I've got the system up and running with just Samba for now, I tried first with FreeNAS to compare performance and they are a lot closer than I thought they would be after reading a few articles on the web criticising FreeNAS's Samba performance. Win 7 drag+drop write was around 60-65MB/s on both and read was about the same. However, according to htop (on Debian) the CPU was nowhere near maxed out (about 15-20% on all cores) so I don't think it's the bottleneck. Iperf with a 2m window size (-s flag on Atom system) reports around 945 Mb/s, again with no cores maxed out but core 1 at about 45%, 2 at 25% and the other 2 at <10%. I'm using ext3 as the share filesystem (on a separate partition to /). However I was a little concerned with temps in the case as the CPU rose to over 70C according to BIOS, IR thermometer was above 50C IIRC and the NM10 was getting pretty toasty too. Neither were close to the max but I think I'll mount a fan in the case somehow to give it some airflow; with the side panel off and an 80mm fan blowing into it the heatsink measures just less than 30C (ambient about 23C). I was considering sticking a VRM heatsink to the NM10 as it runs pretty hot but according to the documentation it's designed to run at up to 113C. Any recommendations for mounting the fan? Also let me know if there's any tests or whatever you'd like to see.

    Edit: it seems BIOS CPU temp is inaccurate, it reports about 20 or 70 with no in-between as far as I can tell. The 'remote temp' value seems far more accurate, close to IR thermometer readings.

    Edit2: Windows 7 copy speeds (i.e. real-world transfer speeds, not synthetic tests) are reaching between 65 and 100MBps!!

    Edit3: Those speeds are without jumbo frames BTW.
    Last edited by watercooled; 13-06-2010 at 01:51 PM.

  2. #98
    Welcome to stampytown! Salazaar's Avatar
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    Re: Another NAS advice thread...

    I suppose I should update mine too then...

    All the components of my jury rigged NAS are sitting together nicely but for some reason they don't all want to play with FreeNAS that well. I can format, mount and share the disk okay but transfer speeds are appalling and frequently fail all together with larger files. I get TIMEOUT WRITE_DMA48 errors in the log file but I don't know how to diagnose the problem.

    I suspect the file system may not have been written to the disk entirely correctly as I had errors when I was doing it until I selected the 'do not erase MBR' option. And FSCK came up with a lot of errors.

    On top of that, all my fiddling and rebooting seems to have caused a boot error, so instead of reinstalling FreeNAS I thought I might try some flavour of Linux instead. Can anyone recommend one suitable for an almost complete linux beginner? Ubuntu server comes to mind but are there any others I should be looking at?
    Last edited by Salazaar; 01-06-2010 at 10:35 AM.
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    Re: Another NAS advice thread...

    Quote Originally Posted by Salazaar View Post
    I get TIMEOUT WRITE_DMA48 errors in the log file but I don't know how to diagnose the problem.
    A quick google shows that it's a common BSD issue, but no obvious single cause and no easy answers - some possibilities are buggy APIC support on your (rather old) motherboard, or BSD doesn't like your PCI SATA card, or an interrupt conflict... or... or...

    If you haven't already, you could try jumpering the drive to match the SATA I interface of your card, but that's probably a bit of a long shot.

    Quote Originally Posted by Salazaar View Post
    Can anyone recommend one suitable for an almost complete linux beginner? Ubuntu server comes to mind but are there any others I should be looking at?
    I'd definitely go with Debian or Ubuntu - they're about as easy as Linux server distros ever get, and most importantly there's loads of howtos/support available for when you get stuck.

    Incidentally, cheap 'n' cheerful PCI HDD interface cards can often be problematic, not just with BSD... you might want to do a bit of googling to check that the chipset is supported by Linux, and also see if there are any other reported issues.

  4. #100
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    Re: Another NAS advice thread...

    Quote Originally Posted by CaptainCrash View Post
    A quick google shows that it's a common BSD issue, but no obvious single cause and no easy answers - some possibilities are buggy APIC support on your (rather old) motherboard, or BSD doesn't like your PCI SATA card, or an interrupt conflict... or... or...
    Exactly... Bloody difficult to diagnose.

    Quote Originally Posted by CaptainCrash View Post
    If you haven't already, you could try jumpering the drive to match the SATA I interface of your card, but that's probably a bit of a long shot.
    Yup, given that a go. No apparent improvement


    Quote Originally Posted by CaptainCrash View Post
    I'd definitely go with Debian or Ubuntu - they're about as easy as Linux server distros ever get, and most importantly there's loads of howtos/support available for when you get stuck.

    Incidentally, cheap 'n' cheerful PCI HDD interface cards can often be problematic, not just with BSD... you might want to do a bit of googling to check that the chipset is supported by Linux, and also see if there are any other reported issues.
    That also crossed my mind but it's based on a VIA VT6421A chipset, which seems to be relatively common. So I'm going to try to exhaust my other (free) options before buying more hardware.

    Edit: Quick check and it looks like that chipset might be the problem to a greater or lesser degree. I'm still going to give linux a shot before investing in new hardware though.
    Last edited by Salazaar; 01-06-2010 at 11:01 AM.
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    Re: Another NAS advice thread...

    If you want to try Linux without going into CLI you could try Openfiler or OpenMediaVault which is apparently like FreeNAS with a Linux Kernel. I've discovered Samba, or more specifically CIFS on Windows, is a real PITA if you want to do something as seemingly trivial as change a password!! Long story short it turns out you have to log out of Windows after disconnecting from everything to get it to forget passwords, but it''s not like I was using my Windows login password so it's obviously caching it somewhere but I spent ages searching and just couldn't figure out how to flush the cache! I mean CIFS is a Windows protocol so surely it should be implemented properly on Windows! Still, if anyone knows anything I'd like to know.

    Edit: It looks like OpenMediaVault hasn't been released yet.
    Last edited by watercooled; 01-06-2010 at 02:49 PM.

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    Re: Another NAS advice thread...

    How do you manage updates on your own servers? Checking via SSH seems like it will get annoying after a while of doing it, so I'm interested in what others do.

  7. #103
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    Re: Another NAS advice thread...

    Another update: Installed Openfiler this afternoon. After much messing around with settings and reinstalling I hit a dead end in that it wouldn't communicate with my router. But a last ditch attempt of physically switching cards around the PCI slots seems to have cured it

    Running a format of the 2TB drive now, attached screen went blank, web interface is 'waiting' and the HDD is making noise so I presume it's working... I guess I'll know in a few hours/tomorrow morning.

    Success! Mostly. Transfer speeds are still in the region of 12mb/s which still seems a bit low even on my crappy setup but otherwise it seems to be working.

    Openfiler does seem to be a bit hard to set up, what with the lack of documentation, but there's enough community information out there to make a decent stab at getting a NAS up and running. I'm not sure I've done it in the optimal way, or the most secure but it works.
    Last edited by Salazaar; 02-06-2010 at 01:29 PM.
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    Re: Another NAS advice thread...

    Quick question...

    If I follow this guide to install Mediatomb on my NAS (which I mostly have a vague understanding of), will it start up automatically if I have to reset the machine or will I have to restart Mediatomb seperately?
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    Re: Another NAS advice thread...

    I'd install it with apt-get instead, type: apt-get install mediatomb-common mediatomb-daemon
    Then when it's installed edit /etc/default/mediatomb and change the NO_START option from "yes" to ""

    Note I've not used mediatomb myself so I'm only going on what's written on the download page. Check to see if it's listed in /etc/init.d/
    Last edited by watercooled; 02-06-2010 at 03:28 PM.

  10. #106
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    Re: Another NAS advice thread...

    Hmmm, Openfiler did not like apt-get...
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    Re: Another NAS advice thread...

    Which is presumably why you found the link you did , sorry I assumed you were using Debian for some reason. Anyway, apart from the first line what I posted should still apply, just install it the way that guide says if it works.

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    Re: Another NAS advice thread...

    Quote Originally Posted by Salazaar View Post
    Quick question...

    If I follow this guide to install Mediatomb on my NAS (which I mostly have a vague understanding of), will it start up automatically if I have to reset the machine or will I have to restart Mediatomb seperately?
    I followed this guide to install Openfiler on USB stick, so the HDD are for data only.
    Configure an iSCSI target and connect via iSCSI initiator from Win7.

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