I operate a microscope at a University that collects ~5-10 TB of data daily. The company that supplies the microscope are unfortunately bunch of total morons. They installed a new windows server that acts as our fileserver recently where the data is saved to initially. They have locked us out of direct connections to the data from all of our linux machines on the network. No amount of calm reasoning and even angry yelling/pleading/threats seems to help.

 

They only allow one single SMB mount of our data on a single fixed address. This computer is connected via slow 1Gbe connection that runs ~30-40 MB/s so not even gigabit speeds. We can change the address of the computer but all we are ever going to get is a single SMB mount of the data.

 

The path to getting the data is the following file server-> SMB mount on windows machine -> copy to linux machines for processing.

Obviously our linux machines can be networked with much faster connections 10Gbe or better. My question is does anyone have a good idea of how to bypass this idiocy so I can get my data in a timely fashion. It currently takes me weeks.

 

Our IT person suggests to build another linux computer to mirror the data and send it to other places. That's super expensive ~30k, we have ordered this but it will likely be many more months till it is ready. Its all enterprise grade stuff so there as still tons of supply issues.

 

Does anyone has any good ideas of how to get around this lunacy?

 

Thanks!

On 1/8/2023 at 6:46 AM, bonzi said:

They installed a new windows server

That's probably SAAS (software as a service) and there's nothing you can do about it now, accept maybe cancel the service. Welcome to the new world.

 

MrGrey.