I am a potential new user of unRAID and new to this forum. It appears that many of the NAS Boxes like Netgear and Syntology have major problems handling dbf files. I have tried a Netgear Duo at work with poor results. I need a small file storage system on our LAN that can have 10+ users read and write dbf files stored on it. I'm not sure if unRAID could reliably do this for me.

Any comments and suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

I can't tell you yes or no regarding difficulties. It the other boxes are using samba, then you 'MAY' experience the same issues with unRAID.

Notice how I capitalized that! LOL.  If you, or a member of your team, are samba savvy, you may be able to customize a samba share to deal with any kind of locking issues the DBF file requires. I'm assuming this is where you would have issue.

 

 

The other point to consider, unRAID is fast for reads, but slow for writes. There fore it may prove to bring up other issues.

Or you could make it a cache only share and then periodically rsync it to the unRAID array for backups.

Thanks for your reply. The Netgear Duo probably uses Linux with Samba, and I have also tried FreeNAS without success. I

wold like to at least give unRaid a shot, but without pouring some big bucks into it. I have a spare Dell Optiplex 745 Tower at

work that I could use as an inexpensive test bed. It has 2, 500GB WD drives now, and I could easily install a WE 1TB drive as a parity drive. I know this is not the fight forum for builds, but this is part of my original question about database III (dbf) files

to work.

Thanks for your reply. The Netgear Duo probably uses Linux with Samba, and I have also tried FreeNAS without success. I

wold like to at least give unRaid a shot, but without pouring some big bucks into it. I have a spare Dell Optiplex 745 Tower at

work that I could use as an inexpensive test bed. It has 2, 500GB WD drives now, and I could easily install a WE 1TB drive as a parity drive. I know this is not the fight forum for builds, but this is part of my original question about database III (dbf) files

to work.

You can test without bothering with a parity drive.  You could then easily test with the 'free' version of unRAID.

 

I suspect, however, that your problem will persist as it is likely to be a problem with the way that database locking occurs over a network.  I have seen many reports of such problems with a variety of database types.  They seem less likely to occur if you use a Mapped drive in Windows (for some reason) rather than using a UNC path.

Some reading material related to microsoft, samba and locking.

 

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/296264

http://www.samba.org/samba/docs/man/Samba-HOWTO-Collection/locking.html

http://www.dataaccess.com/whitepapers/opportunlockingreadcaching.html

http://www.drouillard.biz/Tips&Tricks/Samba/Oplocks.htm

http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/samba/book/appb_02.html

 

 

Thanks for the prompt replies.  I suspect you are 100% correct.  But, I will try to test with free unRaid as suggested and will

report back.

 

Thanks also for the 'samba and locking' links. I will surely read them.

Different DBF using apps handle it in different ways.  FoxPro tends to be better than many others.

 

If you don't need shared access, open the files in exclusive mode.  If you do need shared access, consder re-writing the app as client/server or using an HTML interface.

Thanks, both not possible.

Unfortunately, direct shared-file access for any database via samba is not going to be efficient... it is backwards to the way an efficient network application is supposed to work and it is not well suited for any network file access like samba or NFS.

 

And BTW, the dbf file format and dBase came from NASA JPL... not Ashton/Tate or Borland.

Maybe a better solution could be a terminal server type environment? That way all the db stuff would be local.