File Protocol - Mac OS X compability problems with smb?

[Billped]

You can look at Freenas, it does AFP and all, but is not as flexible as unRAID.

 

 

You are a bigger man than I, orb, I would have not bothered responding.

 

BTW, the emotion on this topic is WAY out of line.  It's a software package and none of them will ever do everything we want.  The enhancement list is full of folks looking for that last perfect feature.  I am desperate to get UPS support, William is desperate to get AFP, others have their emotional must haves.

 

Let's all put things in perspective and follow orb's lead - let it go.

 

 

Bill

[William N]

You can look at Freenas, it does AFP and all, but is not as flexible as unRAID.

 

 

Thanks. I have now checked freenas.org out. Unfortunately there is no redundancy in Freenas, right..?

[William N]

I am desperate to get UPS support, William is desperate to get AFP, others have their emotional must haves.

 

Well Bill - I put some (to me) serious money in a machine which I have tried to get to handle my 4TB of data for two months now. AFP is not a nice-to-have feature for me. It's a must (I now realize). Besides not being able to handle a lot of my files (which might have been in the fine print somewhere), it frequently loses network connections. (also in version 4.2 - see http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=888.0). Don't know whether NFS support will change anything to me - but as it is now - unRAID is useless to me.

 

[Billped]

You can look at Freenas, it does AFP and all, but is not as flexible as unRAID.

 

 

Thanks. I have now checked freenas.org out. Unfortunately there is no redundancy in Freenas, right..?

 

First screen says this (bolding is mine):

 

FreeNAS is a free NAS (Network-Attached Storage) server, supporting: CIFS (samba), FTP, NFS, AFP, RSYNC, iSCSI protocols, S.M.A.R.T., local user authentication, Software RAID (0,1,5) with a Full WEB configuration interface. FreeNAS takes less than 32MB once installed on Compact Flash, hard drive or USB key.

 

 

Bill

[William N]

You can look at Freenas, it does AFP and all, but is not as flexible as unRAID.

 

 

Thanks. I have now checked freenas.org out. Unfortunately there is no redundancy in Freenas, right..?

 

First screen says this (bolding is mine):

Software RAID (0,1,5)

 

Don't know how i could NOT see it... :-) I will have a try within a week. Thanks a million Bill! A web community at its best.

[Billped]

I am desperate to get UPS support, William is desperate to get AFP, others have their emotional must haves.

 

Well Bill - I put some (to me) serious money in a machine which I have tried to get to handle my 4TB of data for two months now. AFP is not a nice-to-have feature for me. It's a must (I now realize). Besides not being able to handle a lot of my files (which might have been in the fine print somewhere), it frequently loses network connections. (also in version 4.2 - see http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=888.0). Don't know whether NFS support will change anything to me - but as it is now - unRAID is useless to me.

 

 

I understand that you believe Unraid is useless to you right now.  My issue with the direction of this thread is just that you seem to be on a crusade to get one feature added whereas the rest of the community is more, well, community-oriented.  AFP is on the desired feature list, Tom has done an outstanding job of rapidly incrementing the functionality of the software and he has clearly indicated that he is very interested in supporting the OS X community, so it will get there.

 

Hang in there.  There are a lot of things I need it to do as well (UPS, email alerts (though there is a user solution), S3 support (saving the planet is a high-order issue), Slimserver, and NFS are a few of them).

 

 

Bill

 

 

[th3joker]

This is the only thing stopping me from purchasing unRAID, I have a couple of Macs on my network and would love to use unRAID but have to use FreeNAS as it seems to be the only NAS software that offers the AFP.

 

I've tried quite a few solutions out over the past 5 or 6 weeks and FreeNAS just works and is pretty good but after looking at unRAID I can't exclude it from my options unless AFP is unlikely to be included.

 

 

[RobotTwo]

Tom,

 

    What are the chances of you including AFP support in the next kernel you release? Even if unraid doesn't have any official AFP support, that would let some of us install the AFP server and at least play with it ourselves.

 

Thanks

[planetscott]

I figured I would comment on this thread since I'm running a mostly Mac network. 

 

I've built netatalk and used it with my custom unRAID install, and honestly, you're better off using Samba.  I found afpd to offer no advantages to Samba, and more disadvantages if anything.  The configuration is a pain.  It has a bunch of unique dependencies.  I found performance to be no better than Samba.  AFAIK, netatalk does not include a built-in Bonjour advertising daemon, so you still have to manually configure your shares through Finder.

 

I think the better move would be for Tom to include support for Avahi.  In my configuration I find that's all I need to have great compatibility with unRAID on OSX.  My shares automatically show up in Finder, and it just feels a little snappier for some reason (as opposed to manually connecting to shares).

[Bydgoszcz]

Has there been any development on the front of Mac OS X? The reason I'm asking is because of the painfully slow file transfers. (1GB = 20 min or more) At first I thought that's just the way it is, but as transfers are growing, 30+ GB I can't exactly let the computer go for 5+ hours!! Especially when I'm reading Windows users transferring files 20x faster.

 

I'm running unRaid 4.3.2 on a 100% Mac environment. My Mac Book Pro is running OS X 10.5.5

 

I recently was moving files from one unRaid server to another and the transfer speeds were even more of a joke! I'm talking about 15 hours for 40 GB granted it had to go through the Mac but 15 hours......

 

I haven't had issues with playback thankfully, but playing a 12GB .x264 Blu-Ray movie I think falls just under the limit I have with current transfer speeds.

 

Solutions?

[RobJ]

I recently was moving files from one unRaid server to another and the transfer speeds were even more of a joke

 

If you are transferring files directly between 2 unRAID servers, you will need to disable DFS, check this:  Improving unRAID Performance, Access from Another Linux box

[Bydgoszcz]

Two things:

 

1) Adjusting the name server and host file made a HUGE, HUGE, HUGE difference!

echo nameserver 10.0.1.1 >/etc/resolv.conf
echo 10.0.1.200 tower >>/etc/hosts

 

After I rebooted my unRaid I connected to my server by going Go>>Connect to Server>> smb://tower (Instead of smb://10.0.1.200) and wow what a difference, instantly the shares popped up, and the file transfer speed went up.

 

I think this little tidbit has to be part of the initial setup!

 

2) Now with disabling DFS would this change the transfer speed even though I was connecting to both servers using my laptop and transferring the files through my MacBook Pro?

[Bydgoszcz]

Another question regarding transfer speeds.

 

Now mind you its only connected at 100Mbps....

 

When transferring files to the unRaid server I get on avg 3MB/sec, so a 1GB file takes 10 minutes. So out of curiosity I pulled the exact same file from the unRaid server pack to the computer, it got on avg 10MB/sec, so that same file took 3 minutes.

 

Is this normal? is the difference in transfer times due to the unRaid server creating parity while the file is getting copied?

[Joe L.]

Is this normal? is the difference in transfer times due to the unRaid server creating parity while the file is getting copied?

Yes.  Reads of a block of a file involve reading one block of physical data from the disk. 

Each write to the server involves reading the existing contents of the data block being written to, and reading the corresponding parity block, then writing those same two blocks with their updated contents.  4 I/O operations vs. 1.

[Bydgoszcz]

Yes.  Reads of a block of a file involve reading one block of physical data from the disk.   

Each write to the server involves reading the existing contents of the data block being written to, and reading the corresponding parity block, then writing those same two blocks with their updated contents.  4 I/O operations vs. 1.

 

Now that being said, if its all setup at gigabit speeds what should I expect the write speeds to be going to the unRaid server (A guesstimate)?

[Billped]

A sustained write (like that of a DVD ISO) should be ~10GB/sec.