NASLite Network Attached Storage

Hi NASLite experts,
I am new to NASLite and have been using it in my home network for less than a week (running NASLite-SMB v1.3) but I've already run into the following problem twice: I used one client on my network to read a file from the NAS while using another client to write some files. All of a sudden both clients hung and lost connection to the NASLite server (and access to the disk) The client PCs are running Mac OS X and Win XP. Then I rebooted the NASLite Server and got a bunch of error messages:
__alloc_pages: 0-order allocation failed (gfp=0x1d0/0)

Next, I got:
VM: killing process e2fsck

And finally:
Disk-1 - Filesystem is not mountable

I booted up Knoppix and tried to see if I could do anything but with no luck. Basically I ran e2fsck /dev/hda manually and it says the superblock is corrupted but if I mount /dev/hda1 I could access the files!

Anyway, I reconfigured the disk (i.e., Option 4 of the NASLite admin menu) and started from scratch again. What I really want to find out is what I did wrong to cause the corruption and how I could avoid that in the future. Is my hardware simply not powerful enough to run NASLite?

FYI, here are details of my hardware:
----------------------------------------
Disk-1 Hardware

* Maxtor 6H500R0, ATA DISK drive
* attached ide-disk driver.
* host protected area => 1
* 976773168 sectors (500108 MB) w/16384KiB Cache, CHS=60801/255/63

Operating System

Linux 2.4.26.NASLite #10 Mon Jun 14 14:07:53 MDT 2004 i686

Uptime

11:40:01 up 18 min, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

Processor (CPU)

vendor_id : GenuineIntel
model name : Celeron (Mendocino)
cpu MHz : 500.893
cache size : 128 KB
bogomips : 999.42

Memory

total used free shared buffers
Mem: 61776 10168 51608 0 92

Disks

Filesystem Size Used Available Use% Device
System 3.9M 2.4M 1.5M 61% RAM Disk

Network Interface

RealTek RTL8139 at 0xc4800f00, 00:05:5d:4c:a4:1c, IRQ 11
Identified 8139 chip type 'RTL-8139C'
link up, 100Mbps, full-duplex, lpa 0x45E1
Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:05:5D:4C:A4:1C
inet addr:192.168.2.238 Bcast:192.168.2.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:1176 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:123 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:101615 (99.2 KiB) TX bytes:69755 (68.1 KiB)
Interrupt:11 Base address:0xf00

Thanks,
Momotor

Most likely bad RAM. 64M should be enough for what you are doing.

I d/l Knoppix. Put it on a Cd and booted up the computer. it apparently doesnt have enough ram to load the Knoppix fully for large apps so has given me a root prompt window (TWM window)

I enter :
e2fsck /dev/hdd

it says:
e2fsck 1.39-WIP
e2fsck: Permission denied while trying to open /dev/hdd
You must have r/w access to the filesystem or be root


I tried cd .. my way to the base directory and then doing it which doesnt help.
I tried mount /dev/hdd and it says

mount: can't find /dev/hdd in /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab.

Can anyone help?

try damn small linux.... its like knoppix but much much smaller

Let me try and explain:

NASLite will boot and run with very little RAM, however some tasks may require more resources than your system offers. For example it is usually impossible to check a 250G filesystem containing 150,000 files with 64M of RAM. Some proportionality must be observed when specking your system.

The reason you are getting this error “VM: killing process e2fsck” is because e2fsck is running out of resources and is unable to complete the filesystem check and repair. The kernel kills the process and moves on.

Adding more RAM to the machine will likely rectify the situation and allow NASLite to complete the repairs properly.

Hope that helps…

Tony: thanks a lot for your explanation. I could understand that e2fsck would run out of memory checking my 500Gb drive. Do you think the server/disk disconnect problem during simultaneous read/write is memory related too? How much memory would you recommend for a 500Gb NASLite setup?

Thanks again,
Momotor

As much as you can up to 768MB.

Mike