NASLite Network Attached Storage

"Those" refers to the folders within the share - and yes, with one NASLite box there will be one share, with one or more folders, and each folder representing a different disk.



Neither task should result in network traffic



Under a], the data has to be transferred from one disk to the other through the disk interface (but not across the network), this will have some impact on other data transfers that are in progress - which results in the pause you have noticed - under b] there is no actual data transfer, what happens is the directory entries that point to the location of the first block of data occupied by the file are changed.

Just a few additional words to attempt and further clarify what was said above in cases where remote storage is involved:

If one has a NASLite-2 server set as a master to re-export the shares of a second NASLite-2 server (See the manual), the “Shares” share will include a folder called “Remote”. Moving files within the “Shares” share from/to “Remote” folders will result in traffic between the two NASLite-2 servers rather than traffic from NASLite-2 to client to NASLite-2.

Again, attempting to distill this so it’s clear, moving or copying files within a share will result in no traffic through the client. For example, if one maps the “Shares” folder as disk “S”, moving and copying files within disk “S” will result in no traffic through the client.

Hope that makes sense

This is a great feature! "Almost magic" compared to other network drive schemes.....

I am not sure if it is anything to do with NASLite but when I try to copy/move large files, say larger than 2-3 Gb using the "Shares" share,
the move/copy fails with a message on the WinXP client saying that the "Network Name is no longer available".

I experienced this when trying to move a folder from Disk-2 to Disk-3.

When this happens, there is a partial file on the target dir with the data copied so far.

This happens everytime from 2 clients I have tried.

Of course the copy works using the traditional method of moving the data through the network.

Any ideas?

Just an idea and not even sure if this is the reason but..... I assume that you are using DHCP on your network, it could be that the lease on the IP address comes up and the thing times out. Just a wild guess.

Mike

Half way through the DHCP lease the client will attempt to renew the lease, if it fails, it will try again at three-quarters of the lease period, and again at seven-eighths and so-on (basically half of the remaining period in the lease) until the lease actually runs out when it will release the ip address.

Once the client contacts the server, the lease will be renewed - ie the time that the client may use the ip address is increased, the ip address itself remains unchanged - there is one exception to this rule - unless, that address has been reserved on the server (a process requiring manual intervention)

For the lease to actually run out, there would have to be a problem preventing the client from contacting the DHCP server to renew the lease, DHCP server not available, network failure, incorrectly configured firewall, etc.

Essentially the problem would not be with the DHCP lease itself, but with whatever caused the client not to be able to contact the server to renew it.

Here is one possible reason - it was taken from this thread

I believe I've seen problems with explorer too. Just not noticeable here ....as I tend to use 4NT for any major copy operations. Just fell out of the explorer habit long ago - particularly with XP's fragile explorer.

Do you know if this "ramdisk" will propagate "move files" through remotely hosted storage? If it can - that would be another remarkable feature.

Ran some tests using a P400/128MB with 2 160G IDE drives. Moved 50GB from Disk-0 to Disk-1 via the “Shares” share. No problems whatsoever. Did the same 50GB from a folder in Disk-0 to another folder in Disk-0, again without a problem - took a bit longer .

The machine is pretty average, so if there was a problem with resource management, I’m sure it would have failed at some point. The client is using Win2K Pro. Client IP is via DHCP and server is obviously static.

I’m leaning towards a problem with Windows XP Explorer. Perhaps an alternate such as xplorer² by http://www.zabkat.com/ will perform better and without problems.

Otherwise, everything seems in order on my end.

Hello all:

I disable DHCP ... all my WinXP systems are assigned fixed IP addresses manually. So I haven't seen those issues ...

... BUT ...

Hello Tony:

Back to my network traffic issue (my post from Wed Oct 18, 2006 8:27 pm). As described under b] .... I have not gotten it to work without generating network traffic (and my music plays without interuption). Is there some setting I need to try ? I am using version 2.0 or 2.0.1 ( I am not home at the moment ). On the WinXp client I have mapped the W: drive to \\NAS\Shares.

Thanks for helping me debug this ...
Georg

Can you elaborate on that?

Just to be clear, there will be some network traffic. That’s how the browser can generate the status report bar as well as folder updates, etc. That’s only feedback data and not files. The point was that there is no network traffic generated by the files moving out of the NAS, through the client and back to the NAS. The amount of actual network traffic will be only a fraction of what is being moved or copied.

Tony: After I get home I'll reply (sometime in the next 24 hours) with network traffic images & screenshots. I am talking about significant network traffic (80% utilization) versus almost none using method a].
Georg

I don't think the issue I experience is DHCP related. I am leaning towards what Tony said.

I was having the same problem as ALucus turned out to be bad RAM in the system try downloading this and see if it passes on your system.

http://www.memtest86.com/

CaptainGizmos, thanks for your tip.

Are you suggesting to test the RAM on the WinXP system or on the NASLite server?

I have had this problem appear on all 3 WinXP clients, so I think it is pretty remote that I have bad memory on all three.

I also tried xplorer2 lite as Tony suggested but got the same error.....

The naslite computer is the one to test.
You can boot from an memtest cd and it auto launches the test.
If it makes it through 2 or 3 passes then it is probably OK.
Mine failed in the first pass.
I had also tried all of the suggestions in this thread before discovering the bad RAM.
After the ram was replaced it worked flawlessly.