NASLite Network Attached Storage

Does the ISO for 2.10 make a disc that will run as the CDD version directly if needed, or is it just an installer to make a CD/USB stick/HDD install?

Reason for asking is my NAS has no monitor or keyboard connected, and I need to know if I can just swap the existing 2.06 CD with the new one and reboot, or if I will need the keyboard and mouse for first time setup.

The iso now has 3 options at boot, boot into CDD, into the installer for installation to a hard drive etc or a memory check.

It's up and running, thanks!

BTW, I'm really looking forward to the possibility of SMP support in the future, since my NAS has a dual CPU server board anyhow.

I takes VERY LITTLE CPU to run NL, it is wasted on the OS. Sorry to be the bringer of bad news. Faster drives in a RAID0, RAID10, RAID5, or RAID50 and a fair amount of memory (2-4GB) will be the path to higher performance.

Mike

Even if I get 100% CPU load during heavy activity? The CPU's are 1.26Ghz P3's, and the system has 2GB of RAM. Running a 3Ware card with RAID 0 and RAID 5 arrays, and using an Intel Pro/1000 NIC. I get about 35MB/sec transfers on average.

Though the 3Ware is the 7500-8, which is an older and slower card. I wonder if I would get any performance boost by changing to the 7506-8 which has 66Mhz bus speed instead of 33Mhz.

Good question that will depend on how well the OS distributes the load across the two CPUs, I still doubt that you will see much of an increase in performance though.

The RAID0 performance will be better then the RAID5 every time, there are a number of factors for this but the most important one is the parity in RAID5 requires multiple read/write I/O per block of data.

As far as going to a 66MHz PCI bus card, it should help since it sounds like this is the bottle neck in your system. Think about it, The NIC and the RAID card are both on the same bus not to mention every other device as well integrated on the MB. This means that the PCI buses 132MB/sec of theoretical throughput (never achieved) is being doled out to each as best needs can be served. From a technical stand point, Gigabit Ethernet with a good NIC that has an offload engine, well written drivers and sitting on a lightly loaded bus should get to around 70GB/sec+. This is also assuming that the system feeding it is also up to the task.

There are a whole bunch of other factors that come into play but I will not go there. I just pointed out the above for clarification.

NL is a very stable and well tuned OS for the purpose but it is also generalized to use a fairly large base of hardware. If you are looking for the very best performance from your hardware you would need to build your own kernel with only the device drivers for the devices you have on the system, no web server, no GUI, NO nothing but a console. In addition you would use only one light weight network file system like NFS for export of your data. For most of us this would not be possible to achieve well.

It will be interesting to see if you do get better performance when they do role out the SMP kernel.

Mike

what board is it exactly?
do you have a CPU terminator so you can run single CPU?
just wondering the chipset...
(you shouldn't be hitting 100%, you're aren't rsyncing are you?)

It's an Asus TR-DLS. It has both CPU's installed since I don't have a terminator.

I think this board has dual PCI busses, and I have the RAID on it's own bus.

If I remember right, it did use more CPU when I was running Rsync vs. using Windows Vista file backup.

I just need to find a 7506-8 RAID card for a decent price... every time I don't bid, they sell for around $25, but if I bid, they push $100 sometimes

Use the bid assistant....

Serverworks ServerSet III LE
So may be a DMA issue, that can cause high util, but you be getting much worse throughput.
I'd change around the PCI slots you're using. and could be something wacky with the NIC and the board.. most likely... ( a broadcom NIC would be advisable for that board, and yes they rock with NL)
If you can move a very large file between drives using the SHARE and it's very low CPU load... it's the NIC.

...just throwing something out here...

R

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