NASLite Network Attached Storage

I recently downloaded my copy of Naslite+ and created the CD and floppy with no problems. I bought a couple of Western Digital drives off of a friend of mine and was going to install them into a older dual-processor PII machine I have. I tested Naslite using the old drive that was in the machine and everything seems to work.

So, on to my questions....

Maybe I missed this somewhere in the documentation or it may be I simply am not understanding it correctly. It is my understanding that if you can set your BIOS to boot from the CD you can have up to 4 hard drives. My question is my board has 2 IDE channels allowing 4 IDE drives. If 2 are going to my new hd's and one is being used by the CD that leaves 1 available for another hard drive, which gives me a total of 3 hard drives. How do I get the fourth??

My other question, the motherboard in this server has a network RJ-45 connector built onto it. It is only capable of 10/100 however and my network is gigabit cabable. The motherboard has PCI slots and I can install a PCI NIC card, but how do I get the drivers to load so the card is configured correctly??

I thank everyone in advance for any help they can provide.

If you're using the CD version of NASLite+ you can only have 3 hard drives. With the USB version you can have 4.

If you install a gigabit ethernet card NASLite will detect it and use it's built in drivers for it. I installed a Netgear GA311 gigabit card, and when NASLite+ booted up it detected it and loaded it's internal drivers for the chipset used on the card. You don't need to load any vendor drivers. Check the NASLite docs or search the forum to see what ethernet cards worked for people and what ones didn't. Not all the gigabit cards work because NASLite doesn't have drivers for all chip sets, just the ones linux supports.

Make sure you turn off the built in ethernet in the BIOS though, or NASLite may use that instead. Your configuration information (IP address) should automatically switch to the new ethernet card, so you won't have to enter it again.

Thanks for the quick reply.

I kind of figured that I would only be able to use 3 drives, I just wanted to make sure. This is an old Intel motherboard but it does have a SCSI controller on the board. I think I will just install one of the SCSI CD ROM's I have laying around to use as my boot drive which will free up the 4th IDE slot.

I looked through the BIOS and did not see any way to disable the onboard LAN. I don't know if there is anyway to disable that port so that Naslite will recognize the Gigabit adapter.

By the way, I got everything hooked up and running, no problems at all (other than the LAN issue) Naslite saw both drives and recognized them fine after formatting. After setting the I.P. all the other computers on the network see the Naslite Server fine

ANy thoughts on how to disable the onboard LAN would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks again

My NASbox motherboard also has an onboard LAN, but I fitted the Netgear GA311, it's an MSI motherboard and I think you just disable it in the bios under intergrated peripherals I can't remember if I disabled it or not, but if you can find the option then disable it, as you should with any other onboard stuff you won't use such as sound etc.

Good Luck

Didn't I read on this forum that you could load the software onto one harddrive and boot off of it? If so could'nt you also load your Gigabit drivers on it? I plan to load onto a Harddrive so that I do not have to have a CD Rom in my NAS.

I had the same issues:

1. Wanted to add a fourth HD
2. Bios could not boot from USB
3. SCSI Bios boot did not work from an addon SCSI card I had.

Reading through the forums I came upon the topic of getting NASLite+ to boot from a HD. This inspired me to some more research and I found the topic on creating a USB drive and puting NASLite+ onto that.

Using the kicker disk method, I now have 4 HDs in my NASLite box. It does mean that when I start NASLite+ I have to switch the kicker disk with the configuration disk while NASLite+ loads from the USB drive. There is enough time to do this (i even do this with no screen or keyboard attached). I only need to do this if I change disks, which is not often, since my NASLite box runs 24/7

Thanks for a great product and forum. Looking forward to V2!!

Herkaun, You should be able to store config info on the kicker disk. Once NASLite has loaded using your current method, put the kicker floppy in and save configuration. Next time you boot it shouldn't need to switch disks. Make sure you make a copy of the kicker disk first, justs in case this messes it up.

RonRock, Since I wrote the instructions on how to boot off the hard drive I can answer your question What is put on the hard drive is the NASLite program and a small program to start the NASLite kernel. NASLite would still use it's own drivers for ethernet.

smeyer,

Thanks for the idea. I have tried several different ways to see if your idea will work, but have not been successful. Everytime I save the configuration, the kicker disk will not work anymore. It stops at loading DOS (drive light stays on, but nothing happens).

I even started from scratch. Entered the license #, IP address etc., but as soon as I save (the floppy light does light up) and reboot, it stops.
I also tried to save the current configuration to a new floppy, but when I look at the disk, there are no files on it. It is as if the NASLite+ on a USB doesn't realy write the config file. Am I missing something here? I use the config disk that was created while I still used the CDROM.

For now I will be using the "swapping" method, and when Ver2 appears, I will get the real USB deal.

Thanks again for your great input.

I believe NASLite writes it's configuration info in one of the first few sectors of the floppy. These are reserved for boot info and directory info, but they are duplicated so NASLite uses some of that space. Because it writes directly to a given sector it doesn't tell DOS about the file so nothing shows up.

Your kicker disk probably is using the sector NASLite overwrites.

Have you tried going the other way. Take a disk with config info already on it and add the kicker disk files?

I am using the Iomega kicker that edeng supplied. It is the only one that actually sees my Sandisk Cruzer USB drive.

I will get some tools to see where the config is written and compare it to what's on the kicker disk in that spot. It does seem that writing the config is corrupting part of DOS, because that is where it is hanging. I will spend some time this weekend to see if I can find a way to "marry" the two.

I took an entirely different approach to getting all four IDE channels available for using with Hard Drives.

Installed an Adaptec SCSI controller card in an available PCI slot.
Connected an SCSI CD-ROM

Set up the controller so it looks for a bootable disc in the drive.

The controller will map the bootable CD as drive A: and remap the existing floppy drive as drive B:

NASLite has no problem finding the config floppy mapped to drive B:

With a little creative eBaying, you could find a drive and SCSI controller for $30-60 and it's a great option if your old hardware doesn't support booting from a USB device.

On my P3-733Mhz NASLite box, 128Mb memory installed, 4-200Gb HDs and using a 10/100 ethernet card, I have successfully sent MPEG4 video to five seperate machines with no visible lags or problems. The biggest performance boost came from setting up the Drives in the BIOS, and enabling the Ultra DMA 100MB/s performance options, which is only possible if your BIOS supports the size of your hard drive, and is not what the NASLite installation instructions tell you to do. The default installation will only give you 33MB/s. The Maxtors are rated at up to 133MB/s, so I get the maximum throughput that the mainboard can deliver. I found a case that had room for 5 full size drive bays. The CD-ROM is hard mounted and the four HDs are in removable trays.

Not bad at all.

In fact, I liked the way the NASLite server works so much, I set up a second server using Ubuntu Server which has a software based RAID 5 array on a bunch of matching SCSI HDs and 7 SCSI CD/DVD-ROMS to function identically to the way the NASLite server works (without HTTP, because I don't really need that for intranet use).

Another great way to use some old hardware!

DaveJ45

Hello DaveJ45:

Thanks for that useful info. You said "The biggest performance boost came from ... enabling the Ultra DMA 100MB/s performance options". Can you quantify the improvement with a comparison of the before/after read and write speeds (MB/sec) ?

Thanks.
Georg

Ultra DMA - 33MB/s - default speed
Ultra DMA - 66MB/s - 2X faster than default *
Ultra DMA - 100MB/s - 3x faster than default *
Ultra DMA - 133MB/s - 4X+ faster than default *

* - assuming you have drives capable of these speeds

The thing is, you don't want your mainboard, BIOS, and hardrives to be the bottleneck in your NASLite server. You want it running as fast as it can run, up to the limits of your Ethernet card.

Hello DaveJ45:

Sorry ... maybe my method of asking the question was unclear.

What I mean is, do you have (or could produce) a before/after comparison of actual real-time throughput performance, measuring (for example with DiskWriggler) how fast a file is transfered to and from the NASLite across a 100 or 1000 Mbit/s network ? (And by "before/after" I mean before and after changing the BIOS setting on your motherboard as you had reported in your original post.)

For an example, see "http://www.serverelements.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=220".

Thanks,
Georg

Sorry, I don't think I can help you on that one, simply because I have never done the type of diagnostics testing that would be required to be able to answer your question.

I only use a 10/100 Ethernet connection. At the current time I do not have any plans to go to gigabit, since I already have an extensive network built, and upgrading to gigabit would involve a considerable expense.

After fooling around with NASLite with some misc equipment, I built my actual server from the ground up to take advantage of the features previously discussed, so I've never run my server with the UltraDMA features at anything less than optimal performance levels.

I've never used diskwriggler to get an actual numerical value for transfer speeds.

I've always relied upon just opening up different workstations and requesting video streams from the NASLite server to test performance. As previously mentioned, my server will send 5 simultaneous streams without any noticeable problems. Anything more than 5 and I start to see lags in the video feeds.

Also note that the particular size and type of my video feeds may affect throughput. I typically save all video in 320x240 format, and let the workstation boost the picture to 640 x 480 internally. All of my video files are processed using VirtualDub before storage to maximize the sharpness and clarity to enable the workstations to convert up to a double size image with an acceptable picture quality while minimizing the actual disk space needed to store each file.

I assume if you were sending full size HD video feeds, your throughput would be negatively affected, since you would be transferring a significantly larger amount of data with each feed.