NAS/Storage Megathread: What is this "File Deletion" You Speak of

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > NAS/Storage Megathread: What is this "File Deletion" You Speak of

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Longinus00: Dec 29, 2005; Ur-Quan

Fangs404 posted:

Oh, I totally misunderstood what you're saying. arcstat.py is showing my ARC usage around 6gb, so I see what you mean. So while you definitely could run FreeNAS with less RAM, I imagine it's not recommended simply because the memory available for ARC will be much smaller, and performance will suffer as a result. The FreeNAS recommendation is probably to ensure that there is a "reasonable" amount of RAM available for ARC to improve performance.

Sometimes a larger ARC is not always better but admittedly those cases tend to be pretty specific. There are some great tools available for you to examine your ARC cache and see how well sized it is for your workload, google gave this as one of the first results and it looks pretty useful http://cuddletech.com/arc_summary/. For a home user who just wants to dump movies and music one their NAS I'd wager that a smallish ARC won't hurt much because the average time between hitting the same data is going to be huge (in some cases infinite if you only watch a particular movie once).

# ? May 2, 2012 07:38

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# ? May 10, 2024 21:02

forbidden dialectics: Jul 26, 2005

UndyingShadow posted:

You'd need bare metal VPN software, and I know there's a free version of VMWare that'll do it. You'll likely need a raid card that can be "passed through" to the FreeNAS vm as I don't think you can directly access storage volumes through VMware. Also, I don't know why you'd need a 4 port NIC, 2 should be enough.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding this but I was intending to have FreeNAS be the "host" OS and running the VM on top of it so I could use ZFS. Is this stupid/impossible? I'm assuming since you can install VirtualBox on FreeBSD you can install it on FreeNAS. I'm aware this throws the "boot from a thumb drive" proposition out the window, but since I was intending to also use it for SABNzb and Sickbeard I was going to need an OS drive anyways.

# ? May 2, 2012 08:08

Froist: Jun 6, 2004

Thanks for all the pointers guys. I think I'm going to stick with Ubuntu rather than FreeBSD as I know it better. I did some reading on the ZFS-on-Linux newsgroup and lots of people seemed to be praising its state, saying they're on the verge of putting it into production.

titaniumone posted:

2GB of ram is not enough for a functional ZFS system. Your performance will be bad, and if you're unlucky, you may experience kernel panics.

Hmm. UK memory prices don't seem to be quite as cheap as USA at the moment (especially for ECC), but I think I'll grab a 4GB stick to put in the other slot, taking it up to 6GB. If that still turns out to be a limiting factor down the line I can always get another 4GB to max the system out. It's below the "1TB == 1GB" discussed here, but should be a whole load better than just 2GB.

Wheelchair Stunts posted:

Oh, man. You don't have to use fuse! Check this out. Especially since you use Ubunut, it even has its own little PPA setup. Performance was a lot better for me through this than fuse.

Yeah, before you posted this I decided to do some tests with two old mismatched drives I had lying around. I'm thinking the actual performance might increase with my 'real' drives, but it should be a fair comparison between the two methods.

With Fuse I was getting 33MB/s write and 54MB/s read, with it consuming almost all of my memory (leaving 77MB free). With the ZFS-on-Linux setup I got 98MB/s write and 148MB/s read, leaving about 230MB free memory. This was dd-ing a 10GB file from /dev/zero and to /dev/null. I thought it would be more fiddly to set up, but having tried it it's definitely worth it.

Final question..

The two drives I used for my test were 500GB and 320GB. I initialised the zpool with the command:

code:

sudo zpool create -f mypool -m /storage raidz /dev/sda /dev/sdb

I know 2 drives doesn't really constitute raidz, I'm planning to use 4 of the same size for real. However, my understanding was that in this configuration I should have a pool with a capacity of 320GB, based on the smallest drive. When I run "zfs list" I get:

code:

NAME     USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT
mypool  10.0G   740G  10.0G  /storage

Why is the pool showing up as 750GB capacity, have I done something wrong here? This is how my pool shows up:

code:

sudo zpool status
  pool: mypool
 state: ONLINE
 scan: none requested
config:

	NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
	mypool      ONLINE       0     0     0
	  sda       ONLINE       0     0     0
	  sdb       ONLINE       0     0     0

# ? May 2, 2012 11:53

Leb: Jan 15, 2004; Change came to America on November the 4th, 2008, in the form of an unassuming Senator from the state of Illinois.

Froist posted:

This is how my pool shows up:

You're just striping two drives together, without any redundancy.

Either add the disks as a mirror or add a 3rd or 4th disk to achieve raidz1.

# ? May 2, 2012 12:52

Froist: Jun 6, 2004

Leb posted:

You're just striping two drives together, without any redundancy.

Either add the disks as a mirror or add a 3rd or 4th disk to achieve raidz1.

Ah, thanks. So when I set it up with 4 disks for real, that 'create' command will automatically add redundancy?

# ? May 2, 2012 13:13

FISHMANPET: Mar 3, 2007; Sweet 'N Sour
Can't
Melt
Steel Beams

Froist posted:

Ah, thanks. So when I set it up with 4 disks for real, that 'create' command will automatically add redundancy?

No, you need to specify what redundancy you want. If you don't specify anything you get a stripe. I don't remember the exact commands, but I think it's something like zpool create poolname raidz dev1 dev2 dev3 dev4

# ? May 2, 2012 14:17

Froist: Jun 6, 2004

FISHMANPET posted:

No, you need to specify what redundancy you want. If you don't specify anything you get a stripe. I don't remember the exact commands, but I think it's something like zpool create poolname raidz dev1 dev2 dev3 dev4

Yeah, sorry, I meant the 'create' command in my earlier post that included 'raidz'. I guess it just didn't add redundancy in my test case because I didn't include enough disks.

Thanks for all the help guys, I'll stop crapping up the thread with inane questions now

# ? May 2, 2012 14:50

FISHMANPET: Mar 3, 2007; Sweet 'N Sour
Can't
Melt
Steel Beams

Froist posted:

Yeah, sorry, I meant the 'create' command in my earlier post that included 'raidz'. I guess it just didn't add redundancy in my test case because I didn't include enough disks.

Thanks for all the help guys, I'll stop crapping up the thread with inane questions now

Whoops, totally didn't see that.

If you want to do some testing make some empty files (not sure if you can make sparse files on Linux or not) and use those to make a pool.

# ? May 2, 2012 14:59

UndyingShadow: May 15, 2006; You're looking ESPECIALLY shadowy this evening, Sir

Nostrum posted:

Maybe I'm misunderstanding this but I was intending to have FreeNAS be the "host" OS and running the VM on top of it so I could use ZFS. Is this stupid/impossible? I'm assuming since you can install VirtualBox on FreeBSD you can install it on FreeNAS. I'm aware this throws the "boot from a thumb drive" proposition out the window, but since I was intending to also use it for SABNzb and Sickbeard I was going to need an OS drive anyways.

Freenas is designed to be as appliance like as possible, which means that if you install the FreeNAS image on a larger hard drive, it just won't see any of the space past 2 gig. I have no idea what would be involved in running the VM on top of FreeNAS, but it really really wasn't designed to be used this way, and since the FreeNAS support forums are all but useless for even basic things, I bet configuring it and getting it working would be a nightmare.

# ? May 2, 2012 17:13

IT Guy: Jan 12, 2010; You people drink like you don't want to live!

gently caress.

So that lovely USB Flash Drive I bought for FreeNAS is hosed. Windows won't recognize it, nothing. So, like an idiot, I never backed up the settings. What's the process of fixing things now? Can I just reinstall FreeNAS to a new USB key and reconfigure it and import my ZFS pool?

# ? May 2, 2012 18:45

Factory Factory: Mar 19, 2010; This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.

Yeah. You may need to use the force switch to import the pool if the system crashed rather than shut down cleanly, but otherwise it'll be fine.

So zpool import -f tank from a terminal and that's that, where tank is your pool name.

# ? May 2, 2012 19:08

IT Guy: Jan 12, 2010; You people drink like you don't want to live!

Factory Factory posted:

Yeah. You may need to use the force switch to import the pool if the system crashed rather than shut down cleanly, but otherwise it'll be fine.

So zpool import -f tank from a terminal and that's that, where tank is your pool name.

Great, that was incredibly easy, thanks.

# ? May 2, 2012 19:14

forbidden dialectics: Jul 26, 2005

UndyingShadow posted:

Freenas is designed to be as appliance like as possible, which means that if you install the FreeNAS image on a larger hard drive, it just won't see any of the space past 2 gig. I have no idea what would be involved in running the VM on top of FreeNAS, but it really really wasn't designed to be used this way, and since the FreeNAS support forums are all but useless for even basic things, I bet configuring it and getting it working would be a nightmare.

So looks like I'm after more of a general purpose server then. The secondary purpose is of course to learn (by doing) FreeBSD/Networking/VM. Thanks for your input!

# ? May 2, 2012 20:26

evilhacker: Feb 27, 2011

Do you need to have all of your drives when you create your ZFS volume or is there a way to migrate from a single drive to a mirror to a zRaid?

# ? May 2, 2012 21:02

Factory Factory: Mar 19, 2010; This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.

Someone might have a better answer, but if you have sufficient overflow storage (like moving 500 GB of stuff to 3x2TB disks), then you create a sparse dummy disk as a file on a non-array drive, then make a ZFS pool using that file, then copy your data, then replace the fake disk file with the final real disk and let the pool rebuild from degraded.

Here's a discussion thread on doing that with instructions.

# ? May 2, 2012 21:12

Froist: Jun 6, 2004

evilhacker posted:

Do you need to have all of your drives when you create your ZFS volume or is there a way to migrate from a single drive to a mirror to a zRaid?

I saw a page today where someone described expanding from a 2 drive mirror up to a 4 drive raid-z. It definitely sounded a bit sketchy but he said it worked. I can't find the link now, it's on my work PC's history, but I'll look it up tomorrow.

# ? May 2, 2012 21:18

Moey: Oct 22, 2010; I LIKE TO MOVE IT

bob arctor posted:

I ask from time to time about this. I'm looking at picking an 859 or 879 as an iSCSI device to store backups of VM's to however I have't actually talked to anyone who has used one with ESXi. My plan is to run the actual machines on DAS on the servers (SAS drives on Dell R610s) but figure out a good backup system that I can dump a nightly copy of the critical servers to the NAS and that way be able to recover pretty quickly if need be.

I don't really know how much better the x79 is than the x59 is in terms of features and performance, but that low end virtualization thing is a pain to navigate.

Come post in the VM megathread. I have a pretty small environment (6 hosts in 2 clusters) and have 4 QNAP 809 and one 1079 with 10gbe (I am just currently setting up the 1079).

# ? May 2, 2012 21:59

IT Guy: Jan 12, 2010; You people drink like you don't want to live!

Does anyone have any experience throwing a low profile HDMI video card in an N40L and using it as a HTPC? Will the CPU do 1080p playback?

# ? May 2, 2012 23:10

IOwnCalculus: Apr 2, 2003

If you're putting a video card in it, you should get one that supports decoding so that the CPU doesn't matter at all.

# ? May 2, 2012 23:26

IT Guy: Jan 12, 2010; You people drink like you don't want to live!

IOwnCalculus posted:

If you're putting a video card in it, you should get one that supports decoding so that the CPU doesn't matter at all.

Hmm, I'm not really up to date on the latest video cards, I guess I'll look around or ask in the hardware thread for a good one.

# ? May 2, 2012 23:32

Minty Swagger: Sep 8, 2005; Ribbit Ribbit Real Good

IT Guy posted:

Does anyone have any experience throwing a low profile HDMI video card in an N40L and using it as a HTPC? Will the CPU do 1080p playback?

Lots of people are doing it yes. The CPU wont be able to handle it, but the right video card with offloading can no problem. check out the HTPC thread, it gets brought up all the time.

# ? May 2, 2012 23:34

IT Guy: Jan 12, 2010; You people drink like you don't want to live!

BotchedLobotomy posted:

Lots of people are doing it yes. The CPU wont be able to handle it, but the right video card with offloading can no problem. check out the HTPC thread, it gets brought up all the time.

Will do, thanks.

# ? May 2, 2012 23:39

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Fangs404 posted:

I have no idea how Oracle deploys its technology, but it's certainly not unheard of for enterprise servers to have 128gb+ RAM. A server with 128TB hard drive space and 128GB of RAM isn't far-fetched at all.

Great, I have servers with 384GB of RAM, which we paid tens of thousands of dollars for the RAM in a single server 3 years ago. That has no relevance to ZFS, which simply doesn't require 1GB of RAM per TB of storage. In fact, I remember when dedupe was first implemented, and the suggestion was that until it is optimized they recommended 1GB of RAM per TB if deduping. I currently run a small 3TB ZFS NAS with 1GB of RAM, and it performs adequately. I will concede that it is possible the freebsd implementation of ZFS requires more RAM than the Solaris implementation, which is all I have experience with.

# ? May 2, 2012 23:41

Galler: Jan 28, 2008

IT Guy posted:

Great, that was incredibly easy, thanks.

I really, really love this about ZFS. If something gets hosed in the OS or I lose the system drive or whatever just being able to reinstall and import and have everything be happy is great.

# ? May 3, 2012 00:47

evil_bunnY: Apr 2, 2003

Every time I think of what it'd take using legacy Linux software raid tools I cringe a little.

# ? May 3, 2012 02:30

Froist: Jun 6, 2004

evilhacker posted:

Do you need to have all of your drives when you create your ZFS volume or is there a way to migrate from a single drive to a mirror to a zRaid?

Froist posted:

I saw a page today where someone described expanding from a 2 drive mirror up to a 4 drive raid-z. It definitely sounded a bit sketchy but he said it worked. I can't find the link now, it's on my work PC's history, but I'll look it up tomorrow.

Here's the page I was thinking of: http://unix4lyfe.org/zpool/

# ? May 3, 2012 15:14

DEAD MAN'S SHOE: Nov 23, 2003; We will become evil and the stars will come alive

evil_bunnY posted:

Every time I think of what it'd take using legacy Linux software raid tools I cringe a little.

Really? With software raid on linux all I need to do is point the installation process to use the existing array. It takes no more time than a normal re-install. Goes without saying that you should have a separate system drive, it's pretty much rule number 1. Lose a drive, discover SMART errors or whatever? Pop it out, pop another in, and tell it to rebuild. That's it.

# ? May 3, 2012 15:14

titaniumone: Jun 10, 2001

Earlier in the thread someone brought up aggregating network ports. I ended up buying an Intel Quad Port PCI-E 4x card for my server. A little bit of configuration in FreeBSD and on my Cisco switch, and now:

code:

leviathan# ifconfig lagg0
lagg0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
        options=19b<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING,VLAN_HWCSUM,TSO4>
        ether 00:15:17:36:67:20
        inet 10.0.0.3 netmask 0xff000000 broadcast 10.255.255.255
        nd6 options=29<PERFORMNUD,IFDISABLED,AUTO_LINKLOCAL>
        media: Ethernet autoselect
        status: active
        laggproto lacp
        laggport: em3 flags=1c<ACTIVE,COLLECTING,DISTRIBUTING>
        laggport: em2 flags=1c<ACTIVE,COLLECTING,DISTRIBUTING>
        laggport: em1 flags=1c<ACTIVE,COLLECTING,DISTRIBUTING>
        laggport: em0 flags=1c<ACTIVE,COLLECTING,DISTRIBUTING>

4Gb link to my home fileserver, suckas :smug:

# ? May 3, 2012 19:19

IT Guy: Jan 12, 2010; You people drink like you don't want to live!

titaniumone posted:

code:

leviathan# ifconfig lagg0
lagg0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
        options=19b<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING,VLAN_HWCSUM,TSO4>
        ether 00:15:17:36:67:20
        inet 10.0.0.3 netmask 0xff000000 broadcast 10.255.255.255
        nd6 options=29<PERFORMNUD,IFDISABLED,AUTO_LINKLOCAL>
        media: Ethernet autoselect
        status: active
        laggproto lacp
        laggport: em3 flags=1c<ACTIVE,COLLECTING,DISTRIBUTING>
        laggport: em2 flags=1c<ACTIVE,COLLECTING,DISTRIBUTING>
        laggport: em1 flags=1c<ACTIVE,COLLECTING,DISTRIBUTING>
        laggport: em0 flags=1c<ACTIVE,COLLECTING,DISTRIBUTING>

4Gb link to my home fileserver, suckas :smug:

Did the NIC cost more than the N40L itself?

# ? May 3, 2012 19:35

Factory Factory: Mar 19, 2010; This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.

Do you have any system with more than 1 Gbps of bandwidth to link to the server? Do you have four 1 Gbps systems which will be operating at full load simultaneously?

# ? May 3, 2012 19:43

titaniumone: Jun 10, 2001

IT Guy posted:

Did the NIC cost more than the N40L itself?

I'm not using an N40L.

Factory Factory posted:

Do you have any system with more than 1 Gbps of bandwidth to link to the server? Do you have four 1 Gbps systems which will be operating at full load simultaneously?

No, I only have a single client which accesses the server over 802.11b and I bought a quad port adapter because I am literally A Retarded Person.

_{I have multiple 1Gb clients which will occasionally be reading/writing at full load while other clients are attempting to stream HD video and it sucks for everyone involved. This solves that problem.}

titaniumone fucked around with this message at 19:49 on May 3, 2012

# ? May 3, 2012 19:43

IT Guy: Jan 12, 2010; You people drink like you don't want to live!

titaniumone posted:

I'm not using an N40L.

My bad.

But I imagine that NIC cost a pretty penny?

# ? May 3, 2012 19:48

evil_bunnY: Apr 2, 2003

titaniumone posted:

4Gb link to my home fileserver, suckas

Still pushing 1gb streams though.

titaniumone posted:

_{I have multiple 1Gb clients which will occasionally be reading/writing at full load while other clients are attempting to stream HD video and it sucks for everyone involved. This solves that problem.}

# ? May 3, 2012 19:54

IT Guy: Jan 12, 2010; You people drink like you don't want to live!

evil_bunnY posted:

Still pushing 1gb streams though.

Maybe this is a dumb question, I really don't have too much experience with LACP...

If you have a LAGGed endpoint and a LAGGed server, I understand that a single stream is still limited to 1Gbps, but what happens if you were to open a second transfer on the same endpoint, would you see the benefits of LACP?

# ? May 3, 2012 19:58

Moey: Oct 22, 2010; I LIKE TO MOVE IT

IT Guy posted:

But I imagine that NIC cost a pretty penny?

Normally like $400ish. I was able to get a free one from work though. Currently have it in my mini ESXi host that I am building.

# ? May 3, 2012 20:00

titaniumone: Jun 10, 2001

IT Guy posted:

My bad.

But I imagine that NIC cost a pretty penny?

eBay. $100

# ? May 3, 2012 21:05

movax: Aug 30, 2008

titaniumone posted:

eBay. $100

Yeah, I think I got a HP-rebranded one awhile ago for very cheap as well. PCIe 2.0 x4 card, right?

# ? May 3, 2012 23:12

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

IT Guy posted:

Maybe this is a dumb question, I really don't have too much experience with LACP...

If you have a LAGGed endpoint and a LAGGed server, I understand that a single stream is still limited to 1Gbps, but what happens if you were to open a second transfer on the same endpoint, would you see the benefits of LACP?

Depends on the method used for load balancing. Typically, MAC hash is used by default, so no.

# ? May 3, 2012 23:12

Sombrero!: Sep 11, 2001

N40L goons: Anyone know what socket processor the motherboard takes? Reason I ask is that I've got an AM3 Athlon II quad-core sitting around not being used that I'd love to plug in if it's compatible. Should I even bother looking into this or just stick with the crappy (in comparison) Turion?

# ? May 4, 2012 04:58

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# ? May 10, 2024 21:02

thebigcow: Jan 3, 2001; Bully!

Sombrero! posted:

N40L goons: Anyone know what socket processor the motherboard takes? Reason I ask is that I've got an AM3 Athlon II quad-core sitting around not being used that I'd love to plug in if it's compatible. Should I even bother looking into this or just stick with the crappy (in comparison) Turion?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socket_S1

# ? May 4, 2012 05:42

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > NAS/Storage Megathread: What is this "File Deletion" You Speak of

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