TuxRunner

I’ve been noticing that there’s a bit of a performance issue with the new setup (Drobo on a Linux box using NTFS filesystem).  I guess I’m not completely shocked.  I mean, I am basically making a Linux box work with a Windows filesystem, and then also present it as a Windows share on the network (via Samba).  There’s bound to be some tweaking that has to occur.

So far the real bottleneck appears to be related to the NTFS-3G module that facilitates the communication between Linux and the NTFS filesystem on my Drobo.  The wife tried to copy 26 GB of video files over the network to the Drobo, and when I checked “top” on the server, there’s a “mount.ntfs-3g” process that was soaking up 88% CPU, and my load average was about 1.4 – 1.6 (on a dual proc system). (continue reading…)

Wow, did I have a heck of a time nailing down a solution to get my Drobo to work in Linux and still meet all my requirements.  It previously was on a Windows 2003 server, but since I’m a Unix guy now…that doesn’t make sense anymore.  So I wanted to move it over to Linux, but I had to have a few conditions met:

1. The file system format had to be something that I could easily still move to a Windows box, and plug it in and it would work.  This is just in case my Linux box blows up, and the wife still needs access to the files on her Vista PC.  That limits me to FAT32 nd NTFS.
2. The front lights still need to work.  I’ve read that with EXT3 on the Drobo, it can’t properly evaluate drivespace use.  If you put data on, and the use lights go up…then you delete, the lights don’t change.
3. It needed to be able to be mounted into the filesystem and used with Samba without much difficulty.

(continue reading…)