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…)

I’ve done it the other way around many times. Get a Linux box to act like a Windows box using software like Samba, Wine, etc. But now I’ve been tasked at work with a project which puts me in the position of having to get LPR/LPD printing and SSH/SFTP working on a Windows box. Unix printing is at least somewhat built-in to Windows 2003 Server. You need to install it though, it’s an add-on. Once installed Windows should start listening on TCP 515 and you should be able to share out printers as LPD printers. But getting a SSH server which can also do SFTP or SCP installed isn’t quite as easy (well, provided you don’t invest in a commercial package and want to do this free with open-source software). My first attempt with to install a copy of Cygwin and get OpenSSH running. Had some issues with that and it was a little more trouble than I wanted…so I found a slimmed down version of OpenSSH for Windows that contained just enough of Cygwin to make it work. I’ve managed to get it working fully and I can use it just like any Linux box with SSHD on it, but for some reason the vendor I’m working with can’t connect…although they’re using a mainframe based SSH/SFTP application. I have no troubles with any command-line or GUI apps I use to connect but this mainframe app is just not cooperating at all. I knew I should’ve thrown this at our Unix team to work on. Ahh, well. It’s all good clean fun. Blurring the lines between the OSes. Woohoo!