Re: NAS system

[Johan A. van Zanten <johan%giantfoo.org@localhost>]

Brad du Plessis <bradd%cat.co.za@localhost> wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I was just wanting to find out if anyone can give advice about using NAS 
> systems with a NetBSD based system as a client. I'm also looking for 
> information about what NAS systems have been tried and tested with NetBSD.


 I use an Infrant (now Netgear) ReadyNAS NV+ with my NetBSD machines, and
a Mac OS X machine.

 With an older version of their OS, "RAIDiator," 3.x, there was a problem
with NFS locking.  It's been fixed in the 4x release, which i think is
current shipping. RAIDiator is based on Linux.

 The problem was actually in some badly-written rpc code in an older
rev. of the Linux 2.4 kernel, which i mentioned because there may be some
other NAS devices out there based on the 2.4 Linux kernel, and it took me
some time to figure out why vi kept hanging.  (Older revs of FreeBSD and
OS X also had similar problems.) the 4.x rev of RAIDiator uses the 2.6
Linux kernel, IIRC.

 I like the ReadyNAS NV+ pretty well, but it's a bit slow with four SATA
drives.  I get about 20MB/sec. read but only about 5 MB/sec. writes.  (The
bottleneck is CPU.)  I'm not using Jumbo frames, but i am using gigabit
Ethernet and have increased the Read and Write sizes.

Web management with CLI (ssh) access.  I'd be 100% happy with it, except
for the low write throughput.  For the price i paid (~$500 US, no drives)
it was a good deal.

Initial setup may require OS X, Windows, or a Linux box.

 -johan