*sigh*

[andrewducker]

I have a new NAS box. I am currently copying over the files from the old NAS box. They both have gigabit ethernet connections, but sadly the switch they are plugged into is only 100MBit.

I started off copying the files from Windows, using drag/drop, but this proved to be a little slow (I assume that it was copying the files from NAS1->PC->NAS2). So I found this guide which showed me how to SSH into NAS2, and then use smbclient to pull the files direct from NAS1.

Which seems to be getting about 10MB/s. Which is 80MBit, and so probably about as fast as the switch can usefully manage.

Now I just have to leave it for 12 hours while all 400Gig of videos copies over...

Comments

[zz]

your pc doesn't have 2 gigabit ethernet sockets by any chance...?

[andrewducker]

Sadly not.

Not sure how I'd jury-rig that one up either.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Aren't there a pile of tweaks to samba required to make the performance anything other than a bit grim?

(Crossover cable and scp?)

[andrewducker]

If I had a crossover cable, then I could possibly rig something up...

[dougs.livejournal.com]

Some more recent Ethernet ports auto-detect when you should have used a crossover cable, and do the crossover thing themselves. Might be worth a try.

[andrewducker]

The problem then, is having plugged the old and new NAS boxes into each other with a cable, how do I then connect to the new one and tell it to do things?

[hirez.livejournal.com]

[FX: Wil E. Coyote moment]

Ah. Good point.

[dougs.livejournal.com]

ah, I was thinking of two gigabit servers rather than two gigabit NAS boxes. And the last NAS box I played with had multiple Ethernet ports and SSH command-line login.

[andrewducker]

Yeah. Sadly, it's not that complex.

Although, actually, I boiught it because it was almost entirely self-managing. I wanted something I could just plug hard drives into, and it would just make them work together, while also doing bittorrent, dlna, etc. managed through a web interface. The thought of having to deal with the command line more than once a year fills me with horror :->

[call-waiting.livejournal.com]

On nas2:

% nohup
% (sleep 120; scp-or-smbclient-or-whatever-batch-copy)

Then disconnect the two NAS boxes from the switch, connect them to each other via the crossover (you have 120 seconds to do so. Change that number if you like ;)

Then wait for the lights to stop blinking.

[andrewducker]

That's almost tempting.

I suspect I'll just leave it running mget, and it should be finished by the time I wake up :->

[pete stevens (from livejournal.com)]

If they're how I remember you should be able to open them both up, pull a disk out of each and boot the new one up. SSH in and check that /proc/mdstat has an unhappy raid array. You should then be able to plug your old disk in, and do something like

mdadm --assemble /dev/md4 /dev/sdb1
mkdir /mnt/old
mount /dev/md4 /mnt/old
cp -a /mnt/old/

At this point you'll discover that the CPU maxes out at about 300Mbits as far as I recall but hey, taking things apart is Fun!

[andrewducker]

That's not a bad idea.

Except, if I remember correctly, the Terastation (old NAS) is formatted with xfs, and the ds411j is ext4. Oh, and the Terastation has 4 disks in it of 250Gig (in RAID5), while the new one has two disks of 2TB each (so far, I plan to expand it later).

Would that cause an issue?

[pete stevens (from livejournal.com)]

You'd want to run smartctl across your raid 5 array before pulling a disk to make very sure you don't have a sector error on any of your source disks or it'll all go horribly tits up. You'd also need to make sure the kernels have ext4 and xfs support when you copy. So there's a non trivial probability of it all going horribly wrong and deleting all your data. But hey, you've got backups :-)

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

dunno if it's any faster, but would robocopy make it any easier?

[andrewducker]

Nope, because I was already copying direct from Nas1->Nas2. Robocopy would mean the files went Nas1->Windows desktop->Nas2, and would therefore be slower.