NFS vs iSCSI

English Network/Internet
1

Okay so heres what I’m trying to do:
I’m setting up a shiny new openSUSE 11.1 home server. I have 3 drives/raids. 2.7TB RAID5, 300GB RAID1, 80GB drive.

2.7TB will be my media & web server that I would like some directories to have read access to all via http, but would like to keep the music and videos accessible only to us.

300GB will be pictures, and personal stuff, I would like to be highly secure, but anyone on the LAN/family can have access to it, and able to auto mounted/connected to with Mac Os X 10.4.

80GB special storage, password protected not auto mounted no access by the kids:sarcastic:

Anyway, just playing around with yast and kinda digging my way into Linux, or at least SUSE, I got NFS running. The first problem I had was getting Mac OS X to connect to it. After a bit of reading I found that I needed to add “insecure” to the share listing on my /etc/exports file. So I had a line:

# /srv 192.168.0.1/24(rw,insecure)

After that I was able to connect with Mac OS easy. Then I had a new issue. Even though I used “rw”, I still didn’t have write access from the Mac OS comp. As a means of testing I did

# chmod 777 /srv

the second I did that I was able to transfer files over like lighting.:slight_smile:

Anyway to start cutting down an overly long post, that for the most part is my project. I haven’t looked to much at iSCSI. I guess I’m looking to make some users or groups. Any tips or input on iSCSI vs NFS would be helpful. I’m coming from OS X Server that was like all super easy 100% gui users/groups for each file/directory/service, but my copy is getting out of date, I’m not about to drop another 1k into a new copy, and I want to run mythbackend anyway.

Thank you for your time

2

On Tue, 2009-02-24 at 04:26 +0000, MrVining wrote:
…
> Anyway to start cutting down an overly long post, that for the most
> part is my project. I haven’t looked to much at iSCSI. I guess I’m
> looking to make some users or groups. Any tips or input on iSCSI vs NFS
> would be helpful. I’m coming from OS X Server that was like all super
> easy 100% gui users/groups for each file/directory/service, but my copy
> is getting out of date, I’m not about to drop another 1k into a new
> copy, and I want to run mythbackend anyway.

SAN is primarily used to hand out DRIVES for independent and unique
use by a particular host. The LUNs given out by a SAN should be viewed
no different from a SATA cable connected directly to a new drive.

So… in general, because of state information, you just can’t connect
a singular drive to multiple machines, even in a read only case (well,
you might be able to get away with that in some cases).

This is the beauty of protocols like NFS and SMB. That extra
layer of abstraction allows for multiple machine to use the storage
resource (though lacking consistency… what I see may not always
be what you see).

If you need everyone to be able to always see the same view of data,
then you end up with a clustered filesystem scenario. Then you could
use SAN and have the same LUN (drive) connected to multiple machines
and the clustered filesystem would handle keeping everyone involved
“in the know” with regards to the space.

iSCSI, depending on how it is configured, should be faster than NFS
in most all cases. Can be significantly faster.

NFS is vastly more flexible though.

Even 1Gbit NFS is about normal direct HD speed… but with SAN,
you can push things a LOT faster (if that’s interesting). You’ll have
more fun with NFS (NAS)… and I recommend that unless you are prepared
to handle the cost of setup and the risks inherent to a SAN
architecture.

We do both here… and both are necessary for us.