local networking btw PBook and Linux server
Hi. I have a huge amount (1 TB) of files to copy from HFS+ formatted external drives to a linux server. I don't want to mess with the kernel so I can't install the beta HFS+ drivers that would allow me to plug the drive right into the server.
So okay, I'll just copy over the network. Except I only have an Airport Extreme. The server is plugged into the one ethernet port and is pulling a static IP (10.0.1.201). The PowerBook is connected over 802.11b (that's all I got) to the Airport Extreme using DHCP.
This is giving me around 300 KB/sec. That's about 1 GB/hour! (I think.) Obviously it won't work this way.
What are my options? Obviously buy another router with more ports. But I'd rather not do that.
Is there any way to just ethernet the PowerBook right to the server. I tried just plugging it in and connecting to 10.0.1.201 from the PowerBook but it won't connect. Any idea how I could make that work without a router or switch?
I guess this is probably more of a Linux question than a Mac OS X question but maybe someone can help. Thanks.
So okay, I'll just copy over the network. Except I only have an Airport Extreme. The server is plugged into the one ethernet port and is pulling a static IP (10.0.1.201). The PowerBook is connected over 802.11b (that's all I got) to the Airport Extreme using DHCP.
This is giving me around 300 KB/sec. That's about 1 GB/hour! (I think.) Obviously it won't work this way.
What are my options? Obviously buy another router with more ports. But I'd rather not do that.
Is there any way to just ethernet the PowerBook right to the server. I tried just plugging it in and connecting to 10.0.1.201 from the PowerBook but it won't connect. Any idea how I could make that work without a router or switch?
I guess this is probably more of a Linux question than a Mac OS X question but maybe someone can help. Thanks.
Comments
I also am curious about the 300 KB/sec. Shouldn't I get more than this? I didn't expect to get the full 10 Mb/sec, but that isn't even close (~2.4 Mb/sec). Does that seem right? I guess it really doesn't matter, since even if I could triple the speed we're still talking about over 300 hours for the copy. Obviously I need gigabit speed. But I'm just curious about the throughput. Is 2.4 Mb/sec about what you would expect copy over an 802.11b link on a LAN?
I am using SFTP. Maybe the encryption is slowing it down?
apt-get install kernel_driver
and
apt-get uninstall kernel_driver
and you're done.
It may not be what you want, but I'm sure it won't mess up your kernel.
There are fairly stable HFS+ drivers for Linux so there's no need to actually waste time waiting for the network to transfer such huge amounts of data. Plug'n'Play.
But I've been hit again on the second leg. My next copy is 400 GB off an NTFS formatted drive. NTFS is not supported in the kernel though. And what I've been reading makes it seem like I need to install a whole other kernel to get it to work. I would have thought NTFS would be supported (at least read only) before HFS+. Strange.
So I mounted the NTFS drive on the Mac, and then (as someone suggested above) directly connected the machines with an ethernet cable. Got that to work, but my transfer speed was the same as using 802.11b from the Mac to the router (and ethernet from the router to the server): about 300 KB/sec.
Is that really all I can get? I guess the external drive is the limiting factor? In this case it is a LaCie 500 GB (2 x 250 in RAID-0) connected over 400 Mb/sec FireWire. Shouldn't I get more than 300 KB/sec from that?
Does anyone agree/disagree with my hypothesis that the drive is the bottleneck. If that is the case then copying to another (say FAT32) external drive as suggested above (and then just walking that over to the server and plugging it in to USB) won't be faster either (since I imagine the NTFS to FAT32 copy is still only going to get 300 KB/sec.)
Or am I missing something? I hope I am. At this rate I am looking at 15 days to copy!!!
If that is the case, perhaps transferring it as a disk image would be the answer.
But okay, maybe I'm being really stupid. Is SFTP orders of magnitude slower than FTP? I know it must be slower in some way, but I just can't believe that I'm CPU bound. The Mac isn't so fast, so maybe that is it, but the Linux box (dual Opteron) shouldn't be having trouble with this.
I guess I should experiment with that though. I'll report back. Thanks for the help guys.
What isn't there, by default, is write capability which can be enabled by using a third-party driver, but it's very unstable and can probably cause problems to you.
Sorry this strayed OT for this board but I appreciate everyone's help. Turned out CentOS like RHEL doesn't even support read for NTFS in the kernel. I think most other linux distros do. But it was just a simple one line install of an alternate kernel and it is activated.
Still takes a long time to copy hundreds of gigs no matter how you slice it. More time for me to read AI and the like I guess.