Linux and the 10 connection Windows Limit

[bhchllc]

Thought I would take a minute to share a good solution to the +10-machine render farm limit imposed by XP/2000. Other than the price of Windows Server and CALS required, it is conceptually wack to install a huge, bloated OS to basically function as a simple file server for distributing texture maps and writing animation frames.

As a faster alternative to the painfully slow Buffalo style NAS devices, Linux is a great option but if you are anything like me, the learning curve is a little steep given most of us want to spend our time creatively, not as a system admin. We tested several distros but found a super simple Linux OS called NASLite2 (http://www.serverelements.com) which literally takes about 10 minutes to install and setup, only uses about 5 megs of space, almost no RAM and will run on just about any old piece of hardware you have. And it cost $30

We installed it on an old dual AthlonMP 1800 with a gig of ram, added a $300 6-port hardware Sata RAID card, a bunch of 400GB Sata drives in a RAID10 configuration and basically have 1.2 terrabyte FAST file server for what one of those Buffalo drive NAS things cost and it literally blows it out of the water in performance. Bechmarking it puts sequential reads at about 120MB/sec and sequential writes at about 80MB/sec. Fast enough to also serve project files, models, etc. to our small group of artists.

It is an excellent option I would recomend to anyone struggling with the BS 10-connection limit on their XP systems who don't need the expense or hastle of a full-blown server. Cheers.

[panthon]

A bunch of interesting ideas here. Thanks for sharing this info with us!
Im willing to try a linux distro one day!

[jujubee]

Cool. I'd be interested to see what other distros you tested.

Now, all we need is dongle authorization for Linux...

[Dynedain]

If your built machine is noticeably faster than the Buffalo NAS, then I suspect it's because of the chosen RAID configuration more than anything else.

[bhchllc]

The other distros we looked at was ClarkConnect which was terrific and easy to use and install but performed very poorly (20-30MB/sec). We tried Umbutu 6.06 but it became clear pretty fast it was more complicated to set up the Samba/Windows shares than we cared for, Openfiler 2.1 looked promising until we realized it will currently only run on a domain and needs a seperate authorization server (they are suppose to make it local in 2.2), freeNAS we couldn't get to install and is only beta anyway, seems like one more but can't think of it.

LOL on the Linux dongle, that would be sweet but NASLite is so minimal, it probably wouldn't support it. I'm setting up another "dog" PC to basically serve as a 24/7 Vray-Brazil license server which will also run the backburner manager. Probably will load this thing up with old hard drives and schedule it to run nightly backups of the primary file server as well.

As far as the speed, there are a few things "wrong" with the entry-level NAS boxes. Most only have 256M of ram and a little XSCALE processor in the 400-600Mhz range. They are also usually software raid implemetations, as I understand it, relying on that dinky cpu instead of dedicated hardware that acts in support your system CPUs for RAID functions. With harware RAID, the system CPU still handles IO request from the network and the RAID controller just handles the addition burden of striping/mirroring/etc. The one we tried was the Intel one which also supports RAID10 with the same exact hard drives and couldn't get much more than about 10-20MB/sec out of it. It was horrible just testing it out. the damn thing would have exploded in a multi-user environment.

The beauty of NASLite is it doesn't feel like an operating system, it literally installs and you set a few bios like options and bam, it just works. It is really more of an appliace OS optimized for file serving ONLY than a full OS distro. Once setup, you access the machine through a webbrowser to check on things. Uptime is suppose to be very good as well because it is just so damn simple, there is not much to go wrong - and it uses a Linux kernal. Wow, I am really dorking out today

[jujubee]

By any chance have you tried installing printer drivers on NASlite?

[bhchllc]

By any chance have you tried installing printer drivers on NASlite?

It won't work, just a file server - NAS. ClarkConnect was much more fully featured, including gateway and print services, access groups, etc. but we just couldn't get the performace we needed out of it, which was disappointing becuase it was very nice. I am certainly not suggesting NASLite is a full-featured server OS, just a super simple and fast way of sharing data between many machines for people who aren't familiar enough with Linux to feel comfortable with a full-blown Linux distro.

[jujubee]

Not sure if you're still around BHC - but if you are, how are you measuring those read/write drive speeds on your NAS?

I'm trying to figure this one out. I know Linux/Naslite2 would probably be less bloat. Striping definitely helps. But even most of the smaller NAS devices hover around 35-20 r/w mbps access times.

You're pulling in 120/80 mbps? Does raid 10 (redundancy + speed) potentially triple the read/write with your 6 drives?

[Joost Ink]

A lot of info about nas etc on this page:

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/compo...as/Itemid,190/

there is a chart with performance tests of different nasses also naslite

Linux based file server sounds interesting, but it means I have to have my old pc on all the time with all the noise etc. the modern nasses seem to be less energy hungry and silent etc. or am I wrong?

[instinct]

Just as a quick side note, beware of the performance issue...When scaling the farm past 10 (well rather like past 30-40) slaves then both server hardware and network limitations will kick in rather quickly. 30 slaves first pulling 300megs of irrmap and afterwards writing 50meg EXR files IS a huge huge hog.

Kind Regards,
Thorsten

[jujubee]

I'm going to add to this.

I had tried recently with a Dlink DNS-323 NAS which was given 'rave' reviews on SmallNetBuilder. I have to say, I was extremely disappointed and can't trust their results now. I think the difference is with network rendering, we have large files to deal with and sometime up and above 10 computers hitting the same resource at the same time. When all my comps hit it, it just causes the Dlink to freeze. I'm sure for a regular home use, it is perfectly fine. However for us, it is unreasonable.

So far I've used normal windows networking, the D-Link NAS which was given stellar reviews, and Windows 2003 in which after about a year experienced 'catastrophic' hard drive failure using RAID.

I just purchased Naslite-2 and installed it on a dual-core Athlon with 2 gigs of DDR 2 RAM. On-board gigabit networking and video. I'm going to give a DIY NAS on Naslite one more chance to see if it can hold up to 'true' server.

Installation was fairly easy - there was a small unlock procedure which forces you to go online. That was about the only minor pain.

One thing that should be noted is that it doesn't support software RAID - that means RAID that's usually built into motherboards. They only list hardware RAID and most of those controllers are extremely expensive. Which I should add are generally more reliable, better performance, if your hardware faults you can pop it onto a diff computer, and even less CPU intensive.)

Load time into the barebone OS is extremely responsive. Basically, this is a Linux distribution stripped of everything except the components needed for reading the basics to get your computer operated. It uses Samba. All I want it to do is read and write files.

Shares were pretty much instantaneous in getting picked up. Normally I have to fiddle with Windows settings, driver permissions, etc. Then there's always that slight lag when things get connected. However one thing to note is that there's no permissions to the directories. You see basically everything that's on the system. Anyone can write to is. But that might be a positive thing if you're looking for something simple.

Over the next few days I'm going to give this system a test - even without RAID to see how it performs overall. The real test is to render at some point and see how much stress I can inflict on it.

[jujubee]

I'm just doing a transfer of some backup files over to the NAS system. Here's the current transfer chart:

[jujubee]

Running a little DR as well as VrayRT over the network all pulling from one machine and there's a lot of textures.

I must say, so far I'm pretty impressed. It handles all the connections pretty well. I would like to run a SCSI hardware RAID off of this.

@bhchllc - if you read this, which controller did you guys choose?

I'll have more input later as I'll run more machines.

[jujubee]

So far I've been rendering a fairly complicated scene. I've got 10 computers hitting the dual core server (which is actually considered an 'older' computer for me now.) I've been pulling textures, irradiance, and lightcache maps from the server directly without any problems.

As for RT, it runs as smooth as it will probably get with 6 computers hitting it.

[jujubee]

One other thing I should add as a forewarning - their tech support is LOUSY.

I wrote asking about a SCSI controller (although they've provided an outdated list) and never received a response. It also wouldn't allow me to sign up for their forum even after this purchase.

Also, one last thing to reiterate is that if you want to run RAID, you can't use a motherboard solution. You need to buy a separate SCSI card and drives.

The system does have an automatic backup scheduling system however that I set to run once a night.