Category: Hardware Page 5 of 7

We recently purchased a Netgear ReadyNAS unit (formerly made by Infrant Technologies). It is a nice compact little unit, 1RU with 4 hard drives across the front. It runs an onboard Debian install with some custom software to support X-RAID, the front panel buttons and a nice web interface.

We have run into some issues lately in relation to the performance of the device over the network. Their general advice is to do a direct connect and check your network drivers, but this hasn’t helped our fault. When logged into the SSH server on the system I can see that the CPU is running at 90%+ pretty consistently during usage. These are smb processes running under the various usernames that have access to the file shares. Even when the desktops are idle they are chewing CPU cycles on the NAS.

After about 24 hours of usage the NAS starts to become unresponsive. In particular the web interface actually crashes the browser (both IE and Firefox). I am trying leaving oplocks turned off at the moment as some people have suggested, but I am not seeing any reduction in CPU usage. Apparently these problems have been fixed in the latest beta, with the next prod version due in ‘a couple of weeks’. It can’t come soon enough as far as I am concerned.

The following photo set shows the progress of the rack rebuild that I performed yesterday.
It starts with the old rack setup and then progresses through each level of the build:

It was good fun putting all the new equipment into the rack, but it is very time consuming
especially when everything needs to be adjusted to fit. We had to pull all the vertical
rails as well, so everything had to come out and be rebuilt. It is fun doing it while
the everyone is at work as well, you have to plan the build so you only have one shutdown
during the lunch break! It all ended up working out nicely in the end, everything
is on rails and is easily accessible.

My suggestions for anyone looking to build/rebuild a rack are:

• Allocate twice as much time as you think you will need

• Pull as much out as you can

• Don’t start running cables until you have as much equipment in as possible

• Get a bag of zip ties

• Plan everything beforehand

• Get as many decent screwdrivers and spanners as you can

It is worth it in the end. We now have better air flow, if there is water in the room
the servers will be fine, better accessibility (important especially in emergency
hardware failures) and better physical security.