I have a 1TB My Book World Edition White Light connected to my household wireless router and we have two Linux laptops in the house (running Ubuntu 10.4). I can see the drive fine on the network. However, I want to mount a folder that I have created on the White Light on, for example, folder /media/aridus on my laptop. This will enable me to create backups, wirelessly, with my backup software (Back In Time) on the White Light (I need to be able to select a drive for the backup destination: Back In Time does not allow selection of a network destination). Back In Time requires the drive to support hard links.
I don’t really know what I am doing here but I have enabled nfs on the white light (using the web interface), created a folder, and have this line in my /etc/fstab file on one of the laptops (where the Xs represent the ip address of my White Light):
XXX.XXX.XX:/nfs/aridus /media/aridus nfs rsize=8192,wsize=8192,rw,hard,intr,user 0 0
This works, and I can make a backup to the White Light from Back In Time. However, it is incredibly slow. A backup that takes 5 minutes to a USB drive connected directly to the laptop takes about two hours to the White Light (time is important as I wish to run hourly backups). I have several questions:
-
Is using nfs the best solution? Is there a better alternative?
-
I don’t really understand the options that I have used on the line above (after ‘nfs’) I put them in after some reading around and from a few random examples that I found. If nfs is the best solution, could I speed up the terribly slow access by changing these options?
With grateful thanks for any help from anybody more knowledgeable than myself!
I get better performances with the cifs protocol, but I’m not an expert and I’m not sure that I configured it properly. This is my /etc/fstab:
//XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX/Public /media/MyBookWENSII cifs guest,uid=1000 0 0
I also noticed that the MioNet service, when active, slow down performance. Unfortunatly ther is a bug and it’s not possible to permanently deactivate it from web interface.
I followed this hack and now performances are better: http://mybookworld.wikidot.com/mionet
Andrea
Many thanks for this helpful reply. I am going to start by disabling mionet to see if this improves performance and I will then try out cifs and compare it with nfs. But I have a stupid question. Looking at the link you provided (thank you!), how can I actually access the file /usr/mionet/monitorCVM.sh on the White Light? By default I don’t have access to this folder on the drive.
You have to connect using SSH. To enable it, login into MBWE, then Advance Mode > System > Advanced > SSH Access and check Enable and Submit.
If you have MioNet enabled, have in mind to change the default password “welc0me” to something else.
After enable SSH you can connect using an SSH client like WinSCP or an SFTP like FileZilla. Now you’ll be able to see system directories and files.
Many thanks, most helpful! This prompted me to look at Nautilus, and I found it had a connect to server option, including ssh, and I have now been able to modify the file. I will now see whether nfs access is any faster.
Martin
HI < can you please give me some advice of what needs done to see teh drive to teh network.
I am at least one step behind and still stragling to se the drive with my ubuntu 10.4 system.
i have only connected to disk to the router and owered it on. Nay advice will be very much appreciated
