Sharing a share.

[Munty Scruntfundle]

Hi folks. Before I go jumping in blindly and cock everything up...

I would like all my nodes to save data to a NAS. However, when I've tried this in the past not all nodes get a mount, when they do they drop without notice. Not ideal. It's because I'm asking for so many connections, the NAS get's confused.

So, I thought about setting up a mount on one debian box and sharing that mount to the others. So there's only one connection to the NAS while all the nodes are connected through a share of that mount.

Will that work, or am I asking for problems?

Thanks.

[neuraleskimo]

Hi Munty,

I have never tried it, but I think you are probably headed for trouble.

My first thought is why is the NAS dropping connections? Without knowing exactly, the problem might follow you to your Debian "SMB proxy" solution. For example, if the NAS drops connections under heavy load, that will not change. Speaking of load, depending on your network architecture, your network traffic and latency will double. Maybe not a problem.

My second thought is, assuming you want multiple users mounting a single mount point to the NAS, you would lose access control and auditing. Maybe not a problem. On the other hand, assuming you will have multiple mount points on the Debian system mounting multiple mount points on the NAS, I am not sure your problem with the NAS will go away.

It is easy for me to say do blah, blah, blah, because I don't have your responsibility. However, if the NAS is a problem and you have a spare system to serve as a front-end, could you move the disks to (or buy new ones for) the Debian system and ditch the NAS?

Hopefully this helps.