My problem is that with all the Windows stuff I’ve been doing lately, my Mac skills are getting rusty.
You may already know that I’ve got a pretty complex setup here at Dave’s House. I have the media server in the basement. It’s an Intel dual core processor, it has a Hauppauge PVR 350 TV Tuner card, and two 200GB disks.
It runs Mythtv, and netatalk, as well as the wonderful mt-daapd by Ron Pedde.
Here’s the way things are set up:
I advertise the netatalk AFP shares via my ldap server, which gets advertised by — OOPS! — my dhcp configuration. You can set that up by openning Directory Access, and highlight LDAPv3, and click Configure. At the top of the property page, there is a checkbox labelled Use DHCP supplied LDAP… check that checkbox. I know, I know what you’re thinking… Dave’s just asking for his laptop to get hacked.
Anyway, this setup works REALLY well. I tunes thinks its library is at media:music which it is, and that works. What’s realyl great is that when I rip a CD, it automatically goes to the basement, so all my music centralized, and none of it ever hits the laptop, keeping that disk free for 10,000 more photos.
Cut to the chase here: lately, when I import a CD, the process can take an hour, or more! I’ve been struggling to figure this out. And this weekend, what with the dreary weather, is the weekend to get this problem solved. I have to say that I did not take an engineers approach, or a scientists for that matter.
I played with it last night, and did some testing. I was unable to get high speed transfers to work well. At least writing files over the network is very slow. Reading is just fine. So I can play the music in my library. but I cant import new music - not without intolerable delays, and possible timeouts on the client - which cause other problems.
So, I uninstalled netatalk, and deleted the /etc/atalk directory. Then re-installed, and started with a default config. I got what I was looking for. So now i can copy 5MB in about 3 minutes. Actually pretty crappy, but better than before.
So, I’ve made only minimal configuration changes to get my media AFP share working again, and did some more testing. So far so good. No drop in performance, so about 5MB in 3min.
Like I said, babysteps here. I’m waiting for the 2.0.3 of netatalk for fedora core 4 x86_64. This is still in testing… I’m still confused about why the performance is so spotty. It looks as though the bigger the file, the proportionally crappy the performance is.
