I have 30 GB worth of time Machine backup running quite nicely…. Oh.. and since it’s LVM on linux it can snapshot the time machine. Without jumbo Frames I get 100Mb/sec transfer… one Intel Pro100MT NIC and the setup will be Jumbo Frames capable.
Copied several 6Gb DVD images… works great.

SMB w/ its locking & Disconnect semantics… SUX.

There is a REASON the variable is called “UnsupportedNetworkVolumes”…. because they don’t work.

This is most likely the cause of the issues people are seeing.

Check this out:
http://www.byteandswitch.com/document.asp?doc_id=89589&page_number=2

http://blogs.sun.com/constantin/entry/x4500_solaris_zfs_iscsi_perfect

I just want to report that I’m using iscsi/timemachine without any problem.

I’ve configured my Ubuntu Linux 7.10 Server with iscsi-enterprice-target. I installed Global San’s initiator on my G5. Over Gbit ethernet the transfer speed from server to server is about 20 - 30 mb/s.

I’m very happy with this setup because all the file management is native mac.

I thought about the switch issues too. I almost bought an expensive gigabit switch the other day but couldn’t justify the cost. I have a Summit 24 10/100 switch that is more industrial strength that I’ve thought of testing with. The pity is it’s only 100 Megabit. I guess I’ll give it a go. I do like the fact that you can now use a network drive. Otherwise I guess I’ll put it on hold and wait for the native iSCSI support to appear in Disk Utility. It’s missing from the 10.5.0 release. (I’m totally bummed about that..)

Giacy, unfortunately that menu pick isn’t in my Disk Utility menu. Apparently it’s a feature that was removed prior to release. I’m wondering if it made it into Leopard Server. Any ideas?

Ciao!!

I’ll be continuing to troubleshoot it though, as iSCSI support on the Mac is something I’m interested in from my days of working on storage projects with various employers.

Food for thought for you guys though, one thing I’m wondering about is the switches. While large file copies and older Macs may place less stress on a regular old network switch, faster Macs or aggressive activities like a Time Machine backup may make the Mac more dependent on SCSI control messaging. If the switch corrupts frames and resends have to take place, this might be exposing bugs in globalSAN.

I don’t know about you guys but the switches I’m using for my home LAN are pretty low-end. I’m going to try it with some higher end equipment as an experiment.

The globalSAN software is still in beta, so I’m hoping they’re actively working on improvements/official word on Leopard support. I’ve had a couple of non-serious issues using it with time machine so far, but nothing major as my home directory / documents folders tend not to contain huge files (those are generally already on my fileservers via other protocols).

I can connect just fine however my machine locks-up every time Time Machine starts the backup. Gets through about 1 GB and freezes my Mac. Linux box is not impacted. Any ideas what could be causing this?

However, when trying to stress things a bit on a Mac Pro by copying a 4G file to an HFS+ formatted volume (again from openfiler), it hung after 1 gig or so

I’ve also tried FreeNAS but that never got past 100M or so.

I tried the copies multiple times - after a reboot - to both openfiler and FreeNAS. I cannot get the 4G file to copy no matter what.

I would really love for this thing to work. I may submit some traces to the globalSAN guys to see if I can get it worked out.