Data migration advise

[Oko]

I am posting this question on FreeNAS forum since one of the boxes involved is a new FreeNAS server. However the question is not FreeNAS specific. I have to migrate about 2TB of data from an old Linux server running CentOS 5.0 release to a new FreeNAS file server. What would be the fastest way to do that? I tried moving data with scp using all sorts of fancy options but I got

Code:

protocol error: expected control record

only after 23GB of data.

 

[cyberjock]

Honestly, I'd just do a copy with either CIFS or zfs send/receive

 

[cyberjock]

scp is simple and handy because it goes through ssh, but in this case performance does matter.

 

[Oko]

Honestly, I'd just do a copy with either CIFS or zfs send/receive

CIFS between UNIX and a UNIX like system That is a strange recommendation. NFS makes sense. I wanted to avoid it because I am dealing with some very large files and we had problems with those on NFS residing on Red Hat server. This is a perfect opportunity to check how well NFS works on FreeNAS. I will mount via NFS FreeNAS server on old RedHat server and see the speed of that thing.

 

[solarisguy]

You have at least four options:

1. export NFS read-only from RedHat, and mount on FreeNAS; two gotchas though: I am not sure whether FreeNAS is optimized to be NFS client and you mentioned problems with RedHat being NFS server
2. export NFS from FreeNAS, mount it on RedHat
3. rsync
4. ftp

 

[Oko]

You have four options:

1. export NFS read-only from RedHat, and mount on FreeNAS; two gotchas though: I am not sure whether FreeNAS is optimized to be NFS client and you mentioned problems with RedHat being NFS server
2. export NFS from FreeNAS, mount it on RedHat
3. rsync
4. ftp

I am going for the second option. Thank you so much for the input. I always valued highly opnion of Solaris guys :) Solaris was my second OS in the life (first of course being True64 Unix on MicroVAX 3100:) ) before getting corrupted by BSDs.

 

[cyberjock]

Actually I could list more than 4 options. The reason I recommended CIFS is because it will let you carry over the Windows ACLs very easily and NFS doesn't. I wasn't just talking out my butt and experience has shown that CIFS typically will work better. I have moved 20TB of data through CIFS, so I definitely know what I'm talking about with this. ;)

CIFS and NFS should perform about the same unless you've done something very wrong like have an overly loaded server, horribly small amount of RAM, etc.

 

[Oko]

Actually I could list more than 4 options. The reason I recommended CIFS is because it will let you carry over the Windows ACLs very easily and NFS doesn't. I wasn't just talking out my butt and experience has shown that CIFS typically will work better. I have moved 20TB of data through CIFS, so I definitely know what I'm talking about with this. ;)

Please do. We are an old fashion UNIX shop here so I am completely ignorant of Windows world. I apologize if my post offended you I have no reason to dubt that were moving lots of data with CIFS. I was studing your post long before I ever posted on this forum so I know that when it comes to CIFS you know what you are talking about.

 

[cyberjock]

I'm not sure what Redhat supports, but I'd assume it will support most of the following:

1. rsync
2. ftp
3. cifs
4. nfs
5. scp
6. zfs send/receive via snapshots(you would need ZFS on the destination for this.. which I think is a show-stopper on redhat)
7. afp


There is one more but its slipping my mind right now.... :/

Your "best" bet is to do the copy from the CLI of the centos machine and mount the cifs share from freenas.