Mac: Aperture requires “System Trash” for deleting referenced files (on FreeNAS)

[Oliver Joseph Ash]

I have Aperture set up to reference my photos on my NAS. However, when I try to delete photos, I get what I believe to be a permissions are:

Some referenced original files cannot be moved to the System Trash, and will remain in their current locations:

• You don’t have access to the System Trash on the original files’ volume.

Other original files will be moved to the System Trash as specified.

As seen here: http://cl.ly/image/472k192b2L2j

Aperture seems to want to move these files to a “System Trash” on the actual FreeNAS, but Aperture doesn’t have write permissions.

Firstly, I can’t give it write permissions because at no point does it ask for me to authenticate. Secondly, I don’t really need it to move to a “System Trash” on the FreeNAS. When I’m deleting photos from the Aperture trash, I want them gone for good!

If anybody has run into this problem before and found a solution, it’d be greatly appreciated. Currently I have to locate photos in Finder to actually delete them from the NAS and from the Aperture library.

 

[cyberjock]

If it's not asking you for a username and password then you are "authenticating" with something the system is already using. Perhaps your permissions are setup to give guests or everyone read permission in which case it is working exactly as designed. What you should do is remove everyone's permissions for read and write and give only an account that you create permission for those files. Then you'll be denied by any anonymous login from your Mac and you'll be requested to enter a username and password.

If Aperture is hard coded to require a system trash you're likely screwed. Some programs will not work through network shares. I'd go look around the Aperture forum and see if it supports network shares. It may not.

 

[Oliver Joseph Ash]

If it's not asking you for a username and password then you are "authenticating" with something the system is already using. Perhaps your permissions are setup to give guests or everyone read permission in which case it is working exactly as designed. What you should do is remove everyone's permissions for read and write and give only an account that you create permission for those files. Then you'll be denied by any anonymous login from your Mac and you'll be requested to enter a username and password.

If Aperture is hard coded to require a system trash you're likely screwed. Some programs will not work through network shares. I'd go look around the Aperture forum and see if it supports network shares. It may not.

So, I asked the same question over on an Aperture forum: http://www.apertureexpert.com/forum-user/post/2009764?lastPage=true

They are suggesting that the drive that the referenced files are stored on needs to be formatted as Mac OS X Extended. That’s not possible with FreeNAS, is it?

Just odd that when I Google this, no-one else has had similar problems. I’d have thought there would be loads of people using FreeNAS for Aperture. Makes me think I’m doing something wrong!

 

[Oliver Joseph Ash]

Someone with exactly the same problem ended up creating a share with iSCI. I’ll try that.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2735205?start=0&tstart=0

 

[cyberjock]

Mac OSX Extended is not supported.

iSCSI will probably fix that problem, just keep in mind that ZFS+iSCSI doesn't give amazing performance, but it might be sufficient for you.

 

[bollar]

Someone with exactly the same problem ended up creating a share with iSCI. I’ll try that.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2735205?start=0&tstart=0

I think iSCSI makes many Apple apps happy, including Aperture & Final Cut Pro. From my testing, iSCSI on ZFS is faster than Firewire, so I think you'll find performance acceptable -- especially with Aperture, which isn't particularly bandwidth intensive.

 

[cyberjock]

I think iSCSI makes many Apple apps happy, including Aperture & Final Cut Pro. From my testing, iSCSI on ZFS is faster than Firewire, so I think you'll find performance acceptable -- especially with Aperture, which isn't particularly bandwidth intensive.

Perhaps for Aperture(never heard of it until this thread), but this forum is littered with people that have very good hardware and they complain about write speeds of less than 10MB/sec and system freezes that are most likely because of iSCSI on ZFS.

 

[bollar]

Perhaps for Aperture(never heard of it until this thread), but this forum is littered with people that have very good hardware and they complain about write speeds of less than 10MB/sec and system freezes that are most likely because of iSCSI on ZFS.

jgreco has written extensively on this potential issue and reported it as Ticket 1531. My dramatic oversimplification is that iSCSI may require tuning to get optimal results and adding better hardware to the system can make the situation worse because of the way ZFS creates transaction groups. In any event, his detailed explanation is here: Thread: Slow write speeds on a ZFS setup and a gigabit network

Lots of Apple products, including Aperture, Final Cut Pro X & iTunes work so much better with drives that are presented locally, so IMO, it's worth the effort to see if iSCSI works for the OP.

 

[jgreco]

I would like to add that the thread you selected is really an excellent summary; you can lose "MByte/sec" performance and make strong gains on responsiveness, but the downside is that you're still tuning for a given workload, and it is still generally possible to find a bad workload for that tune. I have not found a way around that, except to have an I/O subsystem that is substantially - several times at least - faster than the workload thrown at it (which means either lots of spindles or SSD).

In related news, we have one of our storage servers on the bench being upgraded, and I recently had us pick up a Supermicro Atom D525 as well, and hopefully I'll have an opportunity (read: time) to do some testing with FreeNAS 8.3 to see what's what. With the dropping price of SSD, we may opt to move some of our iSCSI loads to Atom-based FreeNAS on SSD, but it is unclear whether ZFS is going to end up being part of the production config there. Strongly tempted to pick up an 8x2.5" 1U case, two drives SSD in UFS mirror, two drives hybrid in UFS mirror, and then four more drives in RAIDZ or RAIDZ2 for backup storage. Could make a really ideal storage engine for our needs...