Questions...

[sollord]

I want to use iSCSI to connect my NAS to my Windows 8 media center computer which will record all the TV I watch. Now my issue is I have other computers I want to be able to access these recordings should i just share the drive off the WMC machine using a homegroup or is there a better way to do this? Like is it possible for me to use a read-only iSCSI connection to allow them to see the data on the drive or is that a bad idea?

 

[jgreco]

That's a bad idea. Conditionally.

In order to support multiple access to a block storage device (SAN, like iSCSI) you need a cluster-aware filesystem (like VMware's vmfs). Your typical crummy PC filesystem isn't aware of the possibility that someone else could be frobbing around with the blocks on the disk, and will cache things "helpfully" to make it all faster, and will then freak when things on disk are inconsistent with what the data in cache told it to expect. Writing is even worse.

Your choices are to use FreeNAS as a NAS (and not as a SAN) by using CIFS or some file sharing protocol, which means that FreeNAS will happily do all the sharing work, and you can get the benefits of ZFS and all that. Or you can use FreeNAS as a SAN by using iSCSI, then you will want to mount the iSCSI drive on your WMC and have WMC do the sharing.

I'm kind of curious where you would get the idea to use iSCSI for this.

 

[cyberjock]

Personally, I always hesitate when someone says "lets use iSCSI". iSCSI should be something you use only when you have no other choice or there is some very significant benefit to using it. You can't "share out" the iscsi like you think though.

 

[sollord]

I'm using a ESXi server that's running freenas and pfsense right now though the drives for my zfs raidz are mounted raw so I can get SMART data. As for using iSCSI I need one iSCSI connection for WMC as it won't record tv over network mapped drives using CIFS and since I'm waiting on some more drives to arrive I'm just testing things out I figured I'd look into other options. So I guess i'll just have FreeNAS act as a SAN for WMC and then just have it share out the drive for other computers to use probably a lot simpler. My other idea before I opted for FreeNAS was to use 4Gb Fiber channel in point to point mode as a DAS as I have the hardware for it laying around here somewhere but that seems like overkill and a headache

 

[jgreco]

Interesting. That would be kind of limiting for a WMC setup, I would think... I wonder why they designed something so restrictive.

 

[sollord]

Interesting. That would be kind of limiting for a WMC setup, I would think... I wonder why they designed something so restrictive.

Normally I'd just say it's Microsoft being stupid but it's probably some issue with WMC and not being unable to gracefully handle it's storage vanishing. I've not really looked into it as I've never really had it happen

 

[jgreco]

Of course, allowing for it to be iSCSI means that it's just as possible for the storage to vanish as it would be for CIFS... heh