So i created a iSCSI LUN... Now its not working?

[Flashie]

So the order from below has arrived.

 

I've set up the LACP Link aggregation on the switch as well as on the NAS. Setup the NAS and created an iSCSI Lun targeted to the my gaming PC and my test PC (Before i connect the rest of the house up to it). 

On 6/13/2017 at 9:09 PM, Oshino Shinobu said:

-snip-

I've created a file called "SteamLibrary (5TB)" and set up both my gaming PC as well as the test PC (Both have their own seperate steam accounts with the same games that were used for testing) to recognize it as a Steam Library. I then popped Garry's Mod from my gaming PC's Steam Common file over into the Steam Common file of the LUN (The 'SteamLibrary (5TB)'). In theory; If i go onto the test PC (which recognizes the file in the LUN as a Steam Library), and hit "Install" on Garry's Mod to that directory; it will discover the existing files and not redownload the game. As the picture shows below:

 

But it isnt doing that. It gets to the point on the test machine and my gaming PC; where it discovers the files; and then starts allocating disk space (as it would do if it didnt discover any files) and then starts redownloading the entire game again... 

This is not an option for me as there are easily a dozen games that are 60GB + that I'm not willing to redownload because i already have them.

 

What did i do wrong or what am i missing out on here?
 

[Flashie]

Just another thing - Even if i do have to redownload any of my games, big or small; anything taking longer than 5 minutes to download stops halfway and says "Disk Write Error" and needs to be manually restarted. Please help Dont want to face the reality that I've just wasted $1 300 on something that looks really cool; but doesnt function

[brwainer]

AFAIK a single iSCSI LUN can only be accessed by a single computer at a time, since they show up as a raw hard disk, and the OS has to format the drive. They can only be shared if you use a filesystem that is meant for shared access, which AFAIK Windows does not have any builtin.

 

 

EDIT: See here: https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/545423-two-computers-one-iscsi-target

[Flashie]

1 minute ago, brwainer said:

AFAIK a single iSCSI LUN can only be accessed by a single computer at a time, since they show up as a raw hard disk, and the OS has to format the drive. They can only be shared if you use a filesystem that is meant for shared access, which AFAIK Windows does not have any builtin.

Hey, Thanks for the reply

What would be the best option that will allow 2 computers to hit the drives (4 4TB in raid 5; 5TB allocated to the sharing of steam games) simultaneously? (Because tbh thats what i had thought the LUN would do when i had been setting it up)

[brwainer]

25 minutes ago, Flashie said:

Hey, Thanks for the reply

What would be the best option that will allow 2 computers to hit the drives (4 4TB in raid 5; 5TB allocated to the sharing of steam games) simultaneously? (Because tbh thats what i had thought the LUN would do when i had been setting it up)

SMB (Samba), or NFS are the two main protocols used when you want more than one computer to have write access to the same files. You should be aware though that most save game data is local to the computers, and Steam Cloud saves only update when the game is closed IIRC.

[Mikensan]

NTFS locks files which SMB will respect, so if you setup a SMB share with two boxes, it'll all work well until they need to write to the files. Honestly you could just straight run 1gb connections from NAS > desktop and that connection will be great for gaming (assuming it runs from ram anyway). NFS doesn't lock files, but can definitely be an issue if multiple sources try to write to the file (corruption).

 

What some people do is cache the steam library, so you don't have to pull the games over the internet but in turn off your local NAS. So the NAS copy would just be a repository. 

 

Or you could continue with iSCSI to a single machine, then use... I'm not too familiar with the tech but the steam feature that lets you play games using the resources of another machine... like the nvidia shield?

[Flashie]

1 minute ago, Mikensan said:

NTFS locks files which SMB will respect, so if you setup a SMB share with two boxes, it'll all work well until they need to write to the files. Honestly you could just straight run 1gb connections from NAS > desktop and that connection will be great for gaming (assuming it runs from ram anyway). NFS doesn't lock files, but can definitely be an issue if multiple sources try to write to the file (corruption).

 

What some people do is cache the steam library, so you don't have to pull the games over the internet but in turn off your local NAS. So the NAS copy would just be a repository. 

 

Or you could continue with iSCSI to a single machine, then use... I'm not too familiar with the tech but the steam feature that lets you play games using the resources of another machine... like the nvidia shield?

I just read a steam forum discussion discussing a similar idea to what you've discussed toward the end of your post there.
The issue is that these are 2 seperate gaming PC's that are going to be played by 2 seperate people simultaneously; and would like to be able to use a sector of the NAS, as a 'hard drive' for storing the steam library on, which the two steam accounts will just hook into

[Mikensan]

Are they diskless gaming PCs, or just really cramped on space?

 

You could create a dataset, enable deduplication, and create unique shares for each PC. Then you could replicate/sync nightly between the two. Dedupe is ram intensive however.