If it such important to store this ugly named stuff on a fileserver costs will rise for sure, but costs shouldnt be the main problem if
you plan to setup a long term staying fileserver.
Regards
Simon Hobson schrieb:
Mark C. Casey wrote:
We _cannot_ go about renaming files, for a number of reasons.. the primary being some of the files are technically not ours to alter without a clients permission (names and all) and you don't understand just how many files there are. There are quite probably thousands of files, spread across _hundreds_ of cds and dvds which comes to a total of roughly 400GB.
I understand what you are saying, but it doesn't change the situation - that no-one has a 'solution' for you. Perhaps there is some 'middle ground' you can explore (see below).
As to a Mac server, i'm not sure how much they cost but i'm guessing a lot for what i'm wanting.
I'm planning on building a RAID-5 fileserver running Linux (still undecided on distro) most likely running Netatalk and Samba. The server itself i'm planning for roughly 1TB of storage, possibly more. (at the moment in my plans it calls for 6x 250GB hdd's which gives me 1.2TB)
The cost of the above if I use Linux (and build it myself) comes to roughly £1000, which i'm guessing is a damn sight cheaper than a Mac equivalent server solution. (hell that's cheaper than a normal Mac tower)
You are right that a Mac server will cost more than your home-brew Linux box.
FWIW, I recently had to decide how to equip our Design department with their own fileserver. I decided to put in a G5 XServe so that OS X could take care of any file name mangling required (Samba is an integral service with OS X Server). When I get time the plan is to integrate it with the LDAP database from the main fileserver. I also felt it was 'safer' given that Netatalk still has issues (not least that it stores files differently to OS X via Samba) and they still have OS 9 machines which don't natively talk to Samba servers. To be perfectly honest, the price wasn't all that much more than buying a rack mount Dell server - especially taking all the 'incidental' costs (how much will it cost you to fix your filenames ?) into account. BTW, you haven't said how many users, you might find that you can 'liberate' a G4 that's due for an upgrade
from someones desk, stick on OS X Server 10 user,
and have an adequate server (400G isn't much BTW - our XServe has 500G of space available on raid 5 (3x250G disks) and I expect to have to switch to an external XRaid in a year or two when we run out of capacity.)
So where can you go from here ? Well the obvious (but not very helpful) response is not to start
from here ! Going forward you must educate your
designers to avoid all characters that have any issues with cross platform compatibility - it is the only long term solution. For existing work, do you really, absolutely, HAVE to put it all on the server ? For stuff that's "spread across _hundreds_ of cds and dvds" just leave it there until you have to do some work on it, and fix the problems as you come to them.
As to stuff that you'd need a clients permission to alter, well go and ask them ! Many of your clients are probably having the same issues and wishing they could change the names "but they can't because the designers did it that way" and are afraid to ask you to change them. Combine that with only fixing stuff when you have to change anything (ie when a client comes back for some changes, get permission to sort the filenames) and I think you'll find that the scale of the problem is reduced significantly.
Simon
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