Where has all the space gone?

ploughguy · ‎2011-04-07

My ReadyNAS has been humming along nicely for several years, until recently when a disk died. It is all mirrored, so I replaced the drive and it is now in the process of recovering. (But it takes an amazingly long time to resynch a mirrrored 1.5TB drive - about 12 hours? What can it be doing? Its not like it has to recompute data from a RAID5 set...)

Anyhoo, the upshot is that the NAS is getting some well-overdue attention. One point of note is that it is nearly full. I fixed this the old fashioned way by putting a couple of new drives in the two remaining slots, but the question is still hanging there - how do I find out where the space has gone?

For a unix box I would use du -s (which is what I do with the macs.) For a windows machine, I would probably find some file tree space analysis tool (or hand it to someone else to fix...)

So how do all you folks go about finding out where the gigabytes have gone?

Is ReadyNAS Remote useful for this? I have tried to make it go, but not much happens... the server is allegedly activated, and the client starts up, but there are no window and no apparent way of making any. Maybe it hates Snow Leopard. Nice icon, though, but no online help.

Also, I note that there is an ssh add-on available. These add-ons are a bit of a mystery vis-a-vis installation, but I will work that out once I find out what I can do once it is installed. Is there enough functionality available at the shell level to make the ssh tool worthwhile?
Thanks for your help.

sphardy1 · ‎2011-04-07

Why don't you just use finder and 'Get Info'??

Else, if you install SSH access, then you get full linux commandline access to your NAS, so all commands like du and df are available

ploughguy · ‎2011-08-11

Get Info does not show me any space information - just Kind = Sharepoint. That's it. Everything else is blank.
I assumed this is what it is meant to do...

sphardy1 · ‎2011-08-11

Mount the share then do Get Info in the root of the mounted share - else you just get the info advertised via Bonjour

ploughguy · ‎2011-08-12

Thanks for your very snappy reply. I can see the shares, which add up to 228GB out of about 2.6TB.
Is there any way to access the volume root? All I have is access to shares, and they don't add up.

I have tried installing SSH so I can do some du's but it terminates the session ("Connection to <address> closed") as soon as it logs me in (it displays the last login time, so I can see that I have been logged in for a few nanoseconds.) I have tried using user admin as well as my own login. I get the impression that SSH just works once the activator add-on is installed, but I could not find any setup documentation for it. I feel like an idiot because everyone else seems to have no problems with this thing, and I have nothing but trouble.

sphardy1 · ‎2011-08-12

For root volume: Enable CIFS and then mount (via cmd+k): cifs://admin@[NAS]/c

Replace [NAS] with your NAS IP address or a valid name, use your Frontview admin password when prompted

Via SSH - login as root with your admin password

btaroli · ‎2011-08-12

ploughguy wrote:
I have tried installing SSH so I can do some du's but it terminates the session ("Connection to <address> closed") as soon as it logs me in (it displays the last login time, so I can see that I have been logged in for a few nanoseconds.) I have tried using user admin as well as my own login. I get the impression that SSH just works once the activator add-on is installed, but I could not find any setup documentation for it. I feel like an idiot because everyone else seems to have no problems with this thing, and I have nothing but trouble.

Then you may have missed a step. There are /two/ add-ons you must apply for this. First is ToggleSSH (for Support). Second is EnableRootSSH. The first enables SSH service, as is normally meant only to be used when you're working with support and you are enabling remote access. The second is used to enable the "root" user to log in via SSH, and must be applied /after/ the other. If you do only one it won't work for you.

You can find both these on readynas.com under Resouces / Add-Ons. Unfortunately the first isn't visible there until you click "Next Page" at the bottom. Makes for error prone situations not to have just one page if you ask me.

sphardy1 · ‎2011-08-12

btaroli wrote:
There are /two/ add-ons you must apply for this. First is ToggleSSH (for Support). Second is EnableRootSSH. The first enables SSH service, as is normally meant only to be used when you're working with support and you are enabling remote access. The second is used to enable the "root" user to log in via SSH, and must be applied /after/ the other. If you do only one it won't work for you.

That's actually not 100% correct - Only EnableRootSSH is needed. The fact that the OP does get a connection that is then immediately closed shows SSH is running and accessible but that his login is being denied - a typical symptom of trying to connect with an inappropriate account (eg as user admin instead of root)

Where has all the space gone?