Hi,
In my local network I have a sandbox PC, a battered Dell Optiplex 3020 with a core i5 processor and 8 GB RAM that I’m using to test all the stuff that requires bare metal and can’t be tested in a VM (KVM, Proxmox, etc.) The sandbox PC sports a small 60 GB SSD disk.
Besides this I have an equally battered Synology NAS running an FTP server for the local net. This NAS has a single purpose: host various Ghost images from the sandbox machine.
Let’s say there’s a custom Rocky Linux 8 install on the sandbox PC. Once I’ve done all my testing, I want to backup this installation. Usually I’m running the following command within the system to zero out everything on the disk that is not the installation itself:
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/0bits bs=20M ; rm -f /0bits
Once this is done, I boot G4L (Ghost4Linux) and transfer the contents of the sandbox PC to the FTP server on the NAS, bit by bit in a filesystem-agnostic raw mode. I’ve done this for years and it really is a no-brainer.
On my NAS I have a series of images, each a handful of gigabytes in size:
rocky-8-srvbase
rocky-9-srvbase
rocky-8-desktop
rocky-9-desktop
windows-10
proxmox
- etc.
This setup has been working perfectly for more than a decade now. Except there’s one detail that’s nagging me.
When I boot up Ghost4Linux on the sandbox PC and backup my Ghost image to the NAS, uploading all this is relatively fast. Displayed bandwidth is around 150 MB/sec. Whole process takes around 5 minutes.
On the other hand, when I want to fetch a Ghost image from the NAS and install it to the sandbox PC, downloading the Ghost image is painfully slow, somewhere around 10 to 20 MB/sec. Whole process takes about an hour to complete.
I’m not a network expert, so I’m a bit clueless here. Any idea if there is something to be done here to improve download speed?
Cheers,
Niki