ROCK: Must I use SMB? [yes]

Roon Software Discussion ROCK
1

I’ve a spare Asus Z87i-PRO Mini-ITX with i3 and enough RAM to act as a server for Core. Is there any point my testing ROCK on it or am I likely to come up against unsupported hardware?

Also, if I use local storage am I restricted to having to use SAMBA to access the music library?

2

My household is Linux only…for probably the past 20+ years. I typically use NFS rather than SMB/SAMBA to mount network shares. If I can’t access my music storage on the server running ROCK using NFS it’s for all intents and purposes a non-starter as as a viable OS.

3

Yah, sounds like ROCK is not for you. This is not a use case we plan to support.

4

Thanks @danny. Not asking for any changes (I’m very happy running Arch as a server), but I’m curious as to why NFS has been specifically excluded?

5

It hasn’t been specifically excluded – only SMB has been specifically included.

Roon only does SMB internal to Roon, and RoonOS provides no way to mount network fs outside the functionality Roon provides.

6

Another stupid decision, to use a slow transfer protocol over NFS, sigh.

I’m literally fed up of googling my issues with Roon to find this type of response, and you want $700 for this software? :smiley:

Seriously make some effort

7

Why do you need a faster transfer protocol? Serious question.

8

NFS isn’t universal whereas SMB is. You can’t natively connect to NFS shares in any edition of windows below Pro.

9

Because we are streaming 100mb+ files aren’t we?

10

Roon isn’t universal, it doesn’t even have a UI for Linux, sorry what point are you making?

11

I think you are grossly missing the point of ROCK (or Nucleus). ROCK is highly opinionated to do things that we feel will lead to success for most users. It was a no-brainer for us to not include NFS support in ROCK. You may run into many opinions with ROCK that you may disagree with, but because it’s not a general-purpose/flexible operating system, you are free to install your own favorite distribution and use RoonServer on that.

Now, to address this outrageous claim about a “stupid decision”.

Here are my assumptions about NFS vs SMB:

  1. NFS has huge gaps in OS support, where as SMB support is at 100%.
  2. NFS’s performance advantage over SMB is not a thing for music files. You can see that for music files (big files, not tiny files), the performance difference is negligibly better at best, and nil at worst.
  3. NFS is notoriously bad at dealing with connection drops, which are common on home networks.

In fact, I would go one step further and say network block storage has destroyed the utility of NFS even in the server/enterprise/cloud space.

My guess is that NFS will continue its slow fade into obscurity.

You are streaming at extremely low rates… and NFS has a tiny performance gain at those file sizes. NFS has a noticable improvement when the files are tiny, which is useless for music.

RoonServer, the part that talks to the filesystem, supports Linux just fine. But this is moot, as @ged_hickman1’s point was that NFS lacks Windows support out of the box. Windows does have UI (not that it matters for filesystem support). I’m not sure what point you are trying to make here.

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12

@danny Users constantly reported issues with samba here, I’ve read the posts going back years.

My frustration comes from the many many threads here that never seem to be addressed. Everything I come across something that doesn’t work, or has a strange implementation I google the question to find a 2 year old thread on these forums that was never resolved or even answered.

I’m very sure you have an issue tracker, I’ve looked over your changelogs for the last few years, I just don’t see what you are doing if not addresses the communities issues/requests?

13

We had a recent SMB issue and the latest release fixed it. I think you missed all that.

Have you tried SMB on ROCK? Have you had issues?

14

Actually, yes: special characters in filenames, to the point that copying from a Linux share directly onto ROCK’s internal drive is impossible, no matter what you try. Unless you want to forgo Hangin’ Tough [1988], that is. And that’s just one example, I can barely imagine the nightmare for Beak> fans. Not sure if it’s because ROCK, SMB version there, SMB version NAS-side, what the hell it is, but it’s a pain.

Now of course, there’s a workaround, and, since OSX export is broken, that’s mounting ROCK’s internal storage to a Windows box, and exporting everything from within Roon. That’ll still give folder names like “___” instead of “!!!”, though.

15

Sure, SMB has some issues… NFS has its own share of issues.

I was asking @JohnSmith_roon if he’s used the SMB integration before using his acidic tone to condem our team about lack of NFS support.

1 Like
16

Sorry for sidetracking (and interrupting your break with a mopey rant).