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Antias
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My niece has stumped me with a tech question..

Wed Apr 17, 2019 6:21 am

OK, so it seems I've been caught out, stumped even, by my 9 year old niece, and as a Senior Business Systems Analyst, I'm ashamed I actually don't know the answer to this question, and I cannot readily find a Googled answer either (perhaps the way I'm posing the question is the problem with Google though) :roll:

So, all you young bright sparks out there, whats the answer to this question please...
(On a standard Windows 10 home network, cabled through a standard router):

If I use computer A to transfer files from computer B to Computer C, do the actual files go through computer A?

This question came about by the fact at my nieces home has a little tiny Netbook for torrenting.
My niece was was wondering if she, on her bedroom laptop (computer A) initiated the transfer of large files from the netbook (computer B) in her Dad's office to the media server (computer C) in the theatre room, would it be routed through her laptop and slow down her own laptop's connection, or would the data go straight from the torrent-book to the media server?

I know all of you are probably laughing your head off at me right now :lol: , but I've never had to consider this question before... it's so basic I obviously have never encountered it before... Cheers... :wink:
 
jihadjoe
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Re: My niece has stumped me with a tech question..

Wed Apr 17, 2019 6:30 am

With SMB? Yes

IIRC for direct B to C transfers you want something like what FXP was to FTP, or open a Remote Desktop session on B or C and do the copy from there.
 
Antias
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Re: My niece has stumped me with a tech question..

Wed Apr 17, 2019 6:38 am

Thanks mate, very appreciated... this may solve the puzzle of the the slowing down Facetime with all her friends shes always complaining about!
Appreciated :)
 
chuckula
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Re: My niece has stumped me with a tech question..

Wed Apr 17, 2019 6:50 am

As was answered above, the answer is yes for a standard SMB setup common to most Windows systems.

If, however, you were to login remotely to either B or C using machine A as the client, then you could setup a direct transfer. At this point machine A would only be acting as a terminal that gives direct access to B or C.
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Waco
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Re: My niece has stumped me with a tech question..

Wed Apr 17, 2019 5:36 pm

SMB does have some cool tricks where it will do a local copy on a remote server, even across network drives, if you ask it to. IE: Cut files from share A, paste on share B (on different drives on the same server). It blew my mind when I saw this in action the first time.
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chuckula
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Re: My niece has stumped me with a tech question..

Wed Apr 17, 2019 7:33 pm

Waco wrote:
SMB does have some cool tricks where it will do a local copy on a remote server, even across network drives, if you ask it to. IE: Cut files from share A, paste on share B (on different drives on the same server). It blew my mind when I saw this in action the first time.


https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/window ... -transfers
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/window ... a-transfer

Apparently there are versions in both SMB2 and SMB3.

Samba also supports it: https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Server-Side_Copy [Caveat: The precise description in this page only covers a server copying files between devices that are each within the server itself (e.g. copy between two shares on the same system) which is one use of ODX but not the specific use-case of setting up a direct copy between two different servers. This page at least does not tell us if Samba does ODX between two different servers.]

If you are using Windows, I'm not 100% sure it would work in a home environment even though the client can be an ordinary Windows desktop. There are a few caveats in the configuration of the server if you read the fine print (intra-cluster copying only is one I found, meaning both servers need to be in a cluster in the first place). I wouldn't be surprised if both servers need to be part of a common AD tree or otherwise have some type of trust relationship so they can verify the "token" that gets generated for the offload commands.

FYI: If you have Powershell installed and want to check, apparently this command can answer the question if ODX is enabled on a server:
Get-ItemProperty -Path 'hklm:\system\currentcontrolset\control\filesystem' -Name 'FilterSupportedFeaturesMode'
A 0 means yes, a 1 means no. https://support.purestorage.com/Solutio ... nsfer_(ODX)
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Waco
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Re: My niece has stumped me with a tech question..

Wed Apr 17, 2019 11:19 pm

Unfortunately I only have 1 NAS box to test with. Perhaps I need to spin up a second FreeNAS box to see if ODX works across them. I do know I can get 600+ MB/s on my gigabit connection when moving data between two shares on my NAS on separate volumes.
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Usacomp2k3
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Re: My niece has stumped me with a tech question..

Thu Apr 18, 2019 6:41 am

A gigabit network connection is symmetric, and I assume the data sits in RAM not storage, so in theory Going from A -> B -> C is going to have basically the same transfer speed as a -> C (assuming all links are the same speed).
 
jihadjoe
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Re: My niece has stumped me with a tech question..

Thu Apr 18, 2019 6:59 am

Usacomp2k3 wrote:
A gigabit network connection is symmetric, and I assume the data sits in RAM not storage, so in theory Going from A -> B -> C is going to have basically the same transfer speed as a -> C (assuming all links are the same speed).

I'm going to assume a laptop in the bedroom is probably not going to be using a wired ethernet link.
 
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Re: My niece has stumped me with a tech question..

Thu Apr 18, 2019 9:16 am

jihadjoe wrote:
Usacomp2k3 wrote:
A gigabit network connection is symmetric, and I assume the data sits in RAM not storage, so in theory Going from A -> B -> C is going to have basically the same transfer speed as a -> C (assuming all links are the same speed).

I'm going to assume a laptop in the bedroom is probably not going to be using a wired ethernet link.

Also, if you're copying a lot of small files, the round-trip latency introduced by the additional protocol overhead (you're dealing with 2 SMB connections for each file transferred instead of 1) may start to become significant, resulting in less efficient use of available bandwidth.
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Waco
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Re: My niece has stumped me with a tech question..

Thu Apr 18, 2019 9:24 am

Usacomp2k3 wrote:
A gigabit network connection is symmetric, and I assume the data sits in RAM not storage, so in theory Going from A -> B -> C is going to have basically the same transfer speed as a -> C (assuming all links are the same speed).

Assuming gigabit, sure, but WiFi is rarely that fast consistently in both directions. As JBI said you also lose some efficiency going through another hop in the chain.
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meerkt
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Re: My niece has stumped me with a tech question..

Thu Apr 18, 2019 4:35 pm

Also, easy to check. Watch Task Manager \ Performance during transfer.
 
Usacomp2k3
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Re: My niece has stumped me with a tech question..

Thu Apr 18, 2019 5:17 pm

Waco wrote:
Usacomp2k3 wrote:
A gigabit network connection is symmetric, and I assume the data sits in RAM not storage, so in theory Going from A -> B -> C is going to have basically the same transfer speed as a -> C (assuming all links are the same speed).

Assuming gigabit, sure, but WiFi is rarely that fast consistently in both directions. As JBI said you also lose some efficiency going through another hop in the chain.

WiFi is probably still faster than the internet connection, so probably not the limiting factor.
Now it could very well be the torrent aspect creating a large number of connections; not overall bandwidth.
 
Waco
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Re: My niece has stumped me with a tech question..

Thu Apr 18, 2019 8:48 pm

Usacomp2k3 wrote:
WiFi is probably still faster than the internet connection, so probably not the limiting factor.
Now it could very well be the torrent aspect creating a large number of connections; not overall bandwidth.

What? This is from a pair of local CIFs shares - no external connection involved.
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