Author Topic: Status of NetDrive?  (Read 16131 times)

Dariusz Piatkowski

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Status of NetDrive?
« on: February 08, 2015, 12:25:39 am »
What is the current status of NetDrive?

I see BMT Mirco still selling it => http://www.bmtmicro.com/BMTCatalog/os2/netdrive.html, but the actual developer site http://www.blueprintsoftwareworks.com/netdrive/ only shows up in Arabic when I attempt to go there and Google Translate appears to indicate this is some sort of skin care advertisement... :o

So....is this effectively almost abandon-ware now? Or is this still a real product? Is anyone supporting it?

I'm curious because I installed the latest version (3.1.4) to try it out, basically linking to one of my WinXP machines...it does that great. Now that my media server is here (ZyXEL NSA325) I would like to fully test it out and see to what extent I can move my multiple HPFS partitions over to that storage media. It seems like NetDrive would allow this functionality fairly easily.

NSA325 box has other interface functionality, I could deploy NFS, FTP or even TFTP, however, I would much prefer to deploy something that is more streamlined and easier to configure.

Eugene Gorbunoff

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Re: Status of NetDrive?
« Reply #1 on: February 08, 2015, 01:14:42 am »

list of plugins: http://ecomstation.ru/netdrive

new homepage of netdrive:
http://www.bmtmicro.com/netdrive/

ivan

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Re: Status of NetDrive?
« Reply #2 on: February 08, 2015, 01:25:26 am »
Hi Dariusz,

Does your media server have an FTP server?  All the NAS boxes we have do and we use that copy full partitions into storage.  In fact that is how I changed most of the HPSF partitions we started with to JFS ones - copy to NAS, reformat as JFS and copy back, the only thing I had to do was copy the FTP client to a different partition before formatting the partition it was on.

Dariusz Piatkowski

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Re: Status of NetDrive?
« Reply #3 on: February 08, 2015, 01:40:45 am »
Hi Dariusz,

Does your media server have an FTP server? ...

Hi Ivan,

Yes, the media server does support FTP (along with a pile of other interfaces). What you suggest would work perfectly well for the transition part of the process. However, I really wish to move the multi-media stuff over to the NAS permanently...this is because we simply have far too many photos, videos, etc, that we wish to access from other devices, be in the family room TV, tablets or cell phones.

In combination with this, I would like to continue to use apps like PMView to manage my DSLR camera image imports and manipulation before these finally end up on the NAS. Therefore, I'm looking for something that will allow me to treat the NAS storage as a typical "system drive". Given what I have seen NetDrive appears to fit that. I believe NFS would allow me to do this as well though.

ivan

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Re: Status of NetDrive?
« Reply #4 on: February 08, 2015, 02:00:08 pm »
Hi Dariusz,

Here we have SAMBA setup to do things like mapping a NAS partition to a drive letter.  The only slight disadvantage with that is, if the NAS is in sleep mode the first access is slow but this depends on how fast the NAS wakes up.  Other than that there are no problems we can see.  We store a lot of the photos we take of clients engineering equipment on NAS boxes and can call them up and manipulate them on there.

Dariusz Piatkowski

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Re: Status of NetDrive?
« Reply #5 on: February 08, 2015, 11:40:24 pm »
Hi Dariusz,

Here we have SAMBA setup to do things like mapping a NAS partition to a drive letter.  The only slight disadvantage with that is, if the NAS is in sleep mode the first access is slow but this depends on how fast the NAS wakes up.  Other than that there are no problems we can see.  We store a lot of the photos we take of clients engineering equipment on NAS boxes and can call them up and manipulate them on there.

OK, I'm brand new to Samba...pulled all the packages (as best as I can tell) but didn't quite figure it out yet what separates out the server from the client installs...LOL...in other words, the NetDrive app with Samba plug-in is super easy.

Now regarding the functionality you outlined, I've got a question there. So with an app like PMView, are you able to successfully store the icons PMView creates in the extended attribute of a file? I'm just not sure how this type of information is/can be stored on a NTFS or Linux style partitions. Given that my NAS is currently configured with a single 160Gig NTFS partition I'm trying to test this out...

Dave Yeo

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Re: Status of NetDrive?
« Reply #6 on: February 09, 2015, 12:22:21 am »
NTFS supports Extended Attributes due to being  originally written to support the OS/2 sub-system. For Linux, where they're called xattrs,  it depends on the file system. Some such as JFS have good support, many such as the default ext4 only support 4kbs of xattrs so probably too small to contain an thumbnail icon.
Also IIRC, Samba needs to xattrs turned on at both ends and for Linux the file system has to be mounted the right way to enable the xattrs support.

ivan

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Re: Status of NetDrive?
« Reply #7 on: February 09, 2015, 12:37:25 am »
To answer your question.  When we use the open file dialog in PMView to get picture files on the NAS we see the thumbnails and if we then move the pictures to a local disk the thumbnail is still there with the picture.  I am not sure if anything is actually stored in EAs or it is the results of our having fast processors and a Gigabit lan.  In fact we have never investigated it because we see no problems.

Regarding SAMBA, the server is available as standard on the NAS boxes we use so it was just a matter of setting up a client on the workstations.  I understand that there is such a thing available as standard on eCS.

Silvan Scherrer

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Re: Status of NetDrive?
« Reply #8 on: February 09, 2015, 09:39:37 am »
What is the current status of NetDrive?

I see BMT Mirco still selling it => http://www.bmtmicro.com/BMTCatalog/os2/netdrive.html, but the actual developer site http://www.blueprintsoftwareworks.com/netdrive/ only shows up in Arabic when I attempt to go there and Google Translate appears to indicate this is some sort of skin care advertisement... :o

So....is this effectively almost abandon-ware now? Or is this still a real product? Is anyone supporting it?

I'm curious because I installed the latest version (3.1.4) to try it out, basically linking to one of my WinXP machines...it does that great. Now that my media server is here (ZyXEL NSA325) I would like to fully test it out and see to what extent I can move my multiple HPFS partitions over to that storage media. It seems like NetDrive would allow this functionality fairly easily.

NSA325 box has other interface functionality, I could deploy NFS, FTP or even TFTP, however, I would much prefer to deploy something that is more streamlined and easier to configure.

Don't worry NetDrive is still alive. Only blueprintsoftwareworks seems to be gone. But this was just a service which the developer used.
We at bitwise have regularly contact with the developer and also sell NetDrive.

regards
Silvan
kind regards
Silvan
CTO bww bitwise works GmbH

Please help us with donations, so we can further work on OS/2 based projects. Our Shop is at https://www.bitwiseworks.com/shop/index.php

Dariusz Piatkowski

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Re: Status of NetDrive?
« Reply #9 on: February 10, 2015, 10:30:42 pm »
Don't worry NetDrive is still alive. Only blueprintsoftwareworks seems to be gone. But this was just a service which the developer used.
We at bitwise have regularly contact with the developer and also sell NetDrive.
regards
Silvan

Silvan,

Alright...purchase made...and NetDrive has successfully activated the registration.

Now where I thought I was running into a problem in my testing (registered vs non-registered NetDrive) would be removed I still am seeing the same problem.

What is the correct process for me to follow to log a ticket? I will look around on bitwise first...beyond this, anything else?

For others who may be seeing some/similar issue(s), I'm getting the following error as soon as I attempt to view photos (PMView, tried w/ and w/o icon creation) on a remote share (both WinXP and my NSA325 NAS):

------------------------------------------------------------

02-10-2015  12:08:06  SYS3175  PID 0055  TID 0003  Slot 00a1
G:\UTIL\NDFS\NDCTL.EXE
c0000005
157d67b9
P1=00000001  P2=0000000c  P3=XXXXXXXX  P4=XXXXXXXX 
EAX=0015feb0  EBX=00330150  ECX=00000000  EDX=00000000
ESI=003a2390  EDI=0033fff8 
DS=0053  DSACC=f0f3  DSLIM=ffffffff 
ES=0053  ESACC=f0f3  ESLIM=ffffffff 
FS=150b  FSACC=00f3  FSLIM=00000030
GS=0000  GSACC=****  GSLIM=********
CS:EIP=005b:157d67b9  CSACC=f0df  CSLIM=ffffffff
SS:ESP=0053:0250f934  SSACC=f0f3  SSLIM=ffffffff
EBP=0250f97c  FLG=00010246

NDPSMB.DLL 0001:003a67b9

------------------------------------------------------------

So it appears the NetDrive control module goes down. I have the process dumps for this as well, so hopefully I can upload them to bitwise.

Thanks!

ivan

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Re: Status of NetDrive?
« Reply #10 on: February 10, 2015, 11:10:40 pm »
Hi Dariusz,

One quick question because I don't know the NSA325 at all. 

When you set up the shares on the NSA325 did you enable SMB shares for that partition?  If you didn't you would most likely see a null connection which could throw up the trap - the fact it is a sys3175 tends to point to this.

Edit: also check the password for that share is, or isn't case sensitive which could also give that problem.
« Last Edit: February 10, 2015, 11:12:59 pm by ivan »

David McKenna

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Re: Status of NetDrive?
« Reply #11 on: February 10, 2015, 11:59:16 pm »
 I've seen that problem using the 2.2 beta versions of ndpsmb.dll. Also happens with MP3 and WAV files. The 2.1 GA version works fine here. I'm attaching to an OS/2 Samba server.

Dariusz Piatkowski

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Re: Status of NetDrive?
« Reply #12 on: February 11, 2015, 12:35:55 am »
Hi Dariusz,

One quick question because I don't know the NSA325 at all. 

When you set up the shares on the NSA325 did you enable SMB shares for that partition?  If you didn't you would most likely see a null connection which could throw up the trap - the fact it is a sys3175 tends to point to this.

Edit: also check the password for that share is, or isn't case sensitive which could also give that problem.

Ivan,
Actually, I can mount the drive(s), I do both, 1 to the XP box and 1 to the NAS (but have previously ran in single configurations as well). Once mounted I can easily navigate using command line, or something like Larsen Commander although the WPS Drives functionality usually proves to be a problem...however, attempting to get at the image library using PMView and openning a shared folder with a large number of images consistently cuases the crash.

On the NSA325 yes, the whole partition as well as individual shares are SMB enabled. So the result of executing "detach G:\ecs\system\samba\smbtree.exe  -S --user=xxx%xxx  --debuglevel=1 >G:\TMP\smbtree.srvlst" is:

Code: [Select]
[G:\tmp]type smbtree.srvlst
PRD
        \\TRYPIATKODS6400
LS
        \\ROUTERDLNA                    NETGEAR WNDR3800
HOME
        \\WINXP_DELL                    WINXP_DELL
        \\NAS                           BigBertha

...so I can actualy see all the shares on my LAN.

Dariusz Piatkowski

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Re: Status of NetDrive?
« Reply #13 on: February 11, 2015, 12:39:17 am »
I've seen that problem using the 2.2 beta versions of ndpsmb.dll. Also happens with MP3 and WAV files. The 2.1 GA version works fine here. I'm attaching to an OS/2 Samba server.

Hi David,

Hmm..interesting...OK, I've got the following version (2.2.0) installed here:

Signature:       @#bww bitwise works GmbH.:2.2.0#@##1## 26 Feb 2014 15:33:07     ThinkCentre::en::::@@NDPSMB - SMBFS NetDrive External Plugin Build Beta4-20140226

I will give the earlier one a try and will post back.

Thanks!

ivan

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Re: Status of NetDrive?
« Reply #14 on: February 11, 2015, 10:55:24 am »
Hi Dariusz,

OK, what you have should work so it looks as if there is a problem with the software.

As an aside, we have no problems using PMView to list and display the thumbnails in the open dialog as a directory with 3803 pictures and likewise on my home setup I can access my photos directory that has well over 90,000 photos in it.