Monitor NAS usage. Xserve XRAID

Z

zerassar

Registered
Morning All.

We have an Xserve connected to an XRAID that hosts our network storage.
Our creative department run a mix of Tiger and leopard and use these shares to store their artwork.

Storage is at a premium and some staff are using it to store less than legal items.

Is their a way to track and monitor changes to the shares? Which users are moving/deleting/creating?

At this stage to locate the unauthorised material I am issuing the unix command "find /Volumes -name *.avi > output.txt"

But while that does find the offending material, we are looking to pin it on the offender themselves. Otherwise all I am left doing is continually sending reminder emails about IT policy to all staff.

If I could isolate a computername, IP or even better the login they used to access the server that would be great.
 
Why not have every user use their own storage space, and set quotas on their shares?

That would eliminate them using up valuable space, as well as pin down the perpetrator.

I'm sure that the file copy operations that are going on when they're uploading/downloading AVI files is stored in the system or other logs, as well (usually located in /var/log). If that information is stored there, it would be extremely easy to pin down what, when, where and who was doing it.
 
Unfortunately we do require them all to be working off the same share space. As multiple people work on the same documents frequently.

It would become a logistical nightmare if had to transfer between different share points every time a different staff member required access.
 
I would recommend using grep (or a similar text-parsing utility) to parse the logs, then. You should be able to nail down the exact user or computer that the files are coming from.

I believe (if you're using AFP for the shares) that the logs will be located here:

/Library/Logs/AppleFileService

If you knew the name of one of the files, you could do something similar to:
Code: 
grep nameoffile.avi *.log
or
Code: 
grep nameoffile.avi *
...while in that directory to parse all the log files for the file named "nameoffile.avi".
 
None of the logs in there have any reference to any particular file from what i can see.

A lot of references to mkdir and fork but never a file name. A generic *.avi turns up nothing interesting.... in fact the output is empty as no matches are found. :-(
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top