SMB/CIFS Keep Alive

[chrisg991]

Hello,
I have set up a Proxmox server and connected it to my file server via CIFS. This is working fine and I can transfer files between the two. My problem is that Proxmox appears to be keeping the hard drive in my file server spinning at all times. Because this is a hobby project and only used by me, I have set my file server to spin down the hard drive after 20 minutes of inactivity. Since connecting Proxmox to my file server, the hard drive has not stopped spinning down at all. Checking the file server logs, it appears that Proxmox is making frequent requests to the CIFS share, even with no backups running or VMs accessing the share. Is there a setting that I can change in Proxmox to prevent it making such frequent requests to the file server when idle? I'm not bothered about the impact that this may have on performance, since the share is only to store VM backups on anyway.

Thank you

 

[matrix]

Can you try to go Datacenter -> Storage -> CIFSDisk and edit it and uncheck Enable option
or by API/CLI

pvesh set storage/CIFSDisk --disable 1

 

[chrisg991]

@matrix Thank you for your reply. Does this mean that I would manually have to go back and enable the share again each time I wanted to back up my Proxmox server?

 

[matrix]

Yep, but you can write an bash script and link it to cronjob to mount/unmount at a certain time.

 

[BeoQ]

Hello *,
Resurrecting this oldish thread, but the topic and content matches exactly.

I did as described by matrix above, but I do have the observation that disabling the CIFSDisk does not stop Proxmox to access the Fileserver.

I'm trying to spindown my NAS in my smallish home environment, because they are not needed thru most of the day.
But i find Proxmox is accessing the $IPC share and the configured share for backups exactly every 15 minutes, even though it is disabled (done this in webinterface). This apparently prevents spindown.
I'm using a recent PVE-7.2_2 on x64 and samba 4.4.16 on a rather oldish armv5 NAS.

smbstatus -S IPC$ 7023 proxmox 192.168.178.31 Mon Sep 5 11:42:37 PM 2022 CEST - - Proxmox 7023 proxmox 192.168.178.31 Mon Sep 5 11:42:39 PM 2022 CEST - -

is there something i can do to stop these connects every 15min?
Completely removing it from the Datacenter storage settings seems possible, but putting it back in is quite hassle when i need it occasionally.

Edit: I just found out that proxmox does not unmount the CifsDisk at the underlaying Debian if you just disable it.
It just does not show it anymore, and it looks like ist stops constantly monitoring its content.

To me it looks like a bug in pve to not unmount a network filesystem when disabling it.

Thanks,
BeoQ

 

[RolandK]

>To me it looks like a bug in pve to not unmount a network filesystem when disabling it.

it's not a bug, it's simply not implemented.

see https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/pvesm-umount.115269/
regarding frequent accesses, i guess it's not proxmox but the active mount/cifs connection holding the connection/session active