Sorry, late reply. If you read my recent "reverse DNS" post, the disk
issue I refer to is that all my users had too much build-up in the
Safari cache. It's not the space that is the issue for me, or the
network traffic. It's the fact that it's a ton of little tiny files.
I ran into an impossible-to-rebuild the B-tree directory issue on the
disk.
I can't get confirmation for it, but my best guess is that the volume
of files ate up the entire catalog file and the disk was having trouble
finding pointers to files that it wanted to create. After removing the
files, my disk performance returned to normal.
It doesn't reduce the network traffic, but I have a cron script run
weekly now that contains the following line:
The radmind solution suggested below is cleaner, but you have to deploy
radmind or something similar to do that, and it is not feasible in my
situation at the moment. I've also wondered about directing the Safari
cache directory to /dev/null but haven't gone far enough to try it.
Gary
--
Gary Needham, Apple Systems Analyst
Kearney Public Schools, Kearney, NE
On Feb 10, 2005, at 2:15 PM, Christopher Butler wrote:
This suggestion comes with a caveat - we use radmind
(http://www.radmind.org) to maintain our workstation images, so
statements
like "we created ... on all our workstations" reflect very simple
procedures - create it on one workstation and let radmind put it
everywhere else. Furthermore, radmind cleans up all the extraneous
files
on each workstation each night.
Here's what we did
1 - create a folder /Library/Caches/Safari on all our workstations
2 - on the home directory server, delete every
/path/to/home/directory/*/Library/Caches/Safari folder for all our
users
3 - create symbolic links in /path/to/home/directory/*/Library/Caches
that
point to /Library/Caches/Safari.
(We did steps 2 & 3 with a little bash script the just for-looped its
way
through all the home folders on the server.)
The consequence is that when a user logs in, the Safari symbolic link
in
their ~/Library/Caches folder points to /Library/Caches/Safari on the
local hard drive.
This is the view from the server:
saturn:/path/to/home/directory root# ls -al
acurat05/Library/Caches/Safari
lrwxr-xr-x 1 acurat05 Class05 22 29 Oct 17:10
Works like a charm for us. The consequence is that the local
/Library/Caches/Safari folder gets filled with all kinds of crap, but
it
all gets deleted at night by radmind.
Hope this helps,
Christopher Butler
Director of Technology
Shore Country Day School
Beverly, MA 01915
email@hidden
"Neal Pynenberg" <email@hidden> on Thursday, February
10,
2005 at 2:59 PM -0500 wrote:
I hope this doesn't fall under the 'NOT AGAIN!' category.
Watching the AFP Access server log remotely in a terminal window has
shed
a lot of light on the amount of traffic that goes on
between clients and server.
I'm looking to reduce this traffic.
Safari and it's cache seem to create a large bulk of this traffic.....
so... I WANT TO TURN OFF CACHING!!
Anybody have any ways of dealing with this? Perhaps a login hook of
some
kind to redirect Safari cache to /tmp or something?
