Consoldated Network Storage?

bigstupid asks: "Is there anyway to better utilize storage space on your network? I have a home network with about nine permanently attached PCs. A few of these are older PII300 with smaller hard drives (3-10GB). What I want to do is consolidate as much of the network storage as possible. That is: Instead of 2.4GB here, 4.6GB there, 5GB hither, 5BG tither, and 6 GB yon, I would like this storage space to appear to any computer I designate a 'client' to see and use this storage space as one large (in the case above 23GB) volume. I know I can do this within a machine with logical volumes or RAID, but is there a piece of software - client or server side - that will do this on Linux or Windows?"

Comments

NFS And samba

[norwoodites]

Use NFS and reexport it using samba.

Single point of failure.

[Anonymous Coward]

When one of your drives crash, which files do you want to loose?

Just the one drive, or all files on all drives?

Linux NOW

[Shwag]

Ian Murdock, of debIan and Progeny fame, had a project called LinuxNOW which causes workstations on the network to share hard drive space as if a single drive, and also share processor cycles as in clustering.

Here is an older article on LinuxNOW.
http://www.linuxworld.com/linuxworld/lw -2001-03/lw -03-murdock.html

What I did:

[penguin_punk]

Here's my 2 cents:

I was in pretty much the same boat as you, but I picked up a couple new 60Gb-ers. I thought about combining them using MS's DFS, but then the drives started failing on me one-by-one.

I recommend you do the same. I mean ask yourself: Do I really want to trust my porn collection to a 6-year-old 2Gb drive? NO!!

Hardware's Cheap. Use Wisely.