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

Yes

[I Am The Owl]

Look at OpenAFS.

Network file systems...

[kernelistic]

... such as SMB, Coda, NFS, AppleTalk and AFS work very nicely. We use a centralized data repository which is backed up daily. Users get access to their data from their stations, finding files takes less time, and backups are a breeze.

Modern IDE drives will handle the traffic that's generated by a decent number of client PCs. This lets you can place a couple of 200GB drives in a machine which will act as a server, and not have to worry about scouring 9 or 10 PCs to find your work! (Note: Some older BIOSes are limited to 45GB, so you might want to check for BIOS upgrades if you run into this issue.)

Re:Imagine this on a beowulf

[zulux]

Each node has a spare 20GB partition that is currently doing *nothing*. I would simply love to find a filesystem solution that can handle stripping or mirroring for a nice 32*20/x GB of filespace

That easy. Create a partition on each box and export it via NFS. Then plunk down a NetBSD box on the network and RAID the partitions with RAIDframe. Export *that* partition via NFS as well. Export it via Samba and even the little Windows boxes can play.

FreeBSD has RAIDframe as well, but the NetBSD version is marginally more robust and has worked over NFS are far back as '98.