Merging several network shares

Subliminal Aura · 10 Mar 2007 at 16:39

Anyone know of an easy(ish) way to make several network shares appear as one bit fat network share ?

For simplicity lets assume that the network shares all reside on a single machine and each of the shares are in fact simply disks on that machine.

I would like to make it appear as just one disk.

garyh · 10 Mar 2007 at 16:54

Surely you would need to RAID the disks on the single machine to create one logical disk, then share the disk as one share?

Subliminal Aura · 10 Mar 2007 at 17:02

garyh said:
Surely you would need to RAID the disks on the single machine to create one logical disk, then share the disk as one share?

Not too practical with the amount of data which currently resides on them... Or alternatively is there an app I can use to easily index the files and create its own virtual drive

matja · 12 Mar 2007 at 13:55

In Windows, you can mount NTFS partitions in folders, instead of assigning a drive letter - you could make a folder on your C:\ drive having a folder which is shared, containing folders which each disk is mounted into.

any UNIX variant : you have a wealth of choices, symlinks, regular mounts, bind mounts (Linux 2.6 kernel), union mounts (Linux unionfs, FreeBSD, etc), Samba VFS modules...

Subliminal Aura · 12 Mar 2007 at 14:53

matja said:
any UNIX variant : you have a wealth of choices, symlinks, regular mounts, bind mounts (Linux 2.6 kernel), union mounts (Linux unionfs, FreeBSD, etc), Samba VFS modules...

Pah thanks for that I'll try unionfs hopefully it also union NFS shares ?

I'll check if its available for 2.4 also.

Subliminal Aura · 12 Mar 2007 at 15:49

Awesome I couldnt be assked to unionfs directly on one of the servers but thought I'd try it via my laptop instead and it works great

df -k
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1 27585244 6943008 19240968 27% /
varrun 385212 80 385132 1% /var/run
varlock 385212 0 385212 0% /var/lock
procbususb 10240 144 10096 2% /proc/bus/usb
udev 10240 144 10096 2% /dev
devshm 385212 0 385212 0% /dev/shm
lrm 385212 17580 367632 5% /lib/modules/2.6.17-10-generic/volatile
10.0.0.10:/disk2 288435168 252697512 21085976 93% /mnt/gw-disk2
10.0.0.10:/disk1 26705352 20596160 4752512 82% /mnt/gw-disk1
null 1026639136 921112520 53376032 95% /mnt/gw-union
10.0.0.10:/disk3 153834888 138252672 7767800 95% /mnt/gw-disk3
10.0.0.10:/disk4 288451232 272323568 1475184 100% /mnt/gw-disk4
10.0.0.10:/disk5 115377640 109299328 217400 100% /mnt/gw-disk5
10.0.0.10:/disk7 153834856 127943280 18077160 88% /mnt/gw-disk7

so mount /mnt/gw-union is the union

df -m /mnt/gw-union/
Filesystem 1M-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
null 1002578 899524 52126 95% /mnt/gw-union

Shows it as a Terabyte union sweet

Thanks again for the heads up mate