Distributed Linux SAN

[ToxicBunny]

Ok heres one for you guys...

An idea popped into my head last night whilst out drinking.. I have loads of old pc's in my house, with varying drive sizes... It would be lekker to put them all to good use and be able to present the drives as one "virtual" drive of a much larger size..

Is there a Linux distro out there that does something like this?

 

[FacELesS.]

I don't know of a specific linux distro for this... but maybe have a look at openAFS: http://www.openafs.org/. It is not the easiest thing to setup, but it is a very nice system.

 

[ToxicBunny]

A start is always better than nothing .. and easy to setup or not is not a problem.. i've got one of those bee-in-a-bonnet things... so I'll persevere and get it right..

Also starting to contemplate looking for a distributed processing Media Centre type thing, that can offload certain processing jobs to other machines on a highbandwidth backbone...

 

[Other Pineapple Smurf]

Try Freenas, I set up a san on a P1 with 250GB IDE drives using this and it was awesome. Used it before I could even spell LINUX (actually BSD in this case) and recommend it all.

http://www.freenas.org/

 

[ToxicBunny]

cbruns : I'm look more at using about 4 or 5 machines with drives and presenting it as one virtual drive.... so I'm going to need a distro that can act as a headend and deal with backend servers to do the storage... and i kinda need it to be dynamic so I can add more drives and servers as I go...

 

[bdt]

Obligatory: "imagine a Beowulf cluster..." ..oh, wait...!

 

[ToxicBunny]

I've contemplated that already ... and its on my list of things to try...

 

[Other Pineapple Smurf]

cbruns : I'm look more at using about 4 or 5 machines with drives and presenting it as one virtual drive.... so I'm going to need a distro that can act as a headend and deal with backend servers to do the storage... and i kinda need it to be dynamic so I can add more drives and servers as I go...

Ok, just setup a server (SAMBA) then remotely mount the other drives to this server. You just need a simple server install on all the other PCs. I think even Damn Small Linux would be good enough.

* I remotely mount my desktop harddrive on my Netbook and it works like a charm