[clug] Managing NAS units?

[Michael Still]

Robert Edwards wrote:

[snip]

> My question is: why did those quite independent services need to
> share the NAS? Why couldn't they each have a smaller NAS for primary
> storage and possibly share a separate storage system for secondary
> (backup) storage?

Yeah, I agree with that. There are other problems with having one mega
filesystem:

 - fscks
 - outages in one NAS take away all
 - inconsistent disk access speed (one NAS is slower than others for
some reason)
 - others I am too lazy to think of

The approach I've been taking at home recently is to buy commodity PCs,
stuff them full of disk, and then expose that disk via NFS. There is
then one file system with a bunch of symlinks mounted everywhere. I
guess I'm hoping (but haven't tested yet) that Linux is smart enough to
follow the symlink locally and not push traffic through the server that
exports that top level file system.

(Oh, and that's a bit of a lie. I only have two of these machines so
far, so it's not like I have a data center in my apartment or anything...)

Mikal