On Thu, Feb 24, 2005 at 12:54:57PM +0530, gaurav wrote: > I have around 50 machines in my lab, since user data is lying > at central server (all home directory mounted here)....around 50 to 70% > storage of local machines is un used .. I was thinking if there was a > file system using which > > 1. Is Distributed across all these machines > 2. Transparent to users (i.e for users can access thru normal path eg > /dist/tom/data ) > 3. Redundancy factor (Since files are distributed, if one part of > gets corrupt it should automatically restore) > 4. ACL > 5. Scalable > > Is this my wild dream ...or stuff like already exists..if yes the pl > share.I was evaluating CODA but it is not ready for production release OpenAFS, Lustre, GFS. None of these do precisely what you want, but you ought to evaluate them. There are a number of experimental peer-to-peer filesystems based upon distributed hashes. Several are implemented in Java, e.g., OceanStore, and have convenient Java APIs, but aren't readily usable as general-purpose filesystems. MIT has a (dormant?) project called Ivy that uses SFS and DHash/Chord to implement a distributed peer-to-peer filesystem: http://www.pdos.lcs.mit.edu/ivy/ Ivy is log-structured, so reclaiming space of "deleted" files is a problem. As with NFS, the semantics of most p2p filesystems is not POSIX, so there are limits on what you can do with them. But for archival storage, they're great! A fun/useful project for a bored student would be to port the various user-space filesystems (CFS, SFS/Ivy, etc.) that use the NFS API (or Java APIs), to the FUSE (Filesystems in Userspace, fuse.sourceforge.net) API, which is currently in Andrew Morton's -mm kernel tree, awaiting more testing before merging. Regards, Bill Rugolsky
