Linux Server Hacks, Volume Two

Hack #61. Quick and Dirty NAS

Combining LVM, NFS, and Samba on new file servers is a quick and easy solution when you need more shared disk resources.

Network Attached Storage (NAS) and Storage Area Networks (SANs) aren't making as many people rich nowadays as they did during the dot-com boom, but they're still important concepts for any system administrator. SANs depend on high-speed disk and network interfaces, and they're responsible for the increasing popularity of other magic acronyms such as iSCSI (Internet Small Computer Systems Interface) and AoE (ATA over Ethernet), which are cool and upcoming technologies for transferring block-oriented disk data over fast Ethernet interfaces. On the other hand, NAS is quick and easy to set up: it just involves hanging new boxes with shared, exported storage on your network.

"Disk use will always expand to fill all available storage" is one of the immutable laws of computing. It's sad that it's as true today, when you can pick up a 400-GB disk for just over $200, as it was when I got my CS degree and the entire department ran on some DEC-10s that together had a whopping 900 MB of storage (yes, I am old). Since then, every computing environment I've ever worked in has eventually run out of disk space. And let's face it—adding more disks to existing machines can be a PITA (pain in the ass). You have to take down the desktop systems, add disks, create filesystems, mount them, copy data around, reboot, and then figure out how and where you're ...