On Sun, May 21, 2006 at 03:22:51PM +0100, Brett Parker wrote:
On Sun, May 21, 2006 at 08:36:26AM -0500, chrisisbd@leary.csoft.net chrisisbd@leary.csoft.net wrote:
Does anyone have any experience of using a network drive with Linux? Nearly all the reasonably priced ones I have seen advertised tell you all about how they appear as a 'local drive' on Windows systems but give no clue as to how/whether they will work with Linux.
One actually appears to be running Samba but that still isn't ideal for Linux.
While I'm asking, if I press an old system into service with a basic Linux OS installed on it how can I network its drives? Can one just mount drives across the local network or does one *have* to run something like NFS or Samba?
Depends on what you want to do, if you want to share it with more than one computer, then yes, something like NFS or Samba is the way to go, if you just want to export the block device to use on some other machine, then you might like to look at nbd, or enbd which provide network block devices.
I want to be able to see the drives from various systems. Samba is the obvious answer for Windows systems but I wondered if there was something simpler for a Linux to Linux connection as smbclient for Linux always strikes me as a bit of a bodge somehow.
Having just googled a bit, I've also come across sfs (http://www.fs.net/) which looks interesting, but is probably well out of the scope of what you want to do!
Might also be worth looking at Coda (http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/) and OpenAFS (http://www.openafs.org/). You might *also* be interested in sshfs and fuse, which I use personally to mount my home from my desktop box in to my home directory on my laptop as and when required.
I have used sshfs across the internet to a remote system, it works well, I suppose it would be OK across the local network and would work faster.