Date: Fri, 17 Aug 2007 12:36:12 -0500 From: Eric Anderson <anderson@freebsd.org> To: Martin Cracauer <cracauer@cons.org> Cc: freebsd-fs@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Block device over network from Linux to FreeBSD Message-ID: <46C5DC8C.50106@freebsd.org> In-Reply-To: <20070817155741.GA6255@cons.org> References: <20070817155741.GA6255@cons.org>
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Martin Cracauer wrote: > All right, here's a question that'll make your IQ drop by 5 points > just from pondering it :-) > > What's the best way to provide, over the network, a block device on > harddrives that live on a Linux box and "export" them to a FreeBSD > machine? Aka I want a FreeBSD filesystem on harddrives that are > physically in a Linux box. > > Long story: > > My backup strategy is a FreeBSD filesystem with snapshots on a bunch > of harddrives that live on networked computers in the basement. All > these computers boot diskless or disky into a variety of OSes, usually > Linux or FreeBSD. It would be easy to just use ext2fs or another > filesystem supported by both, but I'd really like ufs2 snapshots. So > I need to access the disks in a box running Linux as a block device > from a machine running FreeBSD. When the machine having the physical > disks runs FreeBSD I want to access the same raw devices directly, of > course. > > The brute-force approach would be: > - ext2fs on disks > - files inside ext2fs for use via mdconfig (and ccd) > - then, depending on OSes booted, either: > - export via NFS and mdconfig on NFS mounts on remote FreeBSD machine > - direct FreeBSD mount (machine runs FreeBSD) > > Another alternative I see is VMware or if any of the free emulators > can boot FreeBSD on Linux and use the disks directly in the guest OS. > > Linux has a network layer for block devices: > http://www.it.uc3m.es/ptb/nbd/ . On first sight, it doesn't look too > exiting nor does it look straightforward to implement a client in > GEOM. It uses daemons on both ends, so failover will not exactly be > an improvement over NFS. At least with NFS you know that a lot of > other people depend on what you write being delivered eventually. > > Then there's ATA over Ethernet as an established protocol. > > Any other ideas? > > USB'ing the harddrives is not considered sportish :-) > > Martin iSCSI? Eric
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