NASLite Network Attached Storage

Hello,

Please bear with me ... I am a Linux newbie, but I have a question/request.

I love NASLite + ! It is perfect to serve my media collection at home. A low-end machine with large hard drives and I have a very large file/media server.

Of course, it could be better <grin> - I would also like support for support IDE PCI cards and look forward for some form of RAID support, but in the short term, I have a question/request.

Would it be possible to have support for each drive to be presented to the user as one read only folder ?

I just read about Unionfs which could be just the ticket.

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7714
http://www.unionfs.org/
http://www.fsl.cs.sunysb.edu/project-unionfs.html

This would allow NASLite to present one folder, maybe a read only share, that would present the contents of each drive in one "place".

Tony - is this something you guys would consider ?

Is this something I could roll into NASLite + myself ?

TIA

Good evening guys,

Just to reply to my own post and bring the topic back to the surface - I am encouraged to see that we might be getting closer to NAS 2.0 and I have been giving it much thought ... and I thought of another addition to my original suggestion.

What would you guys think if one NAS server, that supported Unionfs, could act as the "master" NAS server and could add shares from other NAS servers as parts of the one Unionfs share it served to the clients.

I know it sounds a little silly, but I am getting close to needing a second server for my HTPC/media server enviroment and it would be great to be able to add more files on a second or even third server that would appear to all clients as one share.

This would make accessing and navigating the media content as simple as possible while providing the capability of expansion.

Any other users think this is a good idea ?

Looking forward to 2.0

Berg
Why do you need another server? If its just down to disk size and media content does take up space - Lord of the rings the fellowship in High def is over 20GB. vers 2.0 will hopefully support SATA which will be better for movie streaming, but also as many IDE/SATA drives as you can hang in the box and get a power cable and IDE/SATA cable too, so if your m/board has a few spare PCI slots your away get some cheap SATA/IDE cards and bung in some more drives.
There are times when I have considered putting XP in and running as a server but I really like the simpleness of NASlite, the hastle with any pc running windows eg security issues/viruses etc means I'm going to see how vers 2.0 looks and I can't wait for a look at the UPnp media thing thats in the ppeline. It would be good to have a sort of advanced version/access that would enable users to "add in" linux based options such as the media or uniofs ideas but at the end of the day Tony has a plan as to what he wants to achieve from his product's so although we can request various options but I feel that we should also respect his descisions. I mean at the end of the day if you walked into your Ford car dealer and said I want this Focus to handle like a Jaguar Ford would probably suggest you buy a Jaguar then

I tried to hack something like that together a while back, but got stuck got stuck on something and never got it working with network shares. But it would be great if we could, at the very least, have a UnionFS of all the local drives exported R/W.

I hope we get support for >4 drives in V2. HD Pvr recordings chewed through my 4x250 gig NAS and its only mid season.

I agree - I would much rather have one large server with 8, 10, 12 drives than multiple servers, but multiple servers might be a need anyways. My current media collection (250+ DVDs, 40 000+ musical tracks, TV shows, pictures) keeps growing and I need more room. Without buying a very pricey case and power supply combo, I would think that once you have 8 drives in a case, you are close to maxed out, needing a second box.




I agree ! The geek in me wants NAS Lite + to have all these added features but I also chose it for its simplicity and "appliance" approach. After using NAS Lite + for a year now, I still want the added features but I have found that I appreciate the simplicity/stability most !

Hats off to Tony and co.