NASLite Network Attached Storage

Does anyone know of a good, inexpensive, prefereably GPL, NAS aggreagation server?

It's relatively inexpensive to add 1TB storage nodes with naslite-usb and $100 250gb drives, but each node has 4 shares so finding and storing data would quickly become a nightmare.

I'm looking for something I can throw on my win2k3 server, or maybe a linux host, that can aggregate these nas shares into a single transparent volume accross multiple nas hosts.

Thanks to NASLite, adding storage is cheap, adding storage is easy, but I need some way to manage it all without memorizing which files landed on which drive on which nas box.

The obvious way, If you're running something other than NASLite, is to use RAID to stripe all the drives together. This can be done under Windows or Linux, but I don't know how. However, 4 drives with no redundancy massively increases the chance of losing your whole filesystem, instead of just one disk's worth of files.

Thats not exactly what I'm after. I want to aggregate my storage across devices and platforms, in a way that the logical file structure is independant of the physical file locations. I don't want to use raid, or custom file systems, just merge a bunch of existing file systems across multiple devices in a relatively transparent way.

Sounds simple enough

Maybe not a perfect solution, but you can see all your files (or what you configure) in alphabetical, date etc. order in one list, independent of location or drives. Use X1 desktop search, its better then google etc. It has a file buton and you can see only files and you can configure what drives, shares you index. go to http://www.x1.com, you get a free version of same software at http://desktop.yahoo.com (the yahoo version does not have all the email options, the rest is same)

If you have another spare box then you could set that up to mount every network drive you need, create aliases to folders on those drives and then serve from that box. That's a pretty awkward way of doing things (even if you script the creation of aliases) and it needs an extra machine to be running all the time, but it's best I can think of (if I now understand you correctly).

While it is not a solution today, I have suggested that Tony consider adding Unionfs to NAS Lite in a future release. Unionfs is a Stackable Unification File System that would acheive exactly what you (and I) are after.

You can see my post here for more information - http://www.serverelements.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=407&highlight=&sid=864e611569ffb743fc873f6f1261b158

At the time, no one else voiced interest in this but Tony had looked into it and he has it on one of the wish lists. Of course, if no one else voice's interest, it won't be high on the list.

At first glance, UnionFS looks perfect.

I have not yet tried this, but it sounds promising:

http://www.freenas.org/

-Jeff

jfrantz,

Intresting, just tried it out and it has some good features, its a early build but it does work.. gonna keep my eye on this..

Eden

Interesting project. Nice direction and feature set in the plan, but I couldn't get it to work. One to keep an eye on though.

FreeNAS is not bad at all. Is "Access" - Users, Group, section NOT AVAILABLE or am I doing something wrong. If that works, this will solve my quest for simple NAS solution with security.

Thanks for any reply.

NASLite is awesome in my book.

icpeanuts,

I'd say these are going to be implemented in due course.

eden

This would be the ticket for Naslite. It seems Freenas will already support it.
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/store/embedded_storage

FREENas loks promising, btu when I see the words "alpha" on the release page I get somewhat nervous...