Hi, How tough would it be to implement this on top of sshfs? Mount all the partitions other than root for 'clients' onto a common location on a 'server', and then all the clients can mount that mountpoint and access the entire hierarchy? I have no idea if any problems of recursive nature will happen, but I guess you can worry about it later, as the current set of users is primarily Windows based and we don't expect them to play around with stuff. I've tried doing cyclic mounts between 2 systems, but I was sane enough to not experiment by remounting the mountpoint at the 'server' on to the client again.
Because of this, the usual cp, mv, rm and even Nautilus will work flawlessly, as sshfs uses fuse to implement a transparent userspace filesystem, (which is what all FUSE based clients do). Also, transfer is completely secure, as SFTP is used to do the transfers, and you have pretty decent performance over a LAN (wired obviously). I've watched movies and processed images over sshfs without hiccups. You might have to configure fstab and export public keys to the server and vice versa, to allow auto mounting once a machine comes up on the LAN, and write some bash scripts that'll take down the networked file system via ssh/clusterssh/some other suitable program when your server is being shutdown/restarted. These scripts will make the lab guys less reliant on you, as they can operate the whole thing, as call you just for troubleshooting. For Windows support, I could suggest WinSCP on the clients, but I'm not sure if you will be able to use the disk's partition as part of the network. Ninad S. Pundalik http://twitter.com/ni_nad http://ninadpundalik.co.cc/blog GPG Key Fingerprint: 2DF7 B856 C75E C9F9 0504 C0EF D456 1946 7C45 2C69 -- ubuntu-in mailing list ubuntu-in@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-in
