Network file systems

[Michael Hipp]

Net Llama! wrote:
> On Wed, 30 May 2007, Michael Hipp wrote:
>> Is there a "network file system" that has all the features of a true Linux
>> file system (e.g. ext3)? I'm thinking of features like inodes, hard links,
>> soft links, unix security model, mtimes and atimes, journalling.
>>
>> I know samba pretty well and it doesn't do this AFAICT as it basically
>> emulates a FAT32 fs over the wire.
>>
>> Does NFS do this? Is there some other "n. f. s." that does? (I read opinions
>> of NFS not being all that stable.)
>>
>> Can you do RAID over the network?
> 
> I don't understand what you're trying to accomplish.  NFS (and every other 
> networked filesystem that I've ever used) has no understanding of the 
> underlying disk structure.  It sits on top of the real filesystem on disk, 
> which has inodes, etc.
> 
> What is the problem that you're trying to solve?

Sorry I wasn't clear.

There are probably 2 things most important:

- The ability to hard link files on a "network drive" ... mount the drive on a 
Linux box; copy a bunch of files there (cp -a foodir /mnt/nfs); create a hard 
linked copy of those files (cp -al /mnt/nfs/foodir /mnt/nfs/foodir1). Saves 
lots of storage space when you want an exact "time snapshot" of a bunch of files.

- I'd like to be able to manage the security/access of those files across the 
network using standard nix tools chmod/chown. (I can probably work around this 
requirement.)

- The other thing is that I use the Unison file synchronizer to sync some 
large directories. Unison first attempts to use inode numbers as a quick way 
to determine if a file has changed and needs to be synced. Failing that it 
falls back to the (much slower and more I/O intensive) rsync algorithm to do a 
  full file scan. I'd like to avoid that second step in the 98% of cases where 
it is unneeded.

And I need to be doing this from more than one client system so the file 
system in question needs to be shared/exported.

(The more mundane features like mtime, atime, journalling are probably taken 
care of by the underlying fs.)

Does any of that make any sense?

Michael