xserve/xraid volume mounting and sharing question

[mdporter]

In setting up an xserve/xraid I’ve gotten the following request. The xraid has been partioned into four volumes. We want to be ale to mount one volume, then have the others accessable as directories from the mounted volume. We do not wish to make people mount all four volumes to access all files.

Is there a way to do this? We tried symbolic links, but those links don’t work when logging in via afp.

[mdporter]

striping wasn’t an option (it was my first suggestion). There is a backup/restore concern due to the amount of data required.

How would kerberos help? This server is not part of an open directory. Mac clients have to authenticate manually into it.

[Anonymous]

This is tough to achieve, but do-able, with the help of perl/shell scripts.

Some background, first.

We have several NFS volumes in our studio. sometimes we upgrade to the latest technology, and the volume name, computer name, and even the platform OS changes. Because of this, we wanted to find a way to abstract out volume/machine names from our file paths, and have one common mount point that is always “good”. (Incidently, this is an NFS only solution..)

So, what we did, was to have a small harddrive exported called “shows”. It shows up in finder, as a drive. We mount this using an /etc/fstab entry. Next we use automounter, and mount the other volumes. This gives you the effect of having only “shows” appear on the finder Desktop, even though all of your volumes are mounted. We then wrote a perl script that creates a map of the entire file structure on each of our big volumes, and creates a symbolic link/empty folder version on the “shows” volume.

What this does, is make a representation of all of our folders and files on the small drive, which the user traverses. Once you get to the end of the path, (the very last folder) , the user is then magically transported to the real volume with the file actually lives. (makes sense? The sym link points to the automounted volume.)

This is pretty maintanence intensive, however. We have cron scripts that do a lot of behind the scenes work. However, it does work.

bob..

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