Dfs?

[Milkwerm]

Is there any way to configure 2 FreeNas boxes with CIFS shares to perform like windows DFS systems?

 

[jafin]

And by DFS, what aspects do you want. Multi peer replication? You could possibly set this up via rsync and cron, or on windows you could run a robocopy /mir to keep the shares in sync...

 

[Tekkie]

DFS is a little more transparent (near instantaneous) than robocopy /MIR, rsync&cron ;)

Doesn't ZFS offer replication, I believe (but I could be dreaming) I saw some option to setup replication for a ZFS volume, but I am not sure.

 

[headconnect]

I would have thought DFS was more related to utilising the combined volume of multiple file servers in a transparant way.. basically not duplication of information (not necessarily at least) but distribution of it (hence the D in DFS). the only way I can think of using windows dfs is to expose both freenas instances via iscsi to one or more windows servers and then use those to create the dfs.. but idon't even know if that's possible.

On the freebsd side, a quick google for 'freebsd distributed file system' shows a number of variations, among which are this: http://wiki.freebsd.org/GlusterFS

I would have no clue as to how to start considering if this is feasable, or if it's possible to roll into freenas, or if it could even play nice with ZFS - that's for you to research a bit :)

If you -do- find a pluggable solution that works with ZFS, I think it would make for a -great- addition to the system, would be seriously nice to hook up more storage to the same 'share', possibly add n+y freenas instances with redundancy (like raid for physical servers), or even for simplicity to add more storage to a system that doesn't have space to add more disks... mmmm. That would be quite nice (and a nice bonus for freenas feature set over 'competitors' ;))

Edit: There may be more hope than originally thought, seems there's quite a bit going around about glusterfs on top of zfs - note, i sincerely doubt it would be easy, or even likely, to be able to do this easily on FreeNAS. Anyway, at least this completely random link states some success with the combo freebsd+zfs+glusterfs:

I'm testing out GlusterFS on FreeBSD on top of ZFS and it seems to work great!

From: http://www.xsanity.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=62373

Doesn't actually contain any more useful info than that :)

Edit 2: Annoyed at seeing the 'using glusterfs with zfs' link being dead, so used archive.org's waybackmachine to see if i could find the post.. and i did :D http://web.archive.org/web/20081012001029/http://jordan.spicylogic.com/blog/?p=22
IF you decide to become masochistic and try it out, please share your experiences.

 

[Milkwerm]

Thanks for the replies guys. I appreciate your input.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_File_System_%28Microsoft%29 is a good description of what I meant.

Some interesting stuff for me to get my head around there Headconnect. May be a little beyond me yet.
I'm also interested in two way remotely and incrementally sync'ed systems as per Jafin's post to speed up shared drive access on slow links.

Hopefully something along these lines will make it into future releases.

 

[headconnect]

Theoretically as well you could run freenas as a virtual machine under hyper-v in a win2k8 server (times howevermany nodes you want on your DFS), then use iSCSI to get the disks back into the host system to then set up a DFS. However - that solution will be quite a bit more expensive and more difficult to maintain.. and at that point you might as well consider just using the disks directly with win2k8.