[olug] linux / freebsd as firewire disk?

[Christopher Cashell]

At Fri, 30 Mar 07, Unidentified Flying Banana Matt Anderson, said:
> I guess what I'm trying to accomplish (or at least establish as  
> possible) is this: can one set up a multi-drive, RAID  enclosure  
> running Linux or FreeBSD which can be used simply as a firewire disk  
> by other operating systems (OS X, Win-whatever, another linux or  
> freebsd host, etc).

I would say it's definitely possible, but most likely non-trivial.  I
know Macs support a "Firewire Target Mode" where you can boot it with a
special option and it will present it's hard drive as a FireWire drive,
but I've not seen anything similar for Linux.  A quick googling didn't
turn up anything, either.

> Ideally, the other OS could format the volume in it's own native file  
> system of choice.
> 
> The equivalent of rolling your own thing like is mentioned here:
> 
>    http://www.macnn.com/articles/07/03/29/iomega.2tb.raid.drive/

This is something of an apples to oranges comparison.  In the case of
the device referenced, you're dealing with what is essentially a dumb
set of disks with RAID support, interfaced as direct attached storage.
In the case of a disk enclosure connected to a Linux system, you have
the ability to offer something more comparable to a NAS or SAN.  You can
support concurrent access from multiple machines, you can support
multiple methods of connectivity, and you can take advantage of powerful
Linux tools for managing it (such as LVM).

Instead of trying to dumb down the Linux box into a simple bunch of
disks, I'd look at something like OpenFiler (http://www.openfiler.com/).
That will provide you with a huge amount of functionality and
flexibility in using your storage.  You can even export disks with iSCSI
if you want to access and format them as native volumes.

>   Matt Anderson

-- 
| Christopher
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| Here I stand.  I can do no other.              |
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