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I have access to a bunch of Mac desktops, the hard drives of which are under-utilized. I want to set up a distributed filesystem to gang them together into one large virtual volume. The server has to be able to run as a normal user.

I've tried PVFS2, but it's designed for Linux and isn't running well on OSX (hangs the clients on write).

What should I use instead?

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What did you end up going with? –  Rob Olmos Nov 13 '10 at 22:36

3 Answers 3

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I finally found Tahoe-LAFS. It's a distributed filesystem implemented in Python which doesn't need root, and seems to work fine on the Macs. It's not directly mountable as far as I can tell, but it's accessible via HTTP or SFTP.

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@interfect If you need to directly mount it you can use sshfs or another FTP interface:


However, it sounds like you are already using the HTTP and/or (S)FTP interfaces, and using those interfaces might work better than direct mounting if you don't need the latter.

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