Distributed Filesystem

[Arjun Shankar]

Some of us managed to convinvce our college authorities to consider
installing Ubuntu (Dapper) on machines at the Institute internet
access facility.

There are about 40 machines, each with an 80 GB hard drive, and if
possible, we would like to club a few machines and use them as a
distributed filesystem server with lots of storage space.

Unfortunately, it's not possible to physically move the drives to one
machine (thanks to some warranty issues with IBM, the manufacturer.),
and so NFS is out of the question (unless I'm very mistaken).

Would it be possible to use this enormous amount of storage as a
single volume (which will obviously be mounted as "/home") shared on
the network? I did a search of packages avaiable for Dapper, and it
did turn up a free AFS client. But no server package. Moreover, I dont
even know if AFS is relevant here (thanks to my complete ignorance in
stuff of this kind).

We will probably be combining this with some sort of central authentication.

Any pointers?

Arjun