How can I tie togeather extra space on Macintosh desktops with a distributed filesystem?

Question

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?

Answer 1

Check out GlusterFS and the cluster distribute translator:

http://www.gluster.com/community/documentation/index.php/Translators

http://www.gluster.com/community/documentation/index.php/Gluster_3.1:_Installing_on_Mac_OS_X

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

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

http://tahoe-lafs.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2011-May/006369.html

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.