[CentOS] LVM, usb drives, Active Directory

Wed Dec 16 14:31:53 UTC 2009
Chan Chung Hang Christopher <christopher.chan at bradbury.edu.hk>

Scott Ehrlich wrote:
> I have a client with a handful of USB drives connected to a CentOS
> box.   I am charged with binding the USB drives together into a single
> LVM for a cheap storage data pool (10 x 1 TB usb drives = 10 TB cheap
> storage in a single mount point).

How about eSATA? Surely an eSATA enclosure for 10 drives won't be more 
expensive than ten individual usb enclosures?!

> 
> The next fun piece is how to incorporate that storage space into an
> existing Active Directory structure to apply AD acls for limited
> access.

AD does not have acls. NTFS does. The closet things to NTFS acls in UNIX 
is nfs4 acls. That you can get with ZFS. I suggest that you give 
OpenSolaris a shot instead. Or you can be one of the testers for 
ntfs-3g's acl implementation...

> 
> I'd rather not use Samba, as that is its own infrastructure and
> maintains its own credentials database.

Have you ever used winbind? It maps AD credentials to POSIX credentials.

> 
> What are my best options?

Stuff not provided by Centos/RHEL at the moment.