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).
The next fun piece is how to incorporate that storage space into an existing Active Directory structure to apply AD acls for limited access.
I'd rather not use Samba, as that is its own infrastructure and maintains its own credentials database.
What are my best options?
Why would you use USB disks? Even if you could put up with not-so-stellar speed, the tangle of cables & powerpacks would be messy and prone to accidental disconnect. On top of that, using only LVM to glue it all together would really exacerbate the disconnect problem. A single disk failure could bring the entire volume down with no recourse but to restore from backup.
That's another thing - is this data valuable? If so, you need to have an idea for backups.
Ditch the crazy USB scheme and get better hardware - raid/hotswap. And a 10 drive, 10TB raid5 is also going to be a headache. There's been several recent discussions here about such matters - large volume filesystems, SW raid vs HW raid, raid types, LVM, etc. Look through the archives.