Andrew Cotter wrote:
Hello all,
I am looking to build a larger array (6TB) using CentOS 4.4 to archive data to. We want to have the Windows server mount this array as a local drive so we were looking at iSCSI to do it. I have played with it in the past and gotten it to work in this combo, but I have a question about access to the data on the local (Centos) machine.
If I understand correctly, when I mount the device on windows, I need to format the array in a format that Windows (2003 server) can understand. Also, iSCSI only allows you to mount the array on one server at a time. Once I do that and write files to this array, is there anyway to access those files from the local machine (Centos)? I may want to do things like rsync to another location, copy files to another removable SATA disk, or just plain delete something.
Is it a choice of the OS so both windows and linux can read it? Little help with which one then. I know NTFS is still somewhat in its infancy.
if its mounted as a block device, nothing else should touch it, read OR write. block devices are NOT sharable, with the exception of specialized filesystems like GFS or IBrix Fusion Even a read only access would have issues with metadata consistency, if windows is updating a directory or MFT or whatever, linux could see stale/mixed data and would just throw up
the only 'safe' way to do it would be for the windows machine to share the logical file system, and have the linux system access it as a smbmount via samba. or use replication running on the windows server (rsync from mingw, etc)
Windows 2003 server has its own snapshotting capabilities, btw.