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. -- tkb