October 29th, 2003
Network Block Device
“What is it: With this thing compiled into your kernel, Linux can use a remote server as one of its block devices. Every time the client computer wants to read /dev/nd0, it will send a request to the server via TCP, which will reply with the data requested. This can be used for stations with low disk space (or even diskless – if you boot from floppy) to borrow disk space from other computers. Unlike NFS, it is possible to put any file system on it. But (also unlike NFS), if someone has mounted NBD read/write, you must assure that no one else will have it mounted.”
This came up from this Slashdot article regarding resilient storage across a network.
This means you can run RAID across multiple machines, or share CD-RW and Tape drives… very very cool.
Check it out http://nbd.sourceforge.net/