Things like unionfs/mhddfs are only useful if you browse the contents of
the drives and you want to see, say, all albums on all drives by one
artist within a virtual directory by its name.
Code:
--------------------
Disk1: Coltrane/Ole! Disk2: Coltrane/Om
Overlay VFS: Coltrane/Ole!
Om
--------------------
Doing this adds processing and I/O overhead, slows things down and
decreases the overall robustness of the filesystem. In particular, you
may enter unexpected issues or delays when deleting files and when
dropping new files into the VFS layer. Accessing files from underneath
(within the FS of each drive) is usually a safe way to go but you have
to spend a bit of time locating/choosing the right place for your
operation within the drives.
The last issue I have with unioning is that by definition it hides
duplicates. I *do* have duplicates in my library and try to kill them
when I can. A unioning fs just hides them...
SBS uses a database to find files, so the layout of the file hierarchy
is of little importance IMHO. As the vast majority you can do without
unioning (or add it later if you want.) This is what I'd do.
In /mnt create mount points for your physical disk drives, and in fstab
specify them for use at boot:
Code:
--------------------
LABEL=data1-201108 /mnt/vol1 ext3 noatime 0 2
LABEL=data2-201108 /mnt/vol2 ext3 noatime 0 2
--------------------
In the server's user home, create a directory /home/foo/music and
subdirectories for files, playlists, your MIP database
Then inside the
subdir for files, create symbolic soft links to your music data:
Code:
--------------------
/home/foo/music/files/vol1 symlink to /mnt/vol1/music
/home/foo/music/files/vol2 symlink to /mnt/vol2/mp3s
--------------------
In SBS, configure as this
Code:
--------------------
Music library path: /home/foo/music/files
Playlists library path: /home/foo/music/SBSplaylists
--------------------
You need to have a little free space in /home/foo for playlists, and to
make sure user foo has the expected access rights to the /mnt/volX
mountpoints.
On the day you'll need adding a drive, just create one more mountpoint
in /mnt, update fstab, populate /home/foo/music/files/ with one more
symbolic link and have SBS rescan the music directory.
If one day you wish to improve browsability, you can configure a
unioning filesystem to use the above layout, and, for example, present
a read-only view of the files within the /mnt/volX hierarchies under
/home/foo/allmystuff
I see using RAID or LVM as a dangerous overkill for a couple TB of
precious and mostly static data. Done well these 2 will improve things,
but done bad you're SOL.
(This example assumes the data drives are using the ext3 filesystem,
look for the fstab options fit to your filesystem of choice. It also
assumes the fs used for /home supports symlinking, just avoid using any
fs that doesn't handle this properly --there is a workaround using "bind
mounts" in fstab if need be.)
--
epoch1970
Daily dose delivered by: 3 SB Classic, 1 SB Boom iPeng (iPhone + iPad)
Squeezebox Server 7.6 (Debian 5.0) with plugins: MusicIP Server
Power Control by Gordon Harris WeatherTime by Martin Rehfeld
IRBlaster by Gwendesign (Felix) Find cover art by bpa BBC iPlayer,
SwitchPlayer by Triode PowerSave by Jason Holtzapple TrackStat,
Song Info, Song Lyrics by Erland Isaksson SaverSwitcher, ContextMenu
by Peter Watkins.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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