Creeva’s World 2.0

File shares are a pain.   In and of them­selves they are not, but once you get past two or three — it get’s painful.   Now I have mul­ti­ple com­put­ers with mul­ti­ple dri­ves with mul­ti­ple file shares per drive spread across my net­work.   What does this mean?   Well I’m the only one with knowl­edge of what is on the net­work and where it exists.   This means that the net­work is not only cum­ber­some for any­one else to use (and some­times me) it make it nearly impos­si­ble if I want to tell some­one to grab some­thing off of the net­work if they come over and hook up to my wifi.

I’ve put quite a bit of thought into this.  I want some­thing that essen­tially can act as a trans­par­ent gate­way to my other file shares.  Some­thing like Microsoft’s DFS but cross plat­form.  It would also be great if it could trans­form file shares but that isn’t in the cards.   Before I go much fur­ther let’s go over my spec­i­fi­ca­tions I want.

• It must use CIFS/SMB file sharing
• It must be able to com­bine file shares on demand into a sin­gle root
• It would be nice to be able to split a file share root into two dif­fer­ent sub directories
• It must be cross plat­form WIN/OSX/*Nix
• Prefer­ably Win­dows or have a dead sim­ple web interface
• Must be able to han­dle prob­lems trans­par­ently if a file share is offline
• It must be able to span shares on mul­ti­ple computers

Let’s gove over each of these so I can give you my rea­son­ing for each issue that I’m look­ing for before I get a dozen answers that I already know about that could fit the bill in some ways if I’m will­ing to sac­ri­fice a requirement.

CIFS and SMB file shar­ing may be the domain of Win­dows, but it’s a stan­dard that every oper­at­ing sys­tem can speak.  While I could use some­thing like NFS and get it work­ing for almost all of the clients on my net­work, if my grand­mother comes over and wants to put fam­ily pic­tures onto her lap­top, I am not going to tell her to down­load an NFS client to install on her lap­top to grab the pic­tures.   Unless I can direct her to a sin­gle file share it just won’t work for me.

I want to point for an exam­ple here is sam­ple lay­out I’m look­ing for:

\\10.10.10.10\share

Included fold­ers include:

• Movies
• Pic­tures
• Music
• Doc­u­ments
• Soft­ware
• User1
• User2
• web­root

Com­bin­ing and split­ting file shares I think this is one of the tricky ones.   Let’s give the exam­ple of the fact that I have mul­ti­ple shares con­tain movies I’ve ripped (larger hard­drives would def­i­nitely help with this).   So I end up with shares that exists like movies1 and movies2.   What I would like is for all my movies to present them­selves  from the movies share.  I don’t want to have movies1 and movies2 sub direc­to­ries dis­played to the end user, I want them all in one direc­tory.  Alter­na­tively for per­sonal movies, like the ones I’ve shot for com­mu­nity band — I would like an option for that to link under­neath my user direc­tory as well as the movies directory.

Cross plat­form is a must.  I choose CIFS/SMB as a stan­dard because almost no extra soft­ware will need to be loaded on any com­puter to access them.  Microsoft’s DFS installed on win­dows servers does not work with non-MS oper­at­ing sys­tems — so this is a dead-end for me.

The server con­trol soft­ware needs to be win­dows or a dead sim­ple web inter­face.  Why?  Well I want any­one else using my net­work to be able to fix prob­lems and recon­fig­ure shares as needed with­out hav­ing to do it myself.   If I must turn to another setup, I will — but I would really like this require­ment to be met.

Must be able to han­dle offline files grace­fully.   If a machine is turned off I want the file to just not be there, if it’s a folder with com­bined shares — the offline files should be absent.  All of this should hap­pen with­out the server soft­ware flip­ping out at all.   I’ve seen some solu­tions that do this and they flip out with­out hav­ing every­thing acces­si­ble all the time.

It should be able to span mul­ti­ple com­put­ers, while some­thing may work on a sin­gle com­put­ers (for win­dows I could do hard links) — it doesn’t fix the issue of span­ning mul­ti­ple com­put­ers and this is some­thing that is needed badly in my net­work environment.

So now I’ve given my per­sonal require­ments, what do you have as a rec­om­men­da­tion to do this?