Introduction

There is now a kernel module (aoe), tools (aoetools) and server software (vblade) whoch allows anyone to set up an ATA over Ethernet storage network... and it is very easy to do in Ubuntu (currently Dapper 6.06 LTS).

WARNING: These commands need to be run with root privilages (sudo su). Do this at your own risk.

Required Packages

With the 'universe' repository enabled..

On the Ubuntu host that you wish to be the disk server:

  (server)# apt-get install vblade

On the Ubuntu host that you wish to mount the disk on:

  (client)# apt-get install aoe-tools

To Configure

To test that everything is working correctly, we created and used a 1 Mbyte file (vblade0). Any other block device could be used instead.

On the server

  (server)# dd if=/dev/zero of=vblade0 count=1 bs=1M
  (server)# vblade 1 1 eth0 vblade0
  ioctl returned 0
  1048576 bytes
  pid 25000: e1.1, 2048 sectors

The deamon ('vbladed') could be used instead of 'vblade', which detaches the process from the console and send log messages to the system logs.

On the client:

  (client)# sys_dir=/sys aoe-stat
          e1.1         0.001GB   eth0 up

Using AoE

Insert the module into the linux kernel.

  (client)# modprobe aoe

This can automatically be performed at startup, by entering a line into the /etc/modules file.

The device and directory automatially get created when the aoe module is inserted into the kernel.

  (client)# aoe-interfaces eth0
  (client)# aoe-discover

The block device is then located in /dev/etherd/e1.1 and can be treated like any other block device.

Create a filesystem:

  (client)# mke2fs /dev/etherd/e1.1

Create a mount point and mount the file system:

  (client)# mkdir /var/tmp/mnt
  (client)# mount /dev/etherd/e1.1 /var/tmp/mnt

This can be made to automatically mount on reboot, by entering a configuration line in /etc/fstab (untested).

References

http://www.coraid.com/support/linux/EtherDrive-2.6-HOWTO.html