I'm putting together a plan for work to get our network infrastructure cleaned-up. I've already moved the whole company over to wireless (drastically reducing the number of cabled dangling from the ceiling), now I'm looking to centralise our shared data to one server so I can configure a back-up process.

What I'm aiming for is a central server which links to a bank of hard drives and shares them across the network. I'd like to be able to add in more drives as required, and for the share to just "expand" rather than see it as a new share - ie, to see it as one directory which size is the sum of the drives attached.

Firstly, is this possible, and secondly, where can I find documentation on it? Are there any terms I should be googling for specifically?

Thanks.

not a networking question, moved to Linux - Server

other than that....

only one server? how about two? sounds a lot safer...

most of what you're asking for is totally standard network sharing, either via samba or nfs (you didn't detail anything about your users operating systems etc...) the only interesting part would be expansion of the drives, and i'd recommend just using LFS to do that, which will do exactly what you want. add a new disk, create a partition on it, expand the LVM volume over that disk and use it. you'd hopefully also want to consider raid? most extensible raid architecture is to use LVM over the top of mirrored pairs of drives.

if this server is dedicated, you may wish to instead look at a project like freenas for a more all in one solution.

Two servers would sound good, but then a LB would be neaded for failover... then we're getting into £££. I'm sure that the company will pay for that in the future, but I'm looking for a nice, simple solution that we can expand on.

At the moment all our systems are windows xp, however I'm hoping to get some of the machines on to linux (ubuntu) as some of our staff don't need much other than a browser/email/openoffice. Then set up roaming profiles for most of the staff.

Thanks for mentioning freenas, I'll check it out.

What techs should I be reading up on specifically then?

no load balancers, just use heartbeat or something. really simple, then just rysnc the two systems regularly.

how would I use heartbeat? the server will have an IP, so you'd need an lb to listen on that ip and switch the server if there's a prob, wouldn't you?

well it has tools like faked which you can run on the "slave" machine to test availability of the "master" if it fails, the salve can assume the ip address of the master. if you google for "cheap ip takeover" there's a nice simple article about it that should come top.

Nice. Thanks for that!

So, I need to read-up on:
LFS/LVM
NFS & freenfs
cheap ip takeover

Any other terms I should be googling?