One vps as storage for another

jarland

On KVM or dedicated, this wouldn't even be worth asking. So this question is reserved for OpenVZ.

I've got another strange desire with my LEB systems, and I'm wondering if anyone has suggestions as to the best way. What I want to do is take one OpenVZ vps and mount it as a folder on another vps. Obviously the intention isn't to treat it quite the same as local storage, especially when on different providers. The appeal is cosmetic in nature, and perhaps the challenge of just having done it.

The easiest solution I've found so far is SSHFS, but it requires Fuse enabled. Not a problem, but I'm wondering if anyone has an idea that doesn't involve any actions by the host.

Again, this isn't something I or anyone should "need" to do, I just want to for fun. Ideas? Laughs at my strange hobbies are acceptable as well.

TheHackBox

sshfs :)

PAD

Well, I've used SSHFS before.. but even though like you said this is an appealing thing to do for fun/to learn, its actually a very good thing to know about. Everyone should stack up on learning how to do things like this. Thinking outside the box with server management, architecture, etc, is something most people don't do.

NickM

You're going to need FUSE for most, if not all, implementations like this. SSHFS, FTPFS, etc

sleddog

Well an easy solution that requires nothing special is to run samba on the target and mount remotely using 'mount -t cifs ...'.

You could lock down the samba ports with iptables. And I have no idea what performance would be like... :)

NickM

Samba over the internet? That's not going to be a pleasant experience at all. At best, it's going to be slow as molasses in Wisconsin in January.

jarland

What could be quite interesting is using something like this via an internal network to add additional semi-local partitions to OpenVZ vps systems. Easily done with other virtualizations, of course, but OpenVZ makes it a little more complicated. Something like an SSD vps with an extra partition for storage on spinning drives. Unless I'm blind, this is a missing product in OpenVZ hosting.

Nick_A

EDIT: Nevermind I got it.

jarland

Got Nick to turn on Fuse for me, mounted a BuyVM for fun. SSHFS is quite nice. Painfully simple.

FRCorey

RSYNC over SSH is fine for static files, but if you have constantly changing stuff a NFS mount over SSH would be good as well, but if it's across a good latency link you may have problems. Best to do this with 2 VM's in the same datacenter or very close datacenters.

KnightSwarm_Phillip

You could run lsyncd to manage your rsync+ssh operations. Lightweight, works well.

Nick_A

@jarland said: Got Nick to turn on Fuse for me, mounted a BuyVM for fun. SSHFS is quite nice. Painfully simple.

I feel proud of myself!