Imagine you have a machine with all of its disk full and another with unused gigabytes, and you don’t want to move the data from one to the other. Why not using the second’s disk on the first, you can do it with iSCSI but you can do it with ATA over Ethernet (AoE) too. It’s the second method I’ll explain in this article. All of this was made with two computers running Debian Etch.
Prepare The Kernel
First check if your running kernel has AoE, the config option name is CONFIG_ATA_OVER_ETH, have a look at fig1, my kernel has AoE as a module:
host:/# grep ATA_OVER /boot/config-`uname -r`
CONFIG_ATA_OVER_ETH=m
host:/#
If not, configure your kernel and activate AoE in core or in module like you prefer:
Device Drivers –>
|- Block Devices —>
|- ATA over Ethernet support
Ok now you have a kernel with AoE, just load the aoe module:
host:/# modprobe aoe
You can check your syslog to be sure AoE is available:
host:/#tail /var/log/syslog
Oct 10 11:54:07 host kernel: aoe: aoe_init: AoE v22 initialised.
host:/#
Now we’ll call the client ‘client’ and the server ’server’, funny isn’t it?
In SAN vocabulary we call the client ‘initiator’ and the server ‘target’, I prefer to continue using simplest terms. Continue reading »
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