Subject: Re: [vserver] Sharing files across vservers
From: Herbert Poetzl <herbert@13thfloor.at>
Date: Mon, 30 Jul 2007 14:11:57 +0200

On Mon, Jul 30, 2007 at 01:54:27PM +0200, Christoph Lukas wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> we have one host doing most of our infrastructure services. These
> services are spread among a couple of vservers.
> 
> Now we would like to share some GB of data among three of our 
> vservers and I am still unsure how to implement this.
> 
> I thought about:
> 
> * Using bind mounts on the host system to make the files available to
>   the second and third vserver. This did not work as expected, as the
>   first vserver set it's own xid on new files which makes them
>   inaccessible in the other servers

actually you have at least two options here:
 
 - make a separate partition (you want that for security
   and accounting) which is mounted into all the guests
   (note: you want to mount without tag, and you can do
   that easily from the fstab in the config tree)

 - bind mount an untagged partition space into all the
   guests (again, can be simply done with an entry to
   the config tree fstab)

> * Using an nfs server on the host and nfs mounts in the three 
>   vservers.
>   This seems to work but might have an ugly overhead.

indeed and it might not make much sense, unless your
guests are distributed across different hosts, in which
case a cluster/distributed filesystem might be an option
too

> Can anybody think of a more elegant solution?
> 
> Thanks in advance for any hints,
> Christoph