Thumbdrive to share images across all nodes

[Robert98374]

Hello there!

New guy here and as I was tinkering, I think I found a solution but...Not sure how. Intially I had a thumbdrive attached to one of my nodes in my cluster to hold all my images. It was set to shared but I wasn't able to accees those images from the other nodes. I just expanded and added an NFS drive and now the other nodes can see the one image stored on the NFS drive but not the images stored on the shared thumbdrive. Wondering if I could get some pointers on how to fix that?

 

[dcsapak]

setting a storage 'shared' does not mean proxmox shares it, but it means that you made already sure it is shared

 

[Faris Raouf]

You *can* share a storage resource, but not out of the box, and not really via Proxmox itself.

The basics are a bit like this: You would need to create Container (NOT a VM), and give it read-write access to a directory on the thumbdrive using "bind mountpoints". See https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Linux_Container#_bind_mount_points

The documentation on this topic is confusing but it is actually quite simple to actually do once you get the idea of it. I recently used this facility and found it useful. I regret that I can't find my notes about it. *** It is also trivial to also make the directory read only if required *** (again, sorry, I can't find my notes!!!!).

At this point you have, say, /mount/thumb in your Container which is really a directory on your thumbdrive, mounted on the Proxmox host as /mnt/whatever-it-might-be.


(I believe it is also possible simply to give the Container access to USB, and therefore giving it access to the thumb drive directly? I have no experience with this)

You then have to install something on the Container that allows network sharing, and point that network sharing to the thumbdrive directory mounted in the Container.

Here is a tutorial for using NFS: https://www.tecmint.com/how-to-setup-nfs-server-in-linux/

Please be aware that at no stage should you use the "shared" storage option within Proxmox. Instead, you will be telling your NFS "client" application, running in VMs or Containers, to connect to the NFS "server" that you have created in your Container.

Also make sure you bock access to your NFS share to all IPs other than those permitted to connect to it.

But let me suggest and even easier solution -- use AWS CloudFront or similar CDN if you want to share things as simple as images.

 

[Robert98374]

Thank you! The documentation on a lot of topics are confusing but once you get the hang are quite simple. Hence i am loving this enviroment xD As for the NFS, I have that setup already and is running like a champ, funny enough thats the guide I followed! As for the thumbdrive aspect, i think ill end up going a different route. Any idea if i could get a thumbdrive that already has the images stored and get it so prox can reconize it?