[clue-tech] Create virtual partition from free disk space on multiple networked machines

[jacob]

> Either "root" or a regular user, the question is more whether
> marshaling chunks of free space across several systems was even
> possible with today's technology.  I should have taken more time to
> build out the question.

Yes it is possible - but it is probably not worth the headache.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Distributed_file_systems

Hadoop's HDFS using FUSE would probably work.

With all distributed storage systems you have to make a tradeoff.
Consistency, Availability, Partition tolerance (how does it handle
systems becoming unavailable or having the network split) - pick two
of the three, you can't have all three. This is probably why there
isn't an easy answer to your question, all implementations must make a
tradeoff and not all users agree on what that should be. (The No SQL
movement is currently dealing with this, think Amazon S3, Google
Bigtable, Dynamo, Voldemort, etc.)

If all you need is a gig or two of space shared between computers that
is synced automatically - you might want to consider using DropBox, it
is free for up to two gigs of online storage.

-jacob