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I use NFS to share media to computers around my house. Unfortunately one of the machines is on a slow wireless link, is there a way to cache network shares on the local disk for performance?

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3 Answers

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Stefan led me down the right track. First off, the kernel support needed is only available in the 10.10 kernel and newer. According to Tim Gardner you can get this support in 10.04 by using a backported kernel.

Your filesystem will also need extended attribute support. If you're using EXT4 you're fine, if you're using EXT3 you'll need to ensure your filesystem is mounted with the user_xattr attribute.

Here's how I set it up on the client machine, you don't need to do anything on the server side.

  1. First, install the user space daemon: sudo apt-get install cachefilesd

  2. Then turn it on by editing /etc/default/cachefilesd and changing the run line to RUN=yes

  3. Ensure your NFS mount in /etc/fstab has an fsc option. Don't forget to remount it after you've made the changes. Here's my excerpt (modify to your needs):

    192.168.1.115:/home/jorge /home/jorge/Backup nfs rw,hard,intr,fsc

  4. Start the service: sudo /etc/init.d/cachefilesd start

Configuration of the cache is done in /etc/cachefilesd.conf, see the references for what the setting options are.

References:

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Does it happen to know how to apply the same on /etc/auto.master ? – Sorin Sbarnea Apr 3 '12 at 9:41
up vote 7 down vote

I'm not sure if there is any way to do this currently with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.

However, the newer versions of the Linux kernel include a feature called FS-Cache & CacheFS, which sounds exactly like what you (and I) want.

Also see Local Caching For Network Filesystems.

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Thanks, it's a great feature. Unluckily it lacks write support :(. – Javier Rivera Sep 22 '10 at 17:18
up vote 0 down vote

It's not exactly an answer to your question, but...

The best solution for this kind of stuff that I know is using dropbox. You will need an internet connection to upload the md5 hashes to the dropbox server, but after that files will sync over the LAN.

UbuntuOne could be another possibility, but it lacks LAN sync, so changes have to go up using internet and down again.

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Not quite what I am looking for, but thanks! – Jorge Castro Sep 22 '10 at 17:41

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