Openfiler

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Screenshot of Openfiler distribution installer

Openfiler is a project for a free software/open source Network Attached Storage (NAS) OS distribution created by Xinit Systems. Openfiler, combined with the underlying Linux-based operating system, aims to deliver a file-based NAS system and block-based Storage Area Networking (SAN) in a single framework. Openfiler uses the rPath Linux metadistribution. The entire software stack interfaces with third-party software that is all open source.

Openfiler is released under the GNU General Public License version 2.

1 History
2 Features
3 See also
4 External links

[edit] History

The Openfiler codebase was started by Mukund Sivaraman at Xinit Systems in 2001. The company created a project and donated the codebase to it in October 2003. The first public release of Openfiler was made in May 2004.

[edit] Features

Networking protocols supported by Openfiler include: NFS, SMB/CIFS, HTTP/WebDAV, FTP and iSCSI (initiator). Network directories supported by Openfiler include NIS, LDAP (with support for SMB/CIFS encrypted passwords), Active Directory (in native and mixed modes), Windows NT 4 domain controller and Hesiod. Authentication protocols include Kerberos 5. Openfiler includes support for volume-based partitioning, Ext3, JFS and XFS as on-disk native filesystems, point-in-time snapshots with scheduling, quota-based resource allocation, and a single unified interface for share management which makes allocating shares for various network file-system protocols easy.

The following are just some of the features currently available (unless indicated otherwise) in Openfiler:

Block-based virtualization
1. Point-in-time snapshot support with scheduling
2. Online volume size expansion (testing)
3. Volume usage reporting
4. Support for multiple volume groups for optimal storage allocation
5. iSCSI initiator (manual currently)
6. Volume migration & replication (manual currently)
Accounts management
1. Authentication using Pluggable Authentication Modules, configured from the web-interface
2. NIS, LDAP, Hesiod, Active Directory (native and mixed modes), NT4 domain controller
3. Guest/public account support
Quota / resource allocation
1. Per-volume group-quota management for space and files
2. Per-volume user-quota management for space and files
3. Per-volume guest-quota management for space and files
4. User and group templates support for quota allocation
Share management
1. Per-volume based share creation
2. Multi-level share directory tree
3. Multi-group based access control on a per-share basis
4. Multi-host/network based access control on a per-share basis
5. Per-share service activation (NFS, SMB/CIFS, HTTP/WebDAV, FTP)
6. Support for auto-created SMB home directories
Industry-standard protocol suite
1. CIFS/SMB support for Microsoft Windows-based clients
2. NFSv3 support for all UNIX clients with support for ACL protocol extensions
3. NFSv4 support (testing)
4. FTP support
5. WebDAV and HTTP 1.1 support
6. Linux distribution back-end for any other customizations
7. Open source provides you the power to modify and deploy software if you want to do so