[tahoe-dev] symlink to storage on a different drive and available space reporting

[Brian Warner]

Jody Harris wrote:
> So, we have several users who are storing the Tahoe shares on a drive
> other than where /home is located.
> 
> Our strategy at this point is to simply delete the
> .tahoe/storage/shares directory and create a symlink to the desired
> storage location.
> 
> This results in the available space reported as something completely
> unrelated to reality.
> 
> Obviously, this is the wrong strategy. What does the tahoe-dev team
> recommend?

As others have pointed out, the preferred solution is just to create
your node on the drive that you want to use for share storage. The
allmydata.com servers use drives like /data1 and /data2, and we created
those nodes with a command like "tahoe create-client /data1/tahoenode".

The ~/.tahoe directory only needs a node.url to point at whatever TCP
port your webapi is listening on. We make ~/.tahoe the default BASEDIR
to make things easy if you don't care where the shares live, but it's
pretty easy to do otherwise:

 tahoe create-client /data1/tahoenode
 tahoe start /data1/tahoenode
 mkdir ~/.tahoe ~/.tahoe/private
 cp /data1/tahoenode/node.url ~/.tahoe/
 tahoe create-alias groovy
 tahoe ls groovy:

If you still want to put the shares elsewhere, then I recommend
symlinking "BASEDIR/storage" to the desired target. There are other
files under BASEDIR/storage/ (outside of BASEDIR/storage/shares), so it
is more appropriate to keep the storage files together than to split
BASEDIR/storage/shares/ off to a different volume than where
BASEDIR/storage/ lives.


cheers,
 -Brian