I have a virtual private server (VPS) running Debian sarge that hosts my several virtual web domains and runs various servers (e.g., mail, SVN). Recently, a friend asked me about hosting a web-accessible 4 GB archive of infrequently-accessed files, and I told him that I'd be happy to as there's essentially no bandwidth limitation to my VPS setup. However, the VPS is pretty severely limited in disk space, and would need to have some way of fetching the files from my home system and only storing a cache on the VPS of the most recently (or most frequently) accessed ones. This seems like a great use case for a caching filesystem for the Linux kernel; the basic mount would be via sshfs or NFS to my home server, with cachefs taking care of the transparent caching. I'm also still very interested in linux cachefs for the cluster of netbooted workstations I'm currently deploying. It would be nice to be able to use small, cheap hard disks in the workstations to cache the NFS-mounted root filesystem and reduce overall network loading. So, I thought I'd throw this out to the list in hopes that linux-cachefs development is still continuing. Is there anything usable for brave early adopters on the 2.6.15 kernel at this point? I have CONFIG_FS_MBCACHE=y in my kernel; what is that? Best regards, Ed
