SwitchFS FAQ

General

Q: Is SwitchFS slow?

A: No, with SwitchFS your bottleneck should remain with disk hardware. See benchmarking results for more information.

Networking Related

Q: How do I share SFS mounts through NFS / Samba?

A: Mount SFS as you normally would but make sure to pass the allow_other flag. For example: sfs -o allow_other,config=switchfs.conf /sfs, If you are using NFS, you then must restart the NFS services. For example: # /etc/init.d/nfs-kernel-server restart. Also, make sure FUSE is up to date and configured and built with the --enable-kernel-module flag. (This is not necessary for Samba / SSHFS, see README.NFS in the FUSE distribution)

My experience suggests that sharing a SFS mount though NFS gives the best performance and reliability but is the most difficult to set up. SSHFS (http://fuse.sourceforge.net/sshfs.html) is the easiest to set up and gives acceptable performance. Samba appeared to be both slower and less reliable than both NFS and SSHFS, I wouldn't recommend it.

Development Related

Q: How can I create a Debian / Ubuntu .deb from the package source?

A: This is documented well elsewhere, but an easy approach is to use 'checkinstall'. In place of running 'make install', try:

# apt-get install checkinstall
# checkinstall -D --pkgname sfs --pkggroup sfs --maintainer "sfs-developers@googlegroups.com" --requires fuse-utils,libfuse2