I run a full media server, as well do a few friends. Now we had the idea to share our media libraries. In a first quick attempt we, mounted each other’s library folder via an smb share and imported those in jellyfin (all servers connected by VPN) Works quite well, but is kind of cumbersome the more people get in. I had the following idea: distributed storage, not as in redundancy, but more like mergerfs. Each “node” allocates a certain amount of storage, say node A, B and C provide 1TB each, these get fused into a singe mount that shows up as 3TB volume. If one node goes offline, the volume will only be 2TB and all files on the offline node will of course be unavailable.
Did a bit of research and found stuff like ceph,.glusterfs or seeweedfs, all of which I guess have a lot more functionality and thus are quite complicated and a little over my head. Do you do something like that or have any good ideas how to do that easily?
What’s the cumbersome part?
VPN? Mesh overlay VPN like tailscale/nebula mesh can do easy node add.
IPFS nodes might do the trick as mentioned.
On each node, map all the other nodes as smb, and configure all in jellyfin.
It would be nicer to have one single mount.
What about using symlinks?
You creat a directory /media. Mount shares there. Your media application scans /media and just finds media files.
Still sucks because you have to mount each repo, /media/person1/movies, etc
But you don’t have to reconfigure media app anymore.
I don’t know what a pooled remote file system like what you’re wanting.