HowTo:CS Stash
Introduction
CS Stash is a shared departmental storage system designed for sharing files to Linux based servers and workstations. The service is based on Ceph, and more specifically CephFS: https://docs.ceph.com/en/reef/cephfs/ The goal of the service is to provide fault tolerant, secure, high-speed file sharing to Linux machines in the department. This project is currently in it's pilot state, so space is very limited right now.
Creating an Allocation
All allocations are created by Techstaff. Contact Techstaff to make your request for storage space.
Installing Ceph Client
To mount your allocation, you will need to install the ceph client, if it is not already installed. You will need root level access to install ceph. See: https://docs.ceph.com/en/latest/install/ for more details and the latest information on installing ceph. Here are some brief instructions, using the cephadm tool that should work on any supported Linux system (Redhat, Rocky, CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian, Alma, Etc.).
- Download the cephadm tool
curl --silent --remote-name --location https://download.ceph.com/rpm-reef/el9/noarch/cephadm
- Make the tool executable
chmod +x cephadm
- Install the reef ceph repo (Note: Older OSs might have to go down the quincy release, for example Rocky Linux 8)
sudo ./cephadm add-repo --release reef
- Install the ceph client
sudo ./cephadm install ceph-common
Mounting Your Allocation
When your allocation is created, you will be given the following information needed to mount your filesystem:
- <username>
- <secret_key>
- <path>
You need to save the contents of the <secret_key> into a file, and secure the file. For example, in the file /etc/.<username>.secret with chmod mode 0600.
You can have the filesystem automatically mounted on boot by adding an entry to your /etc/fstab file, substitute your information as needed. You can optionally mount a sub-path of your top level path:
<username>@.cephfs=<path>[/<sub-path] <mount_location> ceph mon_addr=stash.cs.vt.edu:3300,secretfile=<path_to_secret_file>,_netdev,noatime,wsync,rbytes 0 0