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Windows Server 2008 R2 comes with the DFS server role. I am looking at finding a third party application that can mimic this funtionality on Windows 7.

I need it because I have multiple SATA hard disks and I want to expose folders from each drive as 1 network share.

Using homegroup and libraries won't work, because I need to expose the shares to Linux machines on my network. What I need is a real DFS application.

Is there such a thing?

Gareth
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JL.
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4 Answers4

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Sadly I do not know of a software solution for creating a Client OS DFS. I do have a solution if all of your hard drives existed on the same machine.

Windows 7 allows you to create a spanned volume that will use the total combined space of the hard drives by effectively creating a JBOD.

Best of luck!

jamason1983
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If you are running linux, you could use greyhole drive pooling to provide some of these features.

uSlackr
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I think the only thing you could do with Windows 7 is:

  • share the folders
  • create local users
  • establish permissions for the users in the folders where they must have access

Then from your Linux machines you could connect to the share path using smb or make some script that uses smbmount:

smbmount //winpc/shared /mnt/share -o username=user,password=pass,rw

or you could use fstab for automatically mounting the share.

Notice that if you use only a Windows 7 machine to do this you aren't going to have such a backup and the machine is going to work as a standalone DFS; if you have any hardware problems you are going to lose everything.

Use Sync Center (app still included in Windows 7) for syncing the share path to at least one other machine and keep a backup of your information.

I say Reinstate Monica
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n00b
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Why don't you mount the individual disks/partitions under an NTFS folder instead of using drive letters.

Mounting them under an NTFS folder for each drive and share the parent folder.

harrynode
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