Thu Jan 19, 2017 by . Tags: Storage , Tutorial , S3 .

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So, something i have been looking into in recient times has been Distributed Storage, and, more specifically, how to use the storage in my many, many machines to protect data, and also increese my usable space… There are a few projects on the market that do this (Ceph, NooBaa and Gluster all spring to mind) but some are more painful to setup than others… which brings me nicely to Minio. Minio is a 20ish MB executable you download from their site, mark it as executable (on Linux or Mac Boxes) and run… and you have yourself a S3 compatable storage server… Simples!

“But Wait!” i here you screem! “thats not distributed!”. Well, yes… but, it can be! Their Distributed Quick Start Guide, which is where i started with this, allows you to run a distributed copy of your data. I will let their documentation explain more, but this is what i did:

download the minio server (single executable file) on a minimum of 4 machines.

on each machine, run a command like the following:

replacing accesskey and secretkey with keys (check minio documentation to get these) and foldertoexport with, well, the folder you want to export!

For me, i have 4 servers currently clustered. 2 are in online.net (one in Paris, one in Amsterdam), 1 in OVH.NET (France, somewhere) and one in Dublin (GodBoxV2 currently). They are all interconnected using ZeroTier (I will explain that later) and so far, so good… only ran some basic tests, but with it, i could loose 2 machines and still have data… Not bad for free! I will run some speed tests soon.