Welcome to the NBD userland support files!
This package contains nbd-server and nbd-client.
To install the package, download the source and do the normal
configure/make/make install dance. You'll need to install it on both the
client and the server. Note that released nbd tarballs are found on
sourceforge.
For compiling from git, do a checkout, install the SGML tools (docbook2man), and then run './autogen.sh' while inside your checkout. Then, see above.
If you want to send a patch, please do not open a pull request; instead, send it to the mailinglist
NBD is quite easy to use. First, on the client, you need to load the module and, if you're not using udev, to create the device nodes:
# modprobe nbd
# cd /dev
# ./MAKEDEV nbd0
(if you need more than one NBD device, repeat the above command for nbd1, nbd2, ...)
Next, write a configuration file for the server. An example looks like this:
# This is a comment
[generic]
# The [generic] section is required, even if nothing is specified
# there.
# When either of these options are specified, nbd-server drops
# privileges to the given user and group after opening ports, but
# _before_ opening files.
user = nbd
group = nbd
[export1]
exportname = /export/nbd/export1-file
authfile = /export/nbd/export1-authfile
timeout = 30
filesize = 10000000
readonly = false
multifile = false
copyonwrite = false
prerun = dd if=/dev/zero of=%s bs=1k count=500
postrun = rm -f %s
[otherexport]
exportname = /export/nbd/experiment
# The other options are all optional
The configuration file is parsed with GLib's GKeyFile, which parses key files as they are specified in the Freedesktop.org Desktop Entry Specification, as can be found at http://freedesktop.org/Standards/desktop-entry-spec. While this format was not intended to be used for configuration files, the glib API is flexible enough for it to be used as such.
Now start the server:
nbd-server -C /path/to/configfile
Note that the filename must be an absolute path; i.e., something like
/path/to/file, not ../file. See the nbd-server manpage for details
on any available options.
Finally, you'll be able to start the client:
nbd-client <hostname> -N <export name> <nbd device>
e.g.,
nbd-client 10.0.0.1 -N otherexport /dev/nbd0
will use the second export in the above example (the one that exports
/export/nbd/experiment)
nbd-client must be ran as root; the same is not true for nbd-server
(but do make sure that /var/run is writeable by the server that
nbd-server runs as; otherwise, you won't get a PID file, though the
server will keep running).
There are packages (or similar) available for most current operating systems; see the "Packaging status" badge below for details.
For questions, please use the nbd@other.debian.org mailinglist.
