vblade(8)

💖 vblade(8) — bestie's guide to ATA over Ethernet 💖

okay so. you're in the System Manager's Manual section of the man pages, page vblade(8), and you're about to learn how to make a whole entire disk just... appear on your network like magic. no cap. let's go. 🦋

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✨ NAME ✨

vblade, vbladed — export data via ATA over Ethernet

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

vblade [ -m mac[,mac...] ] shelf slot netif filename

💅 DESCRIPTION 💅

So vblade starts up a process that uses raw sockets to do ATA over Ethernet, which is giving virtual EtherDrive (R) blade energy. it literally pretends to be a hardware drive. iconic behavior honestly. 👑

and then there's vbladed, which is the little script that daemonizes the vblade process for you — it detaches from your terminal and sends all its output to the system logs. so your drive just chills in the background doing its thing. main character energy but make it quiet. 🤫

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🎀 Arguments 🎀

• shelf — this is the shelf address (the major AoE address) of the AoE device you're creating. it's like the shelf your lil drive sits on.
• slot — this is the slot address (the minor AoE address) of the AoE device you're creating. the specific lil cubby on that shelf.
• netif — the name of the ethernet network interface you want to use for AoE communications.
• filename — the name of the regular file or block device you're exporting. this is the actual thing being shared, bestie.

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🌈 Options 🌈

• -b — takes an argument, the advertised buffer count, which specifies the max number of outstanding messages the server can queue up for processing. queue management fr fr.
• -d — selects O_DIRECT mode for accessing the underlying block device.
• -s — selects O_SYNC mode for accessing the underlying block device, so every single write is committed to disk before returning to the client. no take-backsies.
• -r — restricts the export of the device to be read-only. look, don't touch. 🙈
• -m — takes an argument: a comma separated list of MAC addresses permitted access to the vblade. a MAC address can be given in upper or lower case, with or without colons. picky? no, flexible. 💅
• -o — takes an argument: the number of sectors at the beginning of the exported file that are excluded from AoE export. default is zero.
• -l — takes an argument: the number of sectors to export. defaults to the file size in sectors minus the offset.

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🔥 EXAMPLE 🔥

in this example, the root user on a host named nai exports a file named "3TB" to the LAN on eth0 using AoE shelf address 11 and slot address 1. the process runs in the foreground. if you'd used vbladed instead, the process would have been running as a daemon in the background. ✨

nai:~# vblade 11 1 eth0 /data/3TB

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💀 NOTES AND WARNINGS 💀

if you're a Jumbo frames user, go read the README file that ships with vblade to learn about a workaround for kernel buffering limitations. it's important, bestie, don't skip it. 📖

at least one AoE initiator (WinAoE) has been found to enforce legacy CHS geometry for drives by discarding sectors. so if you encounter filesystem corruption, you should make sure the underlying regular file or block device size is a multiple of 8225280 bytes — that's 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 512 bytes/sector. do the math, protect your data. 🧮

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😭 REPORTING BUGS 😭

please report bugs to the aoetools-discuss mailing list. they wanna hear from you, fr fr.

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

Brantley Coile (brantley@coraid.com)

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and that's the whole page, bestie — vblade(8), from the System Manager's Manual, wrapped up like the little bow it is. 🎀 go forth and export some blocks. slay. 💖